Life Lessons from Joseph – Part 2 December 2, 2001
INTRODUCTION
Show clip from Forrest Gump – Forrest says, “Sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks.”
Obviously, that was a scene from the movie “Forrest Gump.” Forrest’s lifelong friend Jenny had grown up in a home where she was abused by her father. He had left his mark on Jenny in a horrible way, profoundly affecting her life choices. And now, years later, seeing that house – the house where she grew up – that house from which she ran to an even more destructive way of life – seeing that house brought back painful memories. The hurt hadn’t gone away. The wounds had never fully healed. And Forrest appropriately comments, “Sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks.”
Let me ask you to consider something today. Have you run out of rocks?
Rocks are what we hurl at objects or individuals who remind us of our pain. They are not literal rocks, but maybe actions or words that we employ to strike back at almost anyone or anything in an attempt to offset some of our own hurt. A sarcastic comment here, a bit of excessive behavior there. Hopefully we won’t hurt so bad as long as we have rocks to throw. Jenny’s wayward adult life that is pictured in Forrest Gump is presented as a futile effort at numbing the pain of past wounds.
The trouble is that the deep hurts and the deep wounds of our lives can’t be fully healed by simply throwing rocks. Sooner or later we’ll run out – we’ll find we’ve hurt others in the process. We’ll find the pain is still there. And reduced to a puddle of unmanageable emotions, we find ourselves having to come to grips with the rest of life, wondering how we’ll cope.
Today’s message is about the healing of deep wounds.
There is a man in the Bible whose family deeply wounded him. His name is Joseph.
If you were here last Sunday, you remember Joseph’s family background. His father was married to two sisters at the same time and kept two mistresses. He had 13 children through these 4 women, all of whom lived in the same household with him. 12 of those children were boys. Joseph’s only sister had been raped. His brothers were guilty of murder, theft and gross immorality. Before he was 10 years old his mother died.
Joseph was the favorite son of his father’s favorite wife. And because of that, Genesis 37 says his father made for him a beautiful robe, fit for a prince. A robe that showed everyone he was exempt from the manual labor his brothers had to engage in day after day. His brothers wore dirty farming clothes. But not Joseph. He had a favored place in the family. His brothers hated him. They were consumed with jealousy. At the age of 17, Joseph was attacked by his brothers, who furiously stripped him of his beautiful robe. They threw him into a deep hole in the ground and would have killed him, except one of his brothers talked the rest out of it. Instead of committing murder, they sold Joseph to some slave traders who took him to Egypt. The brothers lied to their father, telling him Joseph had been killed by a wild animal.
Picking up where we left off last week, through an incredible series of events, Joseph had gone from slave to prisoner to being appointed as 2nd in command in the great Egyptian empire.
During a 7-year period of famine, it was Joseph’s responsibility to manage the distribution of grain to everyone in the Empire and the surrounding areas.
Read Genesis 41:56-57
Because of the famine, in Genesis 42 his brothers are forced to come to Egypt for food. All of his brothers make the trip except for his little brother Benjamin. The only other child of his father’s favorite wife. Joseph recognizes his brothers, but they don’t recognize him.
He holds one brother hostage and makes them go back for his little brother. When they return Genesis 45 says Joseph reveals who he is. And instead of punishing them for what they did to him, he invites them to bring his father down to Egypt so they can all survive the famine and live closer together.
The entire family comes to live in Egypt. And Joseph is finally reunited with his father. Seventeen years after the reunion, Joseph’s father dies. And that is where join the portion of the story I want us to look at today.
Read text – Genesis 50:14-21
Joseph’s life is an example of how God can bring healing to the deep wounds of our lives. Somehow Joseph made it. After all he’d been through. After all the hurt, the betrayal and unfair treatment. Joseph found healing.
As we look at Genesis 50 there are a few substantial truths we can learn from Joseph about the healing of hidden hurts.
TRANSITION: #1, if we desire healing, we must…
1. Guard against bitterness
A chiropractor from Tampa, Florida, had paid alimony to his former wife for a long time. In 1994 he came to his final alimony payment of $182. He didn’t just want to send his money; he wanted to send a message. So in large scale he drew a check on the back of a pinstripe shirt. On the memo line of his shirt-check, he wrote, “Here it is-the shirt off my back!” The bank cashed it.
That’s bitterness.
Bitterness is what can happen when we choose to dwell on our wounds. Maybe we get into the habit of picturing the one who wounded us and imagining all sorts of bad things we would enjoy seeing come upon that person as payback. Bitterness can even lead to a desire for personal revenge.
Joseph’s brothers just assumed he would be bitter.
Genesis 50:15 – “What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for all the wrongs we did to him?”
Now that their father is dead, what would be stopping Joseph from enacting some extreme form of payback? They remembered very well how their uncle, Esau at one point, wanted to kill his brother Jacob, who was their father, so based on their family history, it wasn’t out of the question that Joseph might now want to kill them.
So they send word that their dad had left a message for Joseph before he died. His message: forgive your brothers. Joseph cried when he heard it.
Most scholars believe Joseph probably cried because his brothers chose to stoop to the level of making up a story that involved their deceased father. They were afraid, so they chose drastic measures.
But his brothers didn’t need to be afraid because Joseph wasn’t bitter. He wasn’t bitter? After being sold into slavery at the age of seventeen he wasn’t bitter? Why not?
Joseph wasn’t bitter because he left the righting of wrongs to God. Look at verse 19.
v. 19 – Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God?
In other words. I’m not in the business of payback. God alone rights wrongs, so I don’t have to settle the score. You guys are good with me.
Deep wounds will never be healed if we let ourselves become bitter. In bitterness we want to spread the hurt. Share it with the ones who hurt us. But we do so at the expense of leaving our own wounds unmended.
In the New Testament, Ephesians 4:31 says, Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger…
One biographer on the life of Robert E. Lee tells how after the Civil War was over, General Lee visited a Kentucky lady who showed him the remains of a large old tree in front of her house. She cried bitterly that its limbs and trunk had been destroyed by Union artillery fire. She looked to Lee for a word condemning the soldiers of the North or at least sympathizing with her loss. After a brief silence, Lee said, “Cut it down, my dear Madam, and forget it.”
Get rid of all bitterness. Let it take root and it can poison the rest of our lives.
Joseph was a wise man. He knew God wouldn’t heal his hurt as long as he carried a bitter desire to see harm come to his brothers.
Do you have a deep wound inflicted by someone in your past? If so, guard against bitterness by trusting God to right the wrongs. Without this, healing will not occur.
TRANSITION: Let me tell you a second thing we learn from Joseph that needs to occur if we want God to heal our deep wounds. We must…
2. Take steps toward forgiveness
A few years ago when I was a Youth Minister we took around 50 of the high school students at the church from the church where I served on a ski retreat over the Martin Luther King holiday. The theme of the weekend was forgiveness. We brought in Charlie Gerber, a Christian counselor from Muncie, Indiana to be our speaker. Charlie is very effective at communicating to teens. He is incredibly direct with them. He was talking to them about how the refusal to forgive a person actually because to take its toll on us.
One night during the retreat he got up to speak and simply said, “I know there are a lot of people here who have been deeply hurt by someone in your life. So instead of me talking tonight, I want to hear from you. You tell us what has happened in your life and why it is hard for you to forgive.” What happened next was amazing. For no less than 2 ½ hours these students from our youth ministry came to the front of the room and exposed their deep wounds. A few students carried a lot of anger because their parents had divorced. One young man had recently lost his mother, and now he was considering ending his life because he and his father were at odds. Four different students shared that a member of their family had sexually abused them.
And after each person shared, we made a circle and prayed for them to have help from God to be able to forgive. Those of us who were adult sponsors had a lot of follow up ministry over the next several months. But it was that night when many of those students courageously took a step toward forgiveness.
Forgiveness is difficult when we’ve been hurt badly. The last thing we may want to do is forgive. But remember we’re talking about the healing of deep wounds. And deep wounds require serious treatment.
Some people think forgiving is simply forgetting. It’s not. It is because of deep wounds are not forgotten that forgiveness needs to occur. Other people think forgiveness minimizes the hurt. Almost as though saying, “I forgive you,” gives the person the right to hurt us again. It doesn’t. It is because of the seriousness of the hurt that forgiveness needs to occur. Forgiveness and prosecution are not mutually exclusive.
The key to forgiveness is to understand how much we have been forgiven by God. Each of us have offended God in a major way because of our sins. But He sent Jesus to give us a way to be reunited with Him. Having faith in what Jesus did for us and accepting his grace, we are forgiven. God has taken leave of our sins in Jesus, so we too should let go of the sins committed against us.
Forgive as the Lord forgave you. – Colossians 3:13
Joseph’s brothers wondered, “Could he ever forgive us for the terrible things we did to him?” They were afraid of him. They made up a story. They offered themselves as his slaves.
What did Joseph do? Joseph modeled perfect forgiveness. He demonstrated how God graciously accepts us even though we don’t deserve it.
Read verse 21
A deep wound will always stay open if we are unable to forgive. Do you have someone in your life you’ve sworn you’d never forgive? Think that over again. And then with God’s help, take a step toward forgiveness. He’s the expert on the matter.
TRANSITION: A third thing we learn from Joseph that needs to occur if we want God to heal our deep wounds. We must…
3. Believe in God’s greater purpose
There is an amazing verse in Genesis 50. One of the most profound in the Bible. Verse 20. Joseph, the recipient of unnecessary wrong and mistreatment, looks his brothers in the eyes and says this:
You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.
He says something similar when he reveals his identity to his brothers in chapter 45. Verse 5 – It was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.
God never puts a stamp of approval on evil and sin. What Joseph’s brothers did was wrong. However, as Joseph looks back on his life, he sees it is no accident that he is where he is. Even in the midst of all the bad that happened, God used it for good. In fact, he used Joseph’s life to save many other lives. His brothers intended to harm him, but God intended it for good.
Many of you know that Judy Morrison is one of our church secretaries. Judy’s dad passed away a little over a week ago in California. Judy didn’t have much contact with him. She last talked to him sometime in March.
He wasn’t much of a father to her and he was a substance abuser. He created a number of deep wounds in Judy’s life. So the news of his death certainly stirred up some unpleasant memories for Judy.
But Judy wasn’t destined for a life of pain.
She shared with me that going through it as an adolescent was confusing and painful. She ran from it, into the arms of a sailor named Ray – to whom she’s still married.
But today Judy is a church secretary. She ministers to people every day. Out of her experiences, she’s a blessing to others. A better listener. A person with a big heart for those who hurt and are treated unfairly.
What was intended for harm, God used for good. For the saving of many lives through Judy’s ministry here at CCCH.
Many times we don’t know what God wants to do in our lives until after the fact. If you’re going through a deep wounding right now, or you have in the past, before you give up on God, consider what greater purpose He might have for you. He is in the process of bringing out great possibilities through your experiences.
He did that in Joseph’s life, and He’ll do it in yours. Believe in His greater purpose.
TRANSITION: One last thing we can learn from Joseph about the healing of deep wounds. We need to…
4. Live by promises, not explanations
I’m pretty sure that at the bottom of a pit, Joseph wasn’t fully aware of God’s overall plan for his life. After being thrown into prison for something he didn’t do, he still probably didn’t see the whole picture.
But he lived by promises, not explanations.
Last week we saw that a recurring theme appears in the story of Joseph. It’s these words, Genesis 39:2 – The Lord was with Joseph
Joseph believed the promise that God would never leave him. So because of that, he didn’t have to have an explanation for each of the trials he faced. He had hope in the midst of the unknown.
If you’re suffering from a deep wound, let me read to you some of God’s clear promises out of Romans 8…
v. 18 – Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will give us later.
v. 28 – And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.
v. 31 – If God is for us, who can ever be against us?
v. 37 – No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us.
I don’t know what deep wound there might be in your life. But I do know that God is with you in the midst of it. And his promises will bring you healing in a way searching for an explanation never can.
TRANSITION: Deep wounds can be healed. Joseph’s live proves it.
CONCLUSION
Here is how I want to close this morning.
As you consider your life today which of these 4 things speaks most to where you are right now with regards to a hurt in your life? Instead of throwing rocks…
Do you need to guard against bitterness?
Do you need to take some steps toward forgiveness?
Do you need help seeing God’s greater purpose in your pain?
Do you need to live by promises more than explanations?
Bow your head and let me pray for you.
