Don't Be Afraid To Wear The Coat - Genesis 37:1-4 Series

Well I’m excited today because today we get to start the story of Joseph. Now the story of Joseph is a story that takes up a quarter of the book of Genesis from chapter 37 all the way to the end. More than a quarter of the whole book. So we’re going to spend some time learning about Joseph.

We learn a lot of good things. You know basically the story of Joseph. That God gave him dreams and as these dreams kind of guided him in the beginning, later on he gets thrown in a cistern and he’s taken off to Egypt and sold into slavery and all these things are going to happen in his life. We’re going to take time and look at all of the stories. There are a number of different illustrations of applications for our lives, many principles from the life of Joseph. We’re not going to rush through this. We’re going to take it nice and slow and grasp as much as we can from this story. So that we can be the kind of people of integrity that Joseph was in the culture and the experience that he had. We want to be able to learn ourselves. How can we be Josephs in a culture that’s even antagonistic toward us. I think you’ll see some of those things in the man Joseph.

As we start the story today you can open up your Bibles to Genesis 37. When you do, you’re going to see that we start with some background. We’re going to get some of the basics down here about his family. We’re going to look at his family because his family had some real challenges. There is some sibling conflict that exists in there, the relationships were challenging. Here’s what I think we’re going to get out of this today. We’re going to see, I’m going to give you some glimpses of kind of overall what’s happening, even outside of our passage today in Joseph’s life because I want you to see there are three relational challenges that I think we experience in our lives. Whether there is sibling conflict or you’re dealing with a marriage or you’re dealing with coworkers or you’re driving, you know anything that has to do with relationships of some kind, you’re going to experience three different things that are internal inside of our hearts. We must have a plan for dealing with those because they expose themselves when we’re interacting with other people.

Number one is going to be anger. We’ll see it in this passage because these boys (there’s twelve sons) are going to be so angry that they’re hating their brother and even they’re going to want to kill him. We’ve got to have a plan for dealing with anger. That’s going to be very important.

Then there’s going to be the foolishness, that’s a second area. Foolishness happens all the time with kids as they’re in sibling conflict. But foolishness is not recognizing the consequences of your present actions. Maybe Joseph was a little bit naïve, maybe a little bit foolish by sharing all he knew of the dreams. Maybe he shouldn’t be sharing as freely as he was. I don’t know. If he was, if he shouldn’t have been sharing maybe that was a demonstration of some lack of wisdom shall we say. We certainly see the lack of understanding of the boys. Because they’re going to go and they’re going to throw their brother into a cistern and then they’re going to sell him off to slavery. They’re not going to recognize the consequences of their actions. It’s foolish what they’re doing and they themselves are going to come later on in their lives and they’re going to say, “Oh these bad things are happening to us in life because of the mistreatment we had of our brother.” They’re going to live with that. They don’t recognize the consequences of their current actions. Foolishness is a second area we see demonstrated in the passage that we want to consider in our own lives as well. What do we need to do in that area.

And thirdly it was to do with this area of selfishness. Selfishness is our self-focused way of thinking. We want to be first or we want to be best. That we’re jealous because someone else has a coat and we don’t have it (as is in our passage today). Or you remember when he’s going to get into the discussion with the fellow prisoners that one of the prisoners he tells a dream and exposes the dream for them. But one of the prisoners gets back into service of Pharaoh, but he’s only thinking of himself. It takes a long time for him to come back and remember Joseph.