JOSEPH: FAITHFUL IN AN IMPERFECT FAMILY
GENESIS 37:1-11
A census taker knocked on the door of an old cabin in up in the Appalachian mountains. The door was answered by an unkept skinny 13-year old girl.
The census taker asked, "May I speak with your father?"
The girl answered, "He ain’t here; he’s been in jail for two years".
The men said, "Then can I speak with your mother?"
The girl responded, "She ain’t here either, she ran off with the moonshiner".
The censor taker continued, "Is there an older sister that I can speak with?"
"No" she replied, "She married off and lives with her seven kids, down the bottom of the mountain".
The man then asked, "Well, perhaps there’s an older brother I can speak with?"
Once more the girl answered, "He ain’t here either, he at Harvard".
"Harvard?" said the man, "What’s he studying at Harvard?"
"Oh, he ain’t studying nothing, they’re studying him!"
Today we will begin a study on the life of a man named Joseph. As we will see Joseph is a man worthy of not only of study but of using him as an example. Joseph is one of the greatest people mentioned in the Bible. The thing that perhaps sets Joseph apart as one of the greatest men in the Bible is the fact that Scripture reveals to us no major flaw in his character. Unlike, Abraham, Moses, and David, and other great men of the Bible, the Bible reveals no moral failure on the part of Joseph. No less then 14 chapters of Scripture deal with his life, yet no major moral shortcomings are given.
Joseph is one of the most impressive and godly men in Scripture.
Because of this he is worthy of examination and emulation. We should want to learn more about him and be more like him. Now we will look at Joseph as a model of faithfulness to God. Which was perhaps his most important quality. As we shall see throughout all kinds of situations Joseph was faithful to God.
As we look at the live of Joseph we will begin where we all began, that is with the family. While Joseph was faithful it was not because he got all the breaks.
Joseph is one of those person that we cannot say, "well no wonder he was faithful to God, he got all the breaks". As we will see today Joseph did not become such a fine person because he had such a wonderful family life. In fact we can say that opposite is true. Joseph was faithful in spite of his family life.
We will learn that Joseph was faithful in an imperfect family.
Family life has certainly changed over recent decades. It was not all that long ago TV showed families such as the Cleavers, the Waltons, and Little house on the Prairie. These were normal families for those times.
During the seventies we saw on TV families such as the Brady Bunch, the Partridge family, and Eight is Enough. Families were the kids had more freedoms, families with one parent.
Turn on the TV today and what kind of families do we have, Roseanne, the Simpsons, Murphy Brown, Grace Under Fire. Families where you find very little disciple and very little respect.
While families have changed, there is a sense in which they haven’t changed. Joseph family lived some 4000 years ago. While the culture is changed we see some of the same moral failures in that family that you do in some of today’s family.
What we want to look at today is the fact that Joseph family was far from perfect yet Joseph rose above it. We will learn some helps for our own families, and be encouraged to live faithfully for God.
Let us turn to our passage for today. Genesis 37:1-11. READ PASSAGE.
Did you all do your homework? Reading chapters 29-35. Well if you did you could come to the conclusion that Joseph’s family was messed up. Joseph came from a family that we would call dysfunctional. I want to take a few minutes and look at just how messed up his family was.
I going to compress chapters 29-35.
Abraham, the father of God’s Chosen People, had a son, Isaac. Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob eventually became Joseph’s father.
Jacob’s went looking for wife. He bumped in Racheal at a well. Racheal was actually his cousin. Her father Laban, was the brother of Jacobs mother. It was love at first sight. However Racheal had an older sister named Leah.
Laban asked Jacob what wages he wanted for working for him, and Jacob responded, "I’ll work for you seven years in return for your younger daughter Rachel." Laban thought Jacob would make a good son-in-law and they struck a deal.
Now, you have to understand something about these two sisters, Rachel and Leah.
This is how the Bible describes them, "Rachel was lovely in form and beautiful; Leah had weak eyes."
If we were to describe them today, it would be something like this, "Rachel was the good looking one, Leah . . . . has a nice personality."
The seven years of labor pass by and it’s time for the wedding. The Bible says that those seven years, "seemed like only a few days because of Jacob’s love for her."
They had their wedding, spent their first wedding night together, and woke up the next morning. Jacob rolled over, looked at his wife, and to his surprise there lay Leah.
By the time they were both awake, Jacob realized that Laban had pulled a fast one on him.
Instead of Rachel, it was Leah, under the veil.
Jacob was understandably upset and confronted Laban about this deceit. Laban said, "It’s our custom for the older daughter to marry first. But, I’ll make you a deal. Finish your honeymoon with Leah, and then you can have Rachel. Just work seven more years for me."
He worked 7 more years, for a total of 14 for Rachel. And Scripture says plainly, "Jacob loved Rachel more than Leah." (Gen. 29:30)
Jacob now is married, not just to two women, but to two sisters. The fierceness, competition, and jealousy between these two sisters must have been intense. But, it got worse.
Leah was the one who began getting pregnant and bearing children; Rachel did not. Now Leah is feeling a little bit superior, and Rachel is becoming enraged.
She finally screams at Jacob, "Give me children or I will die!" Jacob says, "Hey, honey, it’s not my fault."
Out of desperation, Rachel says, "Take my maidservant and have relations with her so that she can bear children for me." And Jacob said, "Okay." And so, he did.
The maidservant became pregnant--twice. Now, Leah is getting a bit uneasy again. Her lead in
child bearing is now only 4-2. So, she takes her maidservant and gives her to Jacob (which, by the way, was a fairly common practice in their culture.)
She told him, "Have relations with her so that she can bear me children." And Jacob said, "Okay."
Finally, after all these years, Rachel finally gets pregnant and has a son, Joseph, the subject of our attention. Very quickly, we find one of the problems that existed in this family: favoritism. The Bible plainly says that Jacob loved Joseph more than any other son. Because of that, Jacob gave special gifts to Joseph.
One of these gifts was a "richly ornamented robe." This was a robe that would be worn only be a noblemen or a prince, not by a 17 year old shepherd who is #12 out of 13 children.
Later, Rachel she has another son, Benjamin. And the final tally of these four women is: Leah--6 sons and 1 daughter; Rachel--2 sons; Rachel’s maidservant--2 sons; Leah’s maidservant--2 sons.
After Joseph’s birth, Jacob and his father-in-law have a "falling out"; they split as business partners and Jacob steals more than his share of the business profits.
After that Joseph’s older sister is raped. To avenge for that, his older brothers go to the town where this happened and murder everybody.
To add insult to injury, another one of Joseph’s older brothers had relations with one of his father’s concubines.
Then, to make matters worse, Rachel dies.
So, by the time Joseph is about 10 years old, here’s the family situation:
The father is a polygamist, fathering children from four women. All four of those women (two of whom were sisters) lived in the same household; as did all of the brothers and half- brothers.
Joseph’s father and grandfather had split up. Joseph’s father and uncle had been reunited Joseph’s sister had been raped His older brothers were guilty of murder, plundering, theft, and other immorality. His mother, Rachel, and his grandfather, Isaac, are dead.
All this leads us to the text that we are looking at today. It is important to understand were this family was coming from, and what kind of situation, what kind of family life Joseph faced. But I want to focus not on how bad this situation was, but how we can learn from it.
Four things we need to see from this situation. Hopefully we can get through all of them today.
1. Look long term. This is an important lesson can learn from this family. We need to look long term in our own lives in regards to two things.
a. Negative Consequences. We all need to look long term at the negative consequences of our actions today. We need to realize that many times our actions have consequences far beyond ourselves.
Satan temps us with words such as, "No one will ever know", or "It won’t effect anybody else" Or "it’s my life, it’s my body, I can do whatever I want with it."
Within that family environment our actions effect a large number of people for a great length of time.
As a young man Jacob and his mom, started out deceiving Esua his brother. Then his father. Is it any surprise that Jacob and his father-in-law both began playing a game of deception with each other for years.
Is it any surprise that Jacob’s sons would later would be deceptive when they lied to their father about Joseph’s death. Was it any surprise that when dealt deceptively with Shecham & Hamor. They were acting just like there dad. They were simply practicing what they had seen from their father.
So you see the far reaching affect that Jacob deceptive ways had on his family.
If you doubt that your actions have any long term consequence look at the babies we see born with AIDS, or addicted to cocaine, or a number of other problems because the mother thought that no one would know, or it will not effect any one but me. When Satan begin to tempt you think long term.
Think about how your actions may affect your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren. Thing long-term about the negative consequences, realizing they last a lot longer then you think.
Also in regards to thinking long term we see positive developments. Joseph brother were less then what they should have been as chosen people of God. They were murderers, immoral, deceitful, jealous, and bitter. But in the end they came around to where they should have been.
It took awhile, a few years and a famine but God brought them back.
Your family may not be where you would like to see them. But have patience. Continue to strive every day to develop your family as would want it. Realize that it may take several years, it may take a famine to bring family member back into God’s will. But keep devoted to prayer.
Keep looking long term.
Your son or daughter may only be two years old but establishing the proper authority in the household no will greatly affect his or her teenage years.
Your child many only be four, but how you the husband and wife relate will go a long way in determining the strength of your child’s marriage down the road.
Your child may only be 16 now and marriage may be along way off, but who and how they date right now will effect who they will marry in 8 or 10 years.
Realize that we can and do have both positive and negative long term effects on so many people.
The second lesson we should learn for this family is to be faithful regardless of your family situation. This is the primary lesson of our passage. It there was anyone who had the right to say, "My family was messed up" and run away for God it was Joseph. If anyone had the right to say, hey I’m a victim, it was Joseph.
Yet through it all Joseph remained faithful.
It can be real easy for us to look at our family background and make excuses. My parents are divorced- I can’t help being this way, I was abused as a child, My father was an alcoholic, and the list goes on.
But looking at Joseph’s life we can learn to be faithful anyway.
I don’t think there is anyone here who lived a perfect childhood. So regardless of your family situation, we have to remain faithful to God. Don’t run away from God, keep in prayer, keep reading the word of God, keep praising God.
It is real easy to feel sorry for ourselves, sometimes it’s not so easy to remain faithful to God. But know this, God remains faithful to us. So learn from Joseph to rise above family circumstances and remain faithful.
The third lesson from this account is the need to develop strong spiritual leadership. This is directed mainly to the husbands and fathers our there.
If you look at Jacob, Joseph’s father he was a poor spiritual leader for his family. In fact he was kind of a spiritual wimp. So it should be of no surprise the his family was so messed up.
There are three things we need to develop so that we can have strong spiritual leadership.
1. Integrity. Jacob we can see lacked integrity. He grew up practicing dishonesty and deception. Not only that but he was a slave to sinful nature. He had intimate relations with 4 different women under the same roof.
We need to have integrity if we can ever hope to be a strong spiritual leader. We need to rise above the immorally that Satan may tempt us with. We need to remain faithful to God that our integrity can be seen.
2. Initiative. We can see the Jacob also lacked initiative. It is clear from the Scripture that he let his sons run the household. After Joseph tells his brothers of the dreams that he has, they become extremely jealous. What does Jacob do, "kept the matter in mind."
Jacob does nothing about it. Trouble is brewing right under his nose, yet he does not take of it.
Parent need to be proactive and take the initiative when it comes to the spiritual developments of your family. You need to take the initiative in Bible reading in you home. You need to take the initiative in prayer in your home. You need to establish the importance of attending worship service. Your children need to see in you the importance you place on these things. If they are not important to you, how do you expect them to be important to your children.
Effective parents are those who work to prevent trouble. When your children are young that is the time to establish the lines of authority in your household. Children need to grow up in a home with a strong spiritual leadership.
The are two simple rules to parenting. 1. It’s never to early 2. It’s never to late. No matter how young your child is it’s not to early to begin training them to read the Bible, and to pray. If it as been years since your child as gone to church, it is still not to late to take the initiative.
It’s not to early to start teaching your six year old about the dangers of substance abuse. But if your 16 year old is involved in drugs it’s not to late to take the initiative to recover that situation.
It makes no difference where ever you are in life, take the initiative to develop your family as God wants it to be.
The third thing needed to develop strong spiritual leadership is that we need to involved.
Again look at Jacob, he lacked involvement. He just sat back and "considered" what was going on in his own family. Thing were going on right in front of him, yet he missed it. As we will see next week Jacob was so oblivious to the situation that he didn’t even realize that his son’s had done away with Joseph.
As a parent if you intent to develop a strong spiritual family you must be aware of what is going on in you children’s lives. You must know what is taking place. Understand the world that they live in. Understand the pressures that they are under, understand the things that they face. Talk to your children, ask how their days was. Ask them question, let them know you are concerned.
Let them know you care and are there for them, and most importantly tell them you love them.
To many parents have know idea what there kids are doing, who they are hanging around with.
And far, far to many kid have never heard the their parents tell them that they love them. This is especially true with fathers.
The forth and final thing I want us to learn from this passage, is the we have someone, who no matter what our burdens are, we have someone who will take them. And that someone is Jesus Christ.
There is perhaps no hurt that hurts more then those that come from our family. Those hurts are hurts that only Jesus can heal. So no matter how messed up your family is, no matter how much hurt they may have caused you, you can give those hurts to Jesus, I promise he can and will take them and heal them.
I know this first hand. My parents were far from Christian when I was a child. They were divorced when I was ten. I was abused as a child, not by family but a family friend. And I can sit here and tell you how I was a victim. But I have given all those hurts over to my Lord. And he as taken them from me.
And because he as taken them from me I can be faithful to God, I am without excuse. Jesus gave us a promise, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls"
So give your hurts to Jesus whatever they may be.
We have talked about a lot of things this morning. Things which may have touched every person here in some way. Let us all learn from Joseph learn not only to be faithful to God but to always remain faithful to God no matter what our family or life circumstances may be.
May each one here realize that it all begins with placing your trust in the Lord Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour.
SHALL WE PRAY
