When God Establishes You

SERMON: 2013-10-20--ac13110--when-god-establishes-you-part-3 SOURCE DURATION: 00:36:14.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 14 is the final segment of theological exposition and benediction material within the sermon. Candidate 15 ([Applause]) marks a clear transition to non-sermon room audio/reaction. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- I think you'll agree with me this morning when I say that the most moving scene in the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis is this story here before us in Genesis chapter 45 when he first reveals himself to his brothers and forgives them for the "eel" which they have done to him. Very quick review just to make sure that we're all on the same page. Joseph, as you may recall, was Father Jacob's favorite son. His brothers hated him on account of that. When they saw the opportunity to get rid of him, they sold him to a traveling caravan of Midianite slave traders. They in turn sold him to Potiphar in Egypt, a captain of Pharaoh's Guard. There Joseph did really well for a season until Mrs. Potiphar took a liking to him, wanted to seduce him in bed. He resisted. She cried foul. She cried rape. Sold her husband, he was furious, and Joseph ends up in jail. And there he languishes for many, many years until the age 30. And then in the providence of God, all things having come together, he was suddenly released, gave the proper interpretation to a series of dreams that Pharaoh had, and Pharaoh placed him in charge of the food distribution in Egypt because there were going to be seven long years of good harvest followed by seven years of famine. Now in the narrative in the book of Genesis, we are two years into the famine. And thus it is that Joseph meets up once again with his brothers. The famine was becoming severe. They had heard there was food in Egypt. They traveled to Egypt. They met up with Joseph. They didn't recognize him. He of course recognized them, put them through a series of very difficult tests. And finally then, here in Genesis 45, sees fit to reveal himself. Listen again to these words, "I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you." And then later on in verse eight, same thing, "It wasn't you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, Lord of his entire household and ruler of all of Egypt." And what really comes through in the narrative is Joseph's graciousness towards his brother despite the treatment that he had received at their hands that many years earlier. Genesis chapter 50, the other passage that I referred to, puts it even clearer, "Jacob now has died. His brothers have lived in fear that once Jacob dies, the brakes will be off Joseph and now Joseph will seize the opportunity to get even with them." And so they come groveling to Joseph with a story that their father has asked him to forgive them and Joseph is deeply moved and troubled. And then he says this, "Joseph said to them, 'Don't be afraid, am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then don't be afraid, I will provide for you and your children.' And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them." Quite a story of grace and forgiveness, is it not? And over the next two weeks perhaps, Lord willing, what I want to try to do with you is draw three lessons from that story that I think have practical application to your life into my life. We'll only have time, I think, this morning to deal with one of them, but the first lesson that I believe we learn from this story is that forgiveness, now listen carefully, is relatively, and I use that word advisedly, is relatively easy when God has established you. Forgiveness is relatively easy when God has established you. When I ask you to think through that a little bit with me this morning, why do some people hold grudges that seem to last almost forever? Let me give you an example. When Michelle and I were just in California, we were hosted by a very gracious senior couple treated us like their own children, I think. Had a wonderful time with them. In the course of our many conversations, the lady of the house shared how there was this woman in her congregation who refused to speak to her for many, many years and despite whatever efforts our hostess made to try to find out what was underneath this or try to be reconciled, the lady simply wouldn't talk to her, avoided her at every opportunity. Why do people do that? I bet you, you know some people who do that. Perhaps in your more unholy moments, you're like that. What causes people to hold on to grudges? Well, you say it's because they got hurt, and that's probably true, but my response to that is, everybody gets hurt sooner or later, and if for many people getting hurt, they struggle with it for a little while, they process it, and they put it away, but there's another whole category. It goes into a very deep place, and they have a memory like an elephant, and they can never quite get past the injury that they have received. Why is that? Why do some people hold on, and why are some people so quickly able to let bygones be bygones and to let life go on? Well, there are many reasons for it, and Lord willing, in the continuation of this series of little messages on forgiveness and reconciliation, we look more closely at different factors that are involved in it, but I just want to say this morning that one reason some people are able to let go, and other people cannot, is because the ability to forgive, listen carefully, the ability to forgive, I believe, is a function of how well we feel established by God. Let me say it one more time. Our ability to forgive is a function of being established by God. Let me flesh that out a little bit with our famous circles that you by now should know by heart, and that you should use at every opportunity to evangelize your neighbors and your community, okay? So just learn this, and learn this really well. But you know, this circle represents the kingdom of God, life the way that God is designed for it to be. God is at the center. He is the source of life, and as long as we have a relationship with God, draw our life away from Him, then we are established and we are secure. Nobody is bigger than God, and repeatedly, therefore, the scripture says, "What can man do to me because God is my helper?" Our ability to forgive others is a direct function of God's forgiveness to us. Genesis 3.13, "Bear with each other, and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another, forgive as the Lord forgave you." There's a lot of teaching in the Bible about that. I don't need to repeat all of that now. That's the way life has been designed to function. This is the way we experience life in a fallen world. We're alienated from God. We're under Satan's influence. Satan tries to convince us that either God does not exist, or if he does exist, he is not good and cannot be trusted, and so therefore, you must look after yourself. The result in a fallen world is that I'm selfish, you're selfish. The result is conflict and confusion, and depending on how tenuous my relationship with God is in a fallen world, and how many fragile, inducing experiences I have gone through in life, my heart closes off, and the more my heart closes off, the less energy and strength I have to be the big one in broken relationships, the less strength and energy I have to keep criticism at bay, and the more likely I will carry grudges in my heart. Paul puts it this way in Scripture, 2 Corinthians 6, 11, 12, and 13. He says, "We have spoken freely to you Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you. We are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours from us. As a fair exchange, I speak as to my children, open wide your hearts also." Here's a group of people. They have closed off their hearts. The Bible doesn't say why, but Paul is inviting them to open their hearts, because you see, hearts that are open and filled with a presence and the knowledge of God are hearts that are large and hearts that are generous. Now just to show you how easily verifiable that is, look at your own life. When are you and I most susceptible to the power of criticism? When are we the most sensitive to slights that we experience at the hands of other people, whether real or imagined? Isn't it the worst when we are the most tired? When we are the most stretched internally? When we feel like we're hanging on by our fingernails? When life is not going well? We hurt, we are in pain, we feel like a failure. We see other people steaming along, carelessly sometimes speaking and doing things that wound us to the core of our being, and we just don't have the energy, we just don't have the strength to put up our defenses. They go right into those deep places and we feel broken, and we feel resentment, and we feel angry, and if you're a good Christian then you get down on yourself because you know you're supposed to know better, but the reality is that's how a lot of us live. Is that not true? In the broken and the wounded places of our lives, the hurt goes into a deep spot, and when we can't push it away, we begin to brood about it, and if you've never noticed this, the devil loves to come along and stir it up. Ever noticed that once this takes root in your life, you can think of ten reasons why the other person is a jerk, and now you begin to look at their lives through critical eyes and you begin to reevaluate how they live and how they've related to you, and all of a sudden you can take a whole series of separate incidents and you line them up to demonize your opponent to justify your own anger. The problem is when you fail to forgive, as somebody emailed me just recently, it's like drinking poison expecting the other person to die. And so the words of God to Cain way back in Genesis chapter four are very pertinent to the situation. He said, "Sin is couching at the door. It desires to have you, but you must master it." So hear me and hear me well, no matter what anybody has ever said to you or done to you. And this is a tough one. Forgiveness for the Christian is not an option, but it is rooted in knowing God as your Father and receiving the grace from Him to know that it is God who establishes you. And you see that is where Joseph really shines. Listen again to how he puts it, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives." I think forgiveness would have come much tougher for Joseph about 13 years into jail. Then after he got sprung out of jail, became governor of Egypt, now could look at the embroidery of his life from the front instead of the back and suddenly all those threads that didn't make any sense in the back were a mosaic of God's grace in his life, wouldn't you agree? Much easier to praise God on the mountain top when you see the hand of God than it is to praise Him in the valley when your life is coming apart. Now there are two very significant implications of this that I think we need to understand. Let me try to walk you through that as quickly as I can this morning. Number one, we must be established by God. It's not enough to be established, we must be established by God. Let me explain to you what I mean by that. There is I think a tendency that we all have to one degree or another to think that if people have the world by the tail, they are automatically people with large and generous hearts. So a person who's rich, well he can afford to be generous. A person who's happily married, well he can afford to be kind towards those who are lonely or looking for that special relationship. Those who are successful can afford to be charitable towards those whose success is still waiting to happen. And it's true, there are some for whom that is possible to a degree. But it's only possible to the degree to which that person realizes or recognizes that their blessings come from God and are not the result of their own striving and their own hard work. That's why Paul praying for the Ephesians says this, "I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." Now the measure of the fullness of God there is a life overflowing with love. How do you become a person whose life overflows with love? You've got to be rooted and grounded in God's love. That's why historically the people who have sacrificed most of themselves for a lost and a dying world are people who know God is their father. That is why Jesus could lay his life on the line, surrender to death, because he knew the father would raise him up on the third day unless you know that God is with you. It's only a matter of time before you say, "I can't do this anymore because I'm too busy preserving my own life." But you see, not everybody that is a success in life is a success in life because they believe that God has established them. There's a lot of people who think they are a success in life because they have established themselves. Often these are wounded people who scratch and claw and fight their way to the top and who then demonstrate in their top position all the characteristics of the brokenness that enabled them to succeed to begin with. Here's a verse from Proverbs that I have often pondered and found incredibly accurate, as of course is all of scripture. Proverbs chapter 30, 21, 22, and 23, listen to it carefully. Under three things the earth trembles, under four it cannot bear up. That's a Hebrew way of really making a point. Now notice the parallels here, there's four of them, a servant who becomes a king, a fool who is full of food, an unloved woman who is married, and a maid servant who displeases her mistress. Leave that slide up for just a moment. You would think, would you not, that a servant who becomes a king would remember what it was like to be a servant and he would treat other people the way that he would have wanted to be treated when he was a servant. Isn't that what you would think? And a fool, that's a person who doesn't know how to do life and therefore goes hungry all the time, you would think that a person who went hungry all of his life and now has come into food would remember what it was like to be hungry and would want to share his food. Isn't that equally true? Thank you for your enthusiasm, I just really like that. An unloved woman who's married, you would think that this little old spinster, who's not been courted by anybody now that she has finally found a husband, would have compassion on those who still have nobody to look after them. Don't you think that would be true? And wouldn't you think furthermore that a maid servant who displaces her mistress will remember what it was like to be a maid and decide that she is never going to treat her maids the way that she was treated by her mistress. Isn't that all true? Then why does Proverbs say, "Under three things the earth trembles but under four it cannot bear up." You know why? Because apart from going through healing, they take their brokenness with them and they do unto others what was done unto them. And so the slave is just as cruel as his master because that's all he knows. The fool continues to treat others the way that he had been treated, and the unloved woman is just as stingy in her heart, and so is the maid servant. You see, if you claw your way to the top, and it doesn't come from faith and from a God who loves you and heals you, you take all your brokenness with you and that is why so many of the tyrants in the world are cruel people who impose on others what has been imposed on them. And in one of my books they tell the story about Hitler. How his father was a cruel, vicious disciplinarian. His father was born out of wedlock, which might explain a little bit in terms of his psychology, and he used to beat young Adolf mercilessly, and they were constantly at loggerheads because Adolf wanted to be an artist and his father wanted him to be something else, that whole story. There came a point in young Hitler's life where he said, "You're not going to do that to me anymore." He put up resistance, and it is true he was able to resist his father's discipline, but you see the damage was already done. And while he never again cried under his father's hand, he's made millions of people cry bitter tears because of his own brokenness and his own dysfunction. We need to be established by God. And so we need to pray that God will enable us to be rooted in the love of God. The more we experience the love and the power of God, the more generous we can be in terms of the injuries that we experience at the hands of other people. Am I making sense here? Am I getting through to you? Okay, one more quick implication, equally important, and that is we need to pray for God to bless the miserable people in our lives. Do you know any miserable people? Elsie does. At least she's honest. You can't live in this world without encountering some miserable people, and the tendency is to want to curse them or to hope that God will judge them or to otherwise show that you're better than what they are. But the words of Jesus are incredibly uncomfortable in that regard. He says this in the Sermon on the Mount, "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your father in heaven. He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.'" Don't you sometimes wish you didn't have to be a follower of Jesus? Because of course, the natural tendency is to love those who love you and to hate those who hate you. That's how the Jews of the days of Jesus interpreted the Old Testament, but Jesus comes along and he says, "No, you're missing the whole point. The whole point of the Old Testament was to teach you to love your enemy and to pray for those who are miserable in your life." And there are two reasons for that, one given by Jesus and the second one that I'm going to venture to give you. You got to take the Jesus one at face value. You can challenge me on mine. Reason number one given by Jesus is that is the character of your father who is in heaven. Remember, he makes the sun shine on the evil and on the good. He makes us rainfall on the righteous and the unrighteous. God is generous because he can afford to be. He can take anything away from God. And to be joined to Jesus is to become like our father who is in heaven and if this is what our father in heaven is like, this is what he wants you and me to be like. It's as clear as day, it's hard to live it, but it flows out of union with Christ. If you're joined to Jesus and the spirit of Jesus lives in you, it will always push you in that direction. You love your enemies. You pray for those who persecute you, but there's a second reason and that's the one that I'm giving you and you don't have to take that as inspired, but you can judge this for yourself. Why are miserable people miserable? Because they're hanging on by their fingernails, isn't that true? You will seldom be persecuted in life by people who are happy and who are thriving and who are successful. You know why? They're too busy doing life to bother with the likes of you. They're just happy being happy. And they might even take pity on you. But the people that are miserable are the miserable people. They're hanging on by their fingernails. They don't feel loved. They don't feel accepted. They don't feel they have a place in their world. They feel nobody wants them. And so they vent their frustration by trying to bring you down to their level because they are just unhappy and unhappy on the inside. So what's the best way to fix it? Well, you pray for them, but you pray for God to bless them. Because if God blesses them out of their socks, they're too busy receiving the blessings of God to be bothered with the likes of you. So you see, there is wisdom to the teachings of Jesus because it is love that sets people free, not the law, not more whippings. You can get people to conform outwardly, but you cannot make it happen on the inside. I want to close with this story that Philip Yancey tells in his book, Rumors of Another World, and I need to tell you upfront that there are questions about the historicity of this story. There are some people who say there is no evidence of this ever happened, but whether it's apocryphal or historical, it illustrates powerfully this theme of forgiveness that we see worked out in Joseph's life. The story comes out of South Africa. And you know that in the days before apartheid was outlawed, there was a lot of antagonism between some of the white folks and some of the black folks. And in this particular story, a white policeman captured an 18-year-old black young man and together with the policeman's friends, they killed him and then burned his body in the most gruesome way possible so as to hide the evidence. Some years later, they went back to the home where this young man had lived and they captured his father. They tied him to a pile of wood, poured gasoline over him, and while his horrified wife watched, they burned him to ashes, rolled the clock forward. Apartheid is now a thing of the past. And under the leadership of Nelson Mandela and under the direct leadership of Bishop Desmond Tutu, they instituted in South Africa reconciliation, what's the exact word, truth and reconciliation hearings. Because typically what happens, of course, with a change of regime like this is you get a bloodbath of revenge. And they wanted to avoid that because everybody knew what had happened in Rwanda and in countries like that. So at these truth and reconciliation commission hearings, people were allowed to come forward, confess their misdeeds, repent of them, and seek reconciliation with the parties they had hurt. And if they were willing to do so, the full force of the law would not be applied to them. They would be forgiven. And so this particular policeman, so goes this story, came forward and he related the gruesome details of what he had done in the murder of this 18-year-old and in the gruesome murder of his father. All the while, the widow is sitting there. So after this testimony has concluded, the judge turns towards the widow and says, "What do you want from this policeman in light of all of these things that have happened?" And she thought a little bit and she said, "I want three things. Number one, I want him to go to the place where my husband and son were burned and gather the ashes so that I can give him a proper burial. Secondly," she said, "I have been deprived of my family, but I still have a lot of love left in my heart and so twice a month, I want the policeman to come to where I live and spend the day with me so that I can mother him. And thirdly," she said, "just to show that he's been forgiven by God and that I have forgiven him completely from my heart, I want to walk over to him now and give him a hug to show that I am serious about what I have just said." Somebody in the crowd, so goes the story, began to sing Amazing Grace. By the time she got to the policeman, he had fainted, was unable to give him the hug. And whether the story is apocryphal or whether it's based in reality doesn't really matter very much because it illustrates what forgiveness looks like from God's point of view. And we can try to drum it up. We can try to pretend that, you know, we have forgiven, but I'll tell you, it only happens as in Joseph's case when we know that we know that we're established by God. And so as the service draws to a close, what I want us to do is pray for God to help us to be rooted and grounded in his love so that his love living in our hearts will show us how to pour out ourselves and our lives in those places where we have been hurt, we have been wounded, and we have been broken or where we have imposed that onto others, you know, as well as I did. We've come through a bruising time and many of us have picked up some injuries, some estranged relationships, places where we may have sinned, places where we have been sinned against. And we can talk till the cows come home about forgetting it all, but I'll tell you, true forgiveness is never going to happen unless we know that we know that we know that God loves us with an incredible love and that if he is for us, nobody can be against us. [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:36:12.320; remove through 00:36:14.000] [ [CUT]Applause] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:36:14.000; resume after this marked segment]