Jokingly they said; “I don’t get mad pastor, I just get even.” Sadly enough that little phrase that we used to laugh at has become more of a reality than we want to accept. How else can we explain so many lawsuits, road rage or the explosive reaction by those who feel they have been wronged?
“Getting even” has reached a scary level in society and sadly if we aren’t careful it raises its head in the church. Humans do occasionally err, and God does forgive, but neither seemingly represents a policy that most folk are willing to accept.
This morning I want to introduce you to a fellow who regardless of how he was treated, in spite of unfair and wrongful accusations, even after being rejected abandoned, abused, and forgotten this fellow refused to become resentful, or become bitter or even bear a grudge.
Almost sounds to good to be true don’t it?
Well for the next few weeks we are going to be doing a series on a man of enormous integrity, a man who modeled continual forgiveness…His name is Joseph!
Before we can actually dive into Joseph’s life we have to take just a few moments to see a part of his background and where he comes from, turn with me in your bibles to genesis chapter 30…
22 Then God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and opened her womb. 23 She became pregnant and gave birth to a son and said, "God has taken away my disgrace." 24 She named him Joseph, and said, "May the LORD add to me another son."
The first person we need to consider before we get into “Joseph” is his father Jacob. His other name is Israel which means God strives – a name which he received after he had wrestled with god and wouldn’t let go until God blessed him.
Jacob was and older am when Joseph was born. Because of his older age he had developed a special love for his son Joseph, his birth sort of gave old Jacob a new lease on life, and it stands to reason that Jacob would be especially fond of Joseph since Rachel his true love was his mother!
You know doubt know the story, Jacob had fallen in love with Rachel and agreed to work for Laban for seven years so that he could have her as his bride, then when the seven years were up, Laban tricks him and he married Leah instead, so Jacob agrees to work seven more years for Rachel, finally after 14 years he has the wife he always wanted from the beginning. You heard the scripture Leah gives him seven children, and Rachel cannot get pregnant. Jacob then figures it is time to go on his own and leave Laban, and the two of them get into trickery again…finally they get gone and Jacobs daughter DINAH IS RAPED, then later on after the birth of Joseph sure enough Rachel get s pregnant again and in the delivery of Benjamin Rachel dies…then there is incest within the family, Rueben has sexual relations with Bilhah, and old dad Jacob doesn’t do anything about it
And one reads all of this and wonders how can a man of integrity come from all of this talk about a dysfunctional family!
And it the midsts of all of this chaos, the older brothers are all noticing that Joseph is the favorite! His mother had been favored over theirs, and now he is daddies little pet child and they have had their gullet full…finally one day the straw that breaks the camels back appears when Jacob presents Joseph with the coat of many colors. This coat they tell me was one that extended to the ankles, more of a covering of nobility than a useful coat for working…look at the passage here in genesis 37…
1 Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan. 2 This is the account of Jacob. 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.
3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made a richly ornamented robe for him. 4 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.
Boom, blow up in Dodge City…these guys had been putting up with it for years, and now this…their untreated jealousy had turned into resentment and now into pure hatred! But if that isn’t enough or guy Joseph well…he is a dreamer…listen…
5 Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. 6 He said to them, "Listen to this dream I had: 7 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."
8 His brothers said to him, "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.
9 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."
10 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?" 11 His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.
12 Now his brothers had gone to graze their father’s flocks near Shechem, 13 and Israel said to Joseph, "As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send you to them." "Very well," he replied.
14 So he said to him, "Go and see if all is well 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, 15 a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, "What are you looking for?"
Talking about pouring gas on a fire, these brothers are livid, even dad rouses and gives a little rebuke but that’s about it…
Parents listen to me this morning, there is a free lesson to be learned here…parental passivity is lethal in a family that is getting out of control!
But dad keeps the boy with him while the older brothers go tend the sheep…do you ever wonder what was Jacob thinking…didn’t he see the hatred and the jealousy? Didn’t he realize that in reality he is setting Joseph up?
Now watch what happens next…verse 17…
So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. 18 But they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him.
19 "Here comes that dreamer!" they said to each other. 20 "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."
The bomb explodes, immediately they see him coming and dad is nowhere around to defend him so they decide…lets kill him…oh dear friend listen to me this morning…the core of jealousy… that seed of bitterness, left unattended in your heart will begin to grow and fester and at some inopportune time…the explosion will occur…the get even spirit will show himself and before you can stop it a murder of character, or perhaps even worse will have occurred!
But God has a plan and so out of nowhere in steps Rueben…the oldest…
21 When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue him from their hands. "Let’s not take his life," he said. 22 "Don’t shed any blood. Throw him into this cistern here in the desert, but don’t lay a hand on him." Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father.
This is the same guy who had been such a rascal, the same Rueben who had slept with his father’s concubine…but miraculously he comes to his sense long enough to take some responsibility for his little brother…
23 So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the richly ornamented robe he was wearing- 24 and they took him and threw him into the cistern. Now the cistern was empty; there was no water in it.
25 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.
Did you notice the first thing they do to Joseph upon his arrival, they strip off that hated robe…then they threw him in the pit and sat down to have lunch…All they anger has made them ravenously hungry, there us no guilty conscience here…
26 Judah said to his brothers, "What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? 27 Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood." His brothers agreed.
28 So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt.
29 When Reuben returned to the cistern and saw that Joseph was not there, he tore his clothes. 30 He went back to his brothers and said, "The boy isn’t there! Where can I turn now?"
31 Then they got Joseph’s robe, slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in the blood. 32 They took the ornamented robe back to their father and said, "We found this. Examine it to see whether it is your son’s robe."
33 He recognized it and said, "It is my son’s robe! Some ferocious animal has devoured him. Joseph has surely been torn to pieces."
34 Then Jacob tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and mourned for his son many days. 35 All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. "No," he said, "in mourning will I go down to the grave [c] to my son." So his father wept for him.
As the caravan winds its way across the field the brother s are counting their shekels received from the sale of their despised little brother and we find them dipping the hated robe into the blood of a freshly killed goat…ready to be use din yet another deception in old Jacobs life…
What a tragic consequence…Jacob now up in years has sown the wild oats he has lived a life deception and now we find him weeping in mourning hour after hour day after day being tortured by the thought of what a lousy job he had done in fathering his children. And their no doubt if we listened we could hear old Jacobs’s heart breaking as he poured out his shame and guilt to God!
So as we begin this series this morning what are some lessons we can learn from this story?
1. No enemy is more subtle than passivity!
Valley Mission Nazarene Church parents listen; I am extremely concerned about our families today. In particularly parents of our teenagers…listen if we don’t wake up and take control of what is happening in our kid’s lives, we are really going to be shocked at the end result. In case you haven’t been noticing lately the American family is on a very slippery slide that empties its passengers into the pool of disaster…and listen mom…hey dad…don’t you think for a minute that your little angel is exempt. The devil couldn’t care less who he dams who he destroys…and for some reason parents we play right into his little trap and become just as guilty as old Jacob was about the things that we allow to happen with our very own kids.
Let me ask you a question this morning, when is the last time you checked out your kids web page at myspace.com, when is the last time you read their blogs and viewed their chatroom conversations…the things that they are being tempted with on your computer in your home!
Listen parents it may not be popular today, but YOU ARE STILL THE PARENT AND YOU ARE STILLL RESPONSIBLE FOR THEM! Not the school, not the community, not the church…YOU!!!
We all have watched and listened to Coach Dungy over these past few days, after the tragic suicide of his 18 year old son. And what did the coach say, “I should have done a better job of being in my son’s life”
Do you even have a clue what your kids are doing, who there friends are, what classes they are in this semester, what they think is having a good time?
Are you guilty of the national average…which says the average American kid spends 7 hours a day watching TV and only 5 minutes a day talking to their parents…Come on mom & Dad…WAKE UP!!!
Ole Jacob was so passive about parenting that he never even realized what was going on until these deceptive brothers hand him the coat with the goat’s blood on it and now we find a dad, broken hearted
34 Then Jacob tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and mourned for his son many days. 35 All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. "No," he said, "in mourning will I go down to the grave to my son." So his father wept for him.
There’s a second lesson we can learn from Josephs teenage years and that is;
2. No response is crueler than jealousy
If you are here this morning and you have allowed jealousy over something or somebody to grow and fester in your heart, let me assure you devastating consequences are just around the corner for you.
In Joseph’s early life we can clearly see the effect of a passive father, an absent mother, a family filled with deceit and jealousy and fighting, children left on their own to figure out life for themselves, and the effects of sin and mistreatment that was tolerated in the home. Friend listen to me, Jealousy never corrects itself! It will always lead to a greater problem!
Finally this morning we are reminded that;
3. No action is more powerful than prayer!
As the old caravan is rolling toward Egypt ole Joseph is praying! Left alone to defends for himself he has only one way to turn and that is up!
Rather than to lick his wounds and vow to get revenge, he determines in his heart not to defile himself with a get even spirit.
I wonder this morning who just may be here and your childhood closely resembles that of our new friend Joseph, may be you were left all alone, maybe you were hated by your own family…can I offer you Christ today?
Maybe there is that one here today that is eaten up with jealousy…you have let it ruin your relationship, you have let it dictate your life and this morning you are ready for deliverance…
Maybe there is a mom or a dad here today and you haven’t been as involved in your kids lives as you know you should... Can I plead with you today to ask God forgive you for shirking your duty and commit from this day forward to lead your family as God would be pleased!
