When You Want to Get Even
Tom Shrader examines Joseph's powerful position when his brothers who sold him into slavery come begging for grain during the famine. Rather than seeking revenge when he had the power to destroy them, Joseph chose forgiveness and saw God's sovereign plan at work. The teaching explores how to handle guilt, survive life's cycles, and respond with grace when wronged by others.
“You may have meant it for evil, but God meant it for good, because God's got a plan, and it's bigger and better than mine.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Survival Through the Cycles of Life (2005)
Recorded: 2005
Duration: 43 min
Themes: forgiveness, revenge, grace, sovereignty, guilt, betrayal, reconciliation, cycles, betrayed by family, seeking revenge, struggling with guilt, facing difficult cycles, hurt by loved ones, mentor, survivor of abuse, adult child
Scripture: Genesis 37, Genesis 41, Genesis 42, Genesis 45, Genesis 50, James 1:2, 1 Peter
Theological Themes: providence, divine sovereignty, grace theology, forgiveness doctrine, biblical justice, redemption narrative, sanctification, spiritual maturity
Full Transcript
Today's the last session in one of my favorite series. When the year began, I said this was going to be a magnificent year for this reason alone. We were going to start the year by studying the book of Daniel. We were going to end it by studying the book of Joseph. Two of my favorite studies, and this has been, for me, just a magnificent study.
Let me give you a little bit of a tip. If we have whet your appetite in really wanting to know more about Joseph, his story occupies 25% of the book of Genesis. We're only taking six weeks. So even today, you'll see we're skipping chapters that deal with Joseph's story. But if you said, "Boy, I really like this. I'd like to know more," let me give you a great source.
Chuck Swindoll did a series, and I think he's done six or seven, of these biographical sketches. They are, in my mind, wonderful studies. I like them not just for the information and the biblical insight, because that's really valuable, but the practical application. I finished one. I happened to read Joseph this summer, just because that's where it was. I read David, read Elijah. There's one on Paul. There's six or seven of them.
A Practical Christmas Gift Suggestion
You're looking, you're hunting around for a Christmas gift. That's a great Christmas gift, either the six or seven volume set or individual ones. They're somewhat hard to find, not because they're rare, but for whatever reason, they don't seem to be in a lot of stores. You'll see one there and then another one, somewhat haphazard. I'm sure, certainly you can go on Amazon and just order them as a set or Insight for Living, Swindoll's website, and order them from there. But really helpful stuff.
Joseph: Our Role Model Through Life's Cycles
Joseph has been our role model in this series titled Survival Through the Cycles. The first Friday of December every year, the old office I work in, the old Coal Banker office in Mesa, the guys that are there, and there's now on the mailing list, there's 35 or 40 of us, are invited to lunch. We have lunch together. It was so weird for me to be sitting around with these guys, most of them, almost all of them still in the real estate business and very successful, but to hear us talk and to hear about the cycles, not of business—everybody knows there's business cycles—but to hear about their life cycles.
There was one man who, at the beginning of this year, had a daughter who was in a car wreck and is subsequently paralyzed on the left side of her body, and two months ago had another daughter killed in a car wreck. Now those are survival through those cycles of life, whether it's your relationships, your business, your spiritual life. Life just has cycles to it. How do I survive in the midst of those? And Joseph has been our study.
The Ultimate Test: When You Can Get Even
Today is just a great question. How do you survive when you want to get even and you have the ability to do it? It's one thing to say, "Here's what I'd like if I could," but you can't, so it doesn't matter. Joseph's in a position where he could want to get even and could get even. And that's kind of at the core of everybody.
I pulled a story out of the newspaper. This was a disgruntled actor. I love the creativity of the American public. He had been snubbed for a job. So he came up with this idea and he started a company. He would take a 10 by 10 pie pan, put it in a box, put a cow patty in it, and then he would mail it or deliver it to someone of your choice. He had four cards available: Happy birthday, have a nice day, thinking of you, or dig in. And it was $16.95. For seventy-five cents more, he put fake flies in it.
The story in the newspaper was this. He didn't know if this would work, but he started the company. The phone company came out to hook up the phones. They asked what was going on. He told them. The next day, he got 10 orders from phone company employees. And he knew then he had a good idea. Well, you've had something like that. You don't want to send them necessarily a pasture pizza, but you've had something where you want to get even. How do you respond? That's Joseph.
Joseph's Position of Power
We pick up the story today in Genesis chapter 41. Just a reminder of Joseph's powerful position. Genesis chapter 41, very end of that chapter, there had been seven years of plenty, and now seven years of famine in the land of Egypt. "When all of Egypt was famished, the people cried out to Pharaoh for bread. And he said to them, 'Go to Joseph. Whatever Joseph says to do, you should do it.'" That's Joseph's powerful position.
He didn't start there, remember? We first meet Joseph back in Genesis chapter 37. His brothers had sold him into slavery. We said at the time, if you'd have given any Jew a choice between being sold into slavery to the Ishmaelites or killed, any Jew would have chosen kill me. He's chosen into slavery.
He lands in the house of Potiphar, the head of the Egyptian secret service. Remember this now? And then Potiphar's wife falsely accuses him of rape. He's thrown into the dungeon. The chief jailer sees in Joseph what Potiphar had seen. Potiphar had put him in charge of his whole house, given him everything but his wife. Chief jailer promotes him.
Joseph's Rise from Prison to Palace
Potiphar faces a crisis, because Pharaoh has a falling out with the chief cupbearer and the chief baker, two of his key administrative people. He puts them in prison. Potiphar has control of them. He says, "I need to give this to somebody who won't mess it up." He gives it to Joseph. Joseph reads the dreams, tells the cupbearer he's going to be back with Pharaoh. He said, "Remember me when you get there. Get me out of this." The cupbearer forgets Joseph.
Then Pharaoh has a dream. And the cupbearer said, "Hey, there's a little Hebrew boy who interpreted my dream accurately. Maybe you'd want to listen to him." And that's how Joseph comes in contact with Pharaoh. He interprets his dream. He tells him that the calamity is coming, seven years of prosperity, seven years of famine.
Joseph's Position of Power
Joseph found himself in a position of extraordinary power during the seven years of famine. Pharaoh had made him the grain czar, giving him almost exclusive control of a commodity that was in very high demand and very low supply.
Here's where we find Joseph as we begin today's study in Chapter 42, where we see his character appraised.
The Brothers' Crisis
"Now Jacob saw that there was grain in Egypt. And Jacob said to his sons, 'Why are you staring at one another? Behold, I have heard that there is grain in Egypt. Go down there and buy some for us from that place so that we may live and not die.' Then ten brothers of Joseph went down to buy grain from Egypt. But Jacob did not send Joseph's brother Benjamin with his brothers, for he said, 'I am afraid that harm may befall him.' So the sons of Israel came to buy grain from Joseph."
There's the scene. These are the boys that sold Joseph into slavery.
There are a couple of things that are probably important for us to understand. Number one, look at these boys' reaction in the midst of crisis. Their dad says to them, "Why are you standing there staring at one another?" Sometimes when things come into our life, we don't even know what to do. We don't even know how to respond. The old man maybe had ten student athletes here and they needed just a little direction. He said, "Go to Egypt. Go down there. They have food. We don't. Go get it."
Divine Interruptions in the Mundane
Here's the second thing. These boys come in on a very ordinary day in Joseph's life. Joseph is there just sitting doing his business. Everybody in the world is coming to him for grain. So he's just sitting there processing requests. Next. Next. Very ordinary life.
Here's the word we'd use to describe his day: mundane. By definition, that's what mundane means - ordinary, routine.
In your life and mine, one of the most important things we can do is to master the mundane. Many, maybe most of the most significant moments in my life never were predicted. Never showed up on an Outlook calendar for the day. They weren't in a Blackberry. They weren't in a day timer. They weren't on my yellow tab. They weren't scheduled.
There has to be in your life and mine a sense where we understand that there's meaning in the mundane. That I find purpose and meaning in the mundane. And oftentimes in the mundane, God will drop what I call these divine interruptions.
Finding Meaning in Routine
Haley's starting to experience that now. Brayden will be two weeks old tomorrow. The first four or five days were incredible days. But the baby now isn't sleeping as well. You're beginning to love the kid, but after two weeks, a two-week-old has done all the tricks he knows to do. And now it's about changing diapers.
I never changed boys' diapers. Haley tells me changing a boy's diaper has a whole new element of excitement to it that a girl's diaper didn't have. You can hear sometimes the tiredness in her voice. Susan went down yesterday and said, "Haley, I'm going to give you a Christmas present. You go take a shower and then you go to bed and let me just take care of the baby for three or four hours and I'll feed him and take care of some other stuff." Susan said she came out a new person.
You all know this. There's nothing more mundane than parenting a little kid. But the payoff punch is huge. I remember the mundaneness of raising the two that we have. I remember all of the difficulty. I remember the discipline.
I just met with a guy yesterday and he's having a problem with his 14-year-old kid. We never had any of that - the lion's share of that is God's grace, and the other part of it is Susan's incredible parenting. I remember even in the midst of that, those days where we just said, "This is so hard. Will it ever make a difference?" And now when you see us walking into the oncologist, we're a force to be dealt with. It's Tom, Susan, the nuclear medicine associate, and the oncology nurse. You just see God's blessing all over that. And it goes all the way back to the mundane.
Availability in the Unexpected
You may have on your calendar today nothing special. That does not mean your day is going to have nothing special in it. Part of it is your willingness to be available. Part of it is when somebody comes up and says to you, "I know you're really busy. I know this isn't a good time, but..."
I get more of those calls - I get more of those "I really need your help" calls when I'm really busy and under a deadline or there's something going on and it isn't convenient. Your availability in the midst of that is going to have a huge determination on your spiritual vitality because it's going to be those moments where you dump yourself into somebody else's life and you see God use you in a marvelous way and it never shows up on your calendar.
The Moment of Recognition
That's Joseph. In come the boys. Look at the vivid memories here.
"Now Joseph was the ruler over all the land, and he was the one who sold to all the people of the land. And Joseph's brothers came and bowed down to him with their faces to the ground. When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them, but he disguised himself to them and spoke to them harshly and said, 'Where have you come from?' And they said, 'From the land of Canaan to buy food.' But Joseph had recognized his brothers, although they did not recognize him. And Joseph remembered the dreams which he had about them, and said to them, 'You are spies; you have come to look at the undefended parts of our land.'"
Joseph reflects back to Genesis 37, the dream. Remember the...
dream he had? We went back and it was a dream. When he interpreted it, he said it means you guys are going to bow down to me. Here's the fulfillment of that dream. These boys come in. They don't recognize him. Why? Well, it's been 22 years. They're used to how people, the Hebrews would dress and act, and their hair would be long and their beards would be long. Joseph at this point is probably walking like, talking like, and looking much more like an Egyptian. Probably clean shaven, maybe a little facial hair. They just didn't recognize him.
The other thing is, he's out of context. They've probably long since assumed he's dead. I'm walking through a mall not long ago. This lady comes up to me, stands right in front of me and says, "You don't know me, do you? You don't recognize me, do you?" I can't imagine how rude that is. That is so insensitive.
If I'm seeing somebody who I know may not recognize me or doesn't recognize me, I'll go up to them and say, "Hi, I'm Tom." I don't go up to them and say, "What's my name? What's my social security number? Oh, you don't know me." I said, "No, I don't know you." She said, "Well, I go to one of the studies." Well, it's out of context. If I'd have seen you in this room, it makes sense. So these boys don't recognize them.
Joseph Tests His Brothers
Joseph says, "You're spies." He kind of tests them a little. He puts them in prison. Look at this constructive attitude here. Verse 21, the boys are now in prison, and we're going to have to take a little side trip here.
The boys are in prison, and the first words we hear are this. Verse 21: "They said to one another, 'Truly, we are guilty concerning our brother because we saw the distress of his soul when he pleaded with us, yet we did not listen. Therefore, this distress has come upon us.'" We get a piece of information there that we didn't have earlier. We hear that when Joseph was sold into slavery, he was pleading for his life. We heard him plead. We heard him say, "No, don't do this."
Here these guys are. You want to see guilt? Twenty-two years later, they have distress. Their assessment of the reason they're in this circumstance is, "Remember what we did 22 years ago." That's guilt.
Understanding Guilt
I want to talk about guilt. Guilt's one of those things that gets a bad rap. Most of the time, and we love to say this so you can participate, most of the time we feel guilty because we are guilty. If you can be involved in sin—let's first say this is a hypothetical. I have to go so far out of my way to make sure you understand this is a hypothetical. This isn't true. It hasn't happened. It isn't happening.
Let's say I'm involved in adultery. I'm not. Don't run out and say Tom said he was. I'm not. Let's stipulate that adultery is wrong. Some of you may not quite be at that point yet, but let's go ahead and say it's wrong. If I'm involved in adultery, if I'm involved in ongoing sin, something I know is wrong, I should feel guilty. If I don't feel guilty, what? I'm pathological. Those are the people we lock up.
Here's the question: How do you deal with the guilt? Let me give you four options.
Four Ways People Deal with Guilt
Number one, you deny it. You play it away. You come up with some sort of excuse. You say, "Well, it really isn't sin. Or if it is bad, here's why." "I wouldn't have done this, but my wife isn't responsive, and this gal is." "I've been dealt dirty in so many different areas that it's okay for me to steal this here at work." That's what the Pharisees did. They just kind of denied it. "We're whitewashed tombs." The rich young ruler: "What? I need to go to heaven? Keep all the commandments? I kept them." You're in denial. That's one thing.
Here's the second thing: to admit that you're guilty and despair. Give me the textbook example of that. Judas. Judas is a perfect example of this. Here's what happens. Judas is guilty, and what does he do? He hangs himself. Two very interesting case studies: Peter and Judas. Both really guilty of betraying or denying Christ, and Judas is filled with despair.
I had a guy in one of the studies. I'd never saw him before. I haven't seen him since. I do the lesson. He comes up afterwards. This guy is crying, crying, crying. Everybody leaves. He said, "I've done..." And he starts, as though I'm his confessor, to lay out all of these sins. It was just one sin after another after another. Despicable things, to the point where it's now sin that has affected the health of the people around him, even his children. He's crying and he's weeping. I'm trying to comfort him. I'm hugging him. I'm trying to find some way of comforting him.
Then he said the saddest thing of all: "God could never, never, never, never, never forgive me for this." I said to him, "Well, pal, all you did was bad. But your sin is not greater than God's grace." Maybe you're here today saying, "I'm so guilty. I'm so guilty." That's terrific. Don't despair. That's not an option. Denying it doesn't work. Despair doesn't work.
Here's the third thing you might do: admit you're guilty and attempt—this is my phrase—moral realignment. In other words, every day is New Year's Day for you. "I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm going to throw these books out. I'm not going to look at these magazines. I'm never going to go to that place again." And then you go right back and do it.
This time of year, somebody asked me, "What are you going to do for the holiday?" This is really a busy time of the year for that reason right there. I am the spiritual equivalent of L.A. Fitness. Everybody's going to join L.A. Fitness here in the next month, and they're going to give it a solid two or three days. Well, church and priority living...
are the spiritual equivalent of L.A. Fitness. "I'm going to start coming to your thing again." Well, it isn't my thing. I'll give you a tip. As long as it's my thing and not your thing, it isn't going to make any difference for you. If this isn't your thing and it's my thing, then it's like buying a ticket and going to Glendale Theater to watch Paul McCartney. If this isn't your thing, then I don't care. I mean, it's great that you're here and all those other things. But if you're here just to watch, then don't come.
Don't come out of guilt and say, "Well, I'm going to do this and do this and do this." The idea of moral realignment is "I'll start going to church. I'll start doing this. I'll get involved. I'll start ushering. I'll work with you. I'll clean my act up." What are we doing there? Penance. God's not interested in your penance.
So here's what you can do with guilt. You can deny it. You can despair. You can try to clean your own act up. Those are all wrong answers, by the way. Here's the one right answer: Admit it and turn to Christ. He'll forgive you.
The Right Response to Guilt
If you're here today and you're not a Christian, I'm going to help you understand yourself. What you're prone to do is religion. You're prone to go through this, this, this, and this. What you're not prone to is relationship with Jesus. He wants you to acknowledge your sin, to acknowledge that your sin has separated you from Him, and that embracing Christ...
Here we are. We're at that time of year. Christmas time of year. I think I talked about it last week. I don't remember. This will be my Christmas. I always struggle: What are you going to talk about on Christmas Eve? I mean, how many people that have been with us 15 or 20 years have heard? There's not a lot of nuances to this story.
Well, one of them is the name. I think I mentioned it last week. You know, "You're going to have a baby. Is it a boy or a girl?" "Boy." The minute you say that, they want to know what the name is. Well, here's what they named Jesus. They named Him Jesus. And He said, "You'll name Him Jesus because He will save His people from their sin." That's the whole point of Jesus coming into this earth and dying. If you believe in Him, you will be done with your guilt and you'll be forgiven. If you don't, you'll be miserable here and then go to hell.
Dealing with the Reality of Death
As I said, I'm doing a funeral this afternoon for a man that I met a couple of times. That's always difficult because everybody asks, "What are you going to say about him if you don't know him?" I'm not going to say one word about him. I'm really not. I'm going to emcee it. I'm going to let everybody else talk about him. And when it's all done, I'm going to say, "I really didn't know this guy, but I know this: what he experienced last week, you're going to experience sometime. Are you ready?" And then I will explain the gospel to them.
That's what you do with guilt.
Joseph Reveals Himself
Here are these boys. I just think it's a fascinating, subtle nuance of the story. Here they come. The minute they're in prison, this guilt must have been eating them away. Look at the heart of Joseph, the conciliatory heart of Joseph.
We're going to skip to Genesis chapter 45. Lots happened. He sends the boys back. He brings Benjamin back. Joseph is about to reveal himself to the boys. Chapter 45, verse 1: "Joseph could not control himself before all those who stood before him. And he cried out and said, 'Have everyone go away from me.'" He's holding court. He's got his support staff around him. He sends them all away.
"Now there was no man with Joseph when he made himself known to his brothers. He wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it. The household of Pharaoh heard it. Joseph said to his brothers, 'I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?' But his brothers couldn't answer him, for they were dismayed in His presence."
They're terrified. Why, by the way, are they terrified? Here's why they're terrified. They're terrified, at least in my mind, because they're projecting their reaction onto Joseph. They're not anticipating necessarily what Joseph Himself might have done. They're anticipating what they would do if they were in Joseph's position. They know what they would do. They would have 22 years of bitterness and anger, and it would come spewing out of their mouth, and they would torture and kill and punish and do anything they can to them in that situation.
Projecting Our Reactions onto Others
This is a freebie. We have a tendency to do that, to project ourselves onto other people. We have a tendency to say, "This is what I would do if I'm in that situation," and sometimes that prevents us from ever seeing what's really going on in that other person's life.
There's kind of a sister idea of that, and that is, we tend to not allow people to grow. We tend to have relationships with people over periods of time. We see that we've grown, but we don't really realize they've grown. Nowhere is that more evident than in a family relationship. Nowhere is that more evident than in a family dynamic.
You're getting ready to have Christmas. You got a holiday coming, Christmas coming. For most of you, this is just a time that has with it a lot of joy and some aggravation. For some of you, it has a lot of aggravation and some joy. For some of you, it's just aggravation.
I know human nature well enough to know that in a room this size with this many people in it, you've got a lot of people who are about to just have miserable Christmas experiences. I want to help you here, because you have this tendency to say, "Oh, this will be different." It's not going to be. If your family's nutty...
all year long, it's going to be really nutty when you throw some booze and eggnog on top of it. It's going to be nutty. It's going to be goofy.
One of the things that I think is important is to say, am I treating everybody fairly? What often happens in the family dynamic is that everybody now is CEOs and managing $50 million budgets, but when they come together, you revert back to, well, he's still little Billy. Maybe if you approach Christmas not with the expectation that it's going to be normal when it's been abnormal all the time, but with an expectation that says, I want to really maybe understand my brother, my sister, my mother, my dad, my cousin this year, not as how I think they are, but how they really are. That might be helpful.
Joseph's Profound Perspective
Look at Joseph's perspective. Verse 4, Joseph's profound perspective. Then Joseph said to his brothers, "Please come closer to me." And they came closer, and He said to them, now, I've held Joseph in the highest esteem, and I do, but he does get a little shot in here. "I'm your brother, Joseph. You may have forgotten me. Let me remind you who I am, who you sold into slavery."
It's as though he's saying, I remember, but I want you to understand that isn't the issue here. "Now, do not grieve or be angry with yourself because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there's still five years in which they'll be neither planting or harvesting. God has sent me before you to preserve you, a remnant in earth, and to keep you alive by a great deliverance."
Let me summarize Joseph's attitude for you. Turn to the very end of this book, Genesis chapter 50. By Genesis chapter 50, Joseph has now been reunited with his family. His father's died.
Verse 15, "When Joseph's brother saw that their father was dead, they said, 'What if Joseph should bear a grudge against us and pay us back in full for all the wrong we did to him?'" They said, "What if Joseph should bear a grudge against us and pay us back in full for all the wrong we did to him?" Maybe the reason that Joseph was holding himself back, constraining himself toward us, is because dad was still alive. Now, dad's gone, maybe Joseph's going to kill us. They never really get it.
So, in Genesis chapter 50, verse 19, Joseph said, "Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid, why? I'm in God's place. As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good." There's Joseph's perspective.
We Don't Always Know Good from Bad
Let's stop, let's hit the pause button in the story now, and fast forward, deal with you, where you are. I'm going to tell you something, and you may just kind of flinch against this for a second, but I don't think you will once you think it through. Often in our lives, we don't even know the difference between the good things and the bad things that are happening in our life. We can't oftentimes even tell if something is a good thing or a bad thing.
Now, really quickly, I'm not talking about moral issues. I'm not saying we're confused morally. We got that figured out. I'm talking about circumstance. I'll bet you that if I started over here with Ron and gave him a microphone and said, let's go around the room, and you tell me a time when you really saw God work, and a time where God really taught you a lesson, and a time of great growth, I'll bet you that frequently those occasions of great growth were born out of times of hurt and pain and frustration, disappointment.
Turning points in my life certainly was reaching a point where I said, my life's out of control. Here I am, I'm 30 years old, I can't manage my own life. Now I've got a wife, and now I got a kid. There's something out there bigger than this. I refuse to believe that life is just about seeing how much fun you can have. It was through those circumstances that God used to open my eyes to see the truth of the gospel.
All of a sudden, you have a cancer that comes into your life. Well, if we were to make a value judgment, if you went to the doctor today and he said, you have cancer, and you've got a year to live, our immediate value judgment would probably be, this is a bad thing. I don't think you can say that. Because I will guarantee you, if you will allow it, you will see so much good come out of that, that you'd have a hard time saying it's a bad thing. It may not be what you want. I'm okay with that.
Life's Unexpected Turns
You know, here you go, you're a parent. You send your kid off to college. He comes home after his freshman year and says, I'm done with it. I don't like it. I'm dropping out. Most parents would go, that's awful. That's terrible. You're dropping out of college. What are you going to do? Well, what if your kid's name was Bill Gates? He says, I'm dropping out of college. Why? Well, I'm dropping out of college. I don't think I need it. You know what? He was right. He didn't need it.
You go in and you lose your job. How often have you seen that? That job goes away and then all of a sudden, something better comes along. You were stuck there. You were stymied there. Comfortable there. No risk anymore. The vitality that was there, when you were a little younger, a little more entrepreneurial, a little more free spirit.
Now you hit that critical age. And it's maybe because I'm there. But I think that critical time in so many people's life is around 52 to 56, where you lose the edge. You just start to go through the motions. It's not fun anymore. But you won't stop doing it because you're so heavily invested. You can't go make money like this anywhere else. Sometimes you just need to lose the job to start over. You see what I'm saying? You don't know.
What We Do Know
Here's what we know. God's at work in our life. He loves us more than we love ourselves. He won't allow us to be tested or tried beyond that which we can endure. And no matter what comes in our
Life, we're going to be able to say, "You may have meant it for evil. I may have interpreted it as evil. But God meant it for good." Because God's got a plan, and it's bigger and better than mine. That's Joseph's story.
There's lots more in there. Let me give you five helpful hints here, surviving through the cycles.
Five Hints for Surviving Life's Cycles
Number one, be careful the way you use authority. That's been a recurring theme in this study. Power can be toxic. We understand that. But there's also the opportunity to do great things in the midst of the power that God's given me.
Number two, maximize the mundane. God isn't just working according to your schedule. Your most significant moments aren't just when you're at this peak.
Number three, keep your hard drive clean. You don't need to have this stuff all stored up in there, carrying around years of guilt. Here are these boys for 22 years carrying around all this guilt. You can deny it. Stupid. You can despair. Stupid. You can attempt moral realignment. Stupid. Or you can come to Christ, and there you'll find forgiveness, relief from guilt, freedom to live.
Number four, reconstruct relationships. Here's the scriptural admonition. As far as it depends on you, live at peace with one another.
The True Nature of Fellowship
Charles Spurgeon, many of you know that name. Charles Spurgeon, considered one of the great preachers of all time. I have in my library, I have no idea how many volumes of Spurgeon. Fifty volumes or something. Some big old volumes of Spurgeon stuff. Tons of it.
If you go and you look up the word fellowship with Spurgeon, he doesn't do one message on what we would talk about. If I say fellowship to you, what do you think about? Food, cookies, candy, talking, waste of time. That's what you think of. A room like this, a fellowship hall type thing. Hot chocolate, that kind of stuff. Accountability, where we sit around and lie to each other, that kind of stuff. Fellowship.
In every message that Spurgeon did on fellowship, he never once talked about horizontal fellowship. He talked only about vertical fellowship. That's an amazing thought. Because my horizontal fellowship isn't worth a lick if my vertical fellowship isn't right. I know it in my own life. If my communion with God is not vibrant and alive, then my relationship with people tends to not be caring, forgiving, reconciliatory.
Be Willing to Suffer Hardship
Here's the last thing. Be willing to suffer hardship. I was reading the other day through the Gospels, and Jesus was talking about the Son of Man, the Son of Man, in Himself, has to go to Jerusalem for suffering, plural. And that kind of caught my interest a little bit, the plural. And I happened to be reading another guy, and he's talking about Jesus' sufferings, and he's talking about how He suffered on so many different levels. It wasn't just the physical level. It was the relational level, emotional level.
You're going to have lots of suffering. Here's what Peter says to you and me. After we've suffered for a while, after we've suffered here, the Christian life is inseparably linked to suffering. But suffering, just like the mundaneness of life, has purpose. God's growing you. That's how you grow.
Suffering as Spiritual Growth
I know we hate this. I know we can't stand it. But what's true physically is true spiritually. I haven't been to the gym for a while. I need to get to the gym. My schedule is about to change here, and I've got some free time. And one of the things that's a goal for me is to get back into the gym.
Part of what I dread is I know that first couple of weeks is going to be awful. I know that first day with all of the things and the nausea and all that will come with it, because I don't have the ability to just halfway do this intelligently, will be terrible. I know the next day I won't be able to get up and down steps. I know how anguishing, painful that is.
Why would you do this? And that's probably a question that if I contemplated, I could talk myself out of it. But why do you do that? Why do you go through that? You go through that because it makes you stronger physically. That's true on a physical plane. It's true on a spiritual plane.
The suffering you endure is not meaningless. It makes you stronger spiritually. Count it all joy, brother, James 1:2, when you encounter various trials, because you know the testing of your faith produces endurance. Suffering is spiritual aerobics. There's the truth.
Joseph's Example for Us
Isn't it a great study? Joseph's a great study. And a great study, not just in, "Oh, that's fascinating," but a great study because it's so practical and applicable. And here's what I take away from Joseph's life. Everyone around him saw that the Lord was with Joseph because Joseph was with the Lord. He was obedient and faithful. And that's what God's looking for in your life and mine.
Let's pray together. Father, thank You for this day that we can come and we can look at this man. And we understand he's not some superhuman person. He is a man who's indwelt by the Spirit of God. He's got You working in his life. So do we. God, let's not go, "Wow, what about Joseph?" Let's look at this and go, "God help us live this way." Father, thank You for all that You've extended to us, Your grace and Your mercy, Your love and Your care.