From Slavery To The Slammer!

FROM SLAVERY TO THE SLAMMER!

INTRO

When we are looking at someone who has everything going for them, our first general assumption is we are looking at someone who has every received all the breaks in life and was born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

• From the distance, they’ve got the charm, the looks, the money, the wealth, the health, friends, happiness, love, name it and they claim it!

Reba McEntire – sings a song entitled “The Girl Who Has Everything”

I just got the wedding invitation

There's gonna be a celebration

Like you've never seen

Just fit for a queen

She's got her mom and daddy's blessing

She's got a long white wedding dress

And his wedding ring

Oh, what can I bring

What do you give the girl who has everything

Oh, what can I bring

What do you give the girl who has everything

She'll hear his promise of forever

She'll hear him say what

I could never get him to say

Oh, he'll say it today

She'll hold his hand and throw the flowers

Drink champagne till the morning hours

The queen has her king

And the world on a string

So what do you give the girl who has everything

The other day I was headed to the office and was listening to some current country and there was a song that was describing a women that a country boy would

consider to have everything going for her. Most people would say the girl in the song is highly successful.

• She had looks, money, education, everything the song writer was looking for.

Part of the lyrics to the song says,

“She’s got her daddy’s money, her momma’s good looks.

More laughs than a stack of comic books.

A wild imagination, a college education.

Add it all up it’s a deadly combination.

She’s a good bass fisher. A dynomite kisser.

Country as a turnip green.

She’s got her daddy’s money. Her momma’s good looks, and look who’s looking at me!”

Do you every quietly look at people like this and think, “If only I could have THEIR advantages. If only I had their family, their money, their education – I could be accomplish great things with my life.”

In a famous study by Victor and Mildred Goertzel, entitled Cradles of Eminence, the home backgrounds of 300 highly successful people were investigated. These 300 people had made it to the top. They were men and women whose names everyone would recognize as brilliant in their fields such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Clara Barton, Gandhi, Einstein, and Freud. The intensive investigation into their early home lives yielded some surprising findings:

• Three fourths of the children were troubled either by poverty, by a broken home, or by being rejected, or having over possessive, or dominating parents.

• Seventy-four of 85 writers of fiction or drama and 16 of the 20 poets came from homes where, as children, they saw tense psychological drama played out by their parents.

• Physical handicaps such as blindness, deafness, or crippled limbs characterized over one-fourth of the sample.

Just because someone has arrived at the shore of success, does not mean that they arrived there without a mighty price to be paid.

We come to another man name Joseph. Our first initial glance at Joseph, we walk away thinking -- This boy has it all. He has been born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

• He is young

• He is blessed by the Lord

• His father favors him over his step brothers

• He gets a coat lined with colors

• The texts suggest he doesn’t have to work as hard like his brothers.

Like so many others, we see just the layer of a person. We see the façade. If we could pull back the curtain and view the entire picture we would walk away with another point of view.

Joseph is thrown into the pit:

Because his brothers hated him, Joseph ended up thrown into a pit, by his brothers. Joseph’s brothers had actually planned to kill him.

When Reuben (one of the brothers) heard this, he tried to rescue Joseph from their hands. “Let’s not take his life,” he said. “Don’t shed any blood. Throw him into this cistern here in the wilderness, but don’t lay a hand on him

So Joseph’s brothers stripped him of his robe and — and they took him and threw him into the pit..

Joseph is sold into slavery

As the brothers sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming 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? Lets let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites His brothers agreed.