BACKGROUND:
The story of Joseph begins. Any serious reading of God's word and God's hero's must include the life of this incredible man - it is foundational to our faith. Joseph is introduced as an obedient 17-year-old son who brought back a bad report about his half brothers (he did not bring a bad report about his full brother Benjamin). The substance of this report is not given. Though doing this has never been popular, it shows that Joseph was faithful as a servant. Naturally his brothers... hated him for this.
The lad was also honored by Jacob who gave him a richly ornamented robe, probably a multicolored tunic. This seems to signify that Jacob favored him above the rest with the intent of granting him all or a larger portion of the inheritance. WHY? Maybe because Joseph was the firstborn of Rachel, Jacob’s loved wife. Yet Jacob should have remembered what parental favoritism does to a family. It had separated him from his mother, and it would separate Joseph from Jacob.
God confirmed Jacob’s choice of his faithful son by two dreams. In a dream God had announced to Abraham the Egyptian bondage in the first place; in a dream God promised protection and prosperity for Jacob in his sojourn with Laban; and by two dreams God predicted that Joseph would rule over his family.
These dreams and caused Joseph's brothers to hate Joseph all the more. They were clearly jealous of him. Sensing that Joseph was to be elevated to prominence over them, the envy and hatred of his brothers took action. Rather than recognize God’s choice, his brothers set on a course to destroy him. Their actions, though prompted by the belief that they should lead, shows why they should not have led.
SO WHAT? (what will I do with what I have read today?)
Genesis 37 talks about the life of a dreamer. Three important things about God’s purpose and plan for our life. Every one of us needs these three things.
1. We need to be directed by principles. I’ve got to have some principles to direct my life. Those are found in God’s word.
2. I need to be driven by purpose.
3. I need to be energized by a dream in my life.
If we’re just directed by principles and you don’t have any purpose in life, you become like a pharisaic rule keeper. All you know how to do is to do what somebody told you to do. You keep the rules but there’s no overarching purpose to your life. If all you have is a purpose for life but you don’t have God’s principles behind that purpose, then you’d do anything it takes to get to that purpose and that always ends in disaster. But if you have principles and a purpose but you don’t have a dream to energize it, you’re sort of like a 100-year old marathon runner. You know the goal and you know how to get there but you’re not sure you have the energy to take each step of the way.
Have any of you ever felt like that about God’s plan and purpose for your life? What energizes your life for the rest of your life? A God-given dream. And there’s no one better to teach us about God given dreams than Joseph. We all need a dream to motivate our life. If you’ve ever felt, “I know what’s right to do. I know what I should be doing. But I just don’t feel like doing it today.” Some of you need to hear God speaking a dream into your heart beyond your present expectation of what He can do in your life. You need Him to just explode the idea of what He could do in your life. Others of you need to recognize the dream that’s right around you. Some of you parents, your God-given dream, believe it or not, is your kids. What you do in their lives and what you give into their lives, God’s going to change the world through them. You need to recognize the God given dream that’s right there.
As our story opens we find Joseph in Israel with his family. He’s about 17 years old. He’s living in the town of Hebron. He’s living with eleven brothers and one sister. (How would you liked to have been that one sister?) But actually it was the one brother, Joseph, who got in the most trouble in this family. This is the story of dreams. This is the story of how dreams begin. Joseph is the story of how dreams develop. Joseph's life is the story of how dreams are realized. And Joseph's life is the story of how you live your dream once you reach it.
We’re going to take take this entire week to tell this story. We’re going to build it around how dreams happen in your life and my life and the lessons God can teach us in the life of Joseph. At the end of the week, I want to share some dreams that God has given me for our church.
#1. God teaches us through Joseph's life some lessons about GETTING THE DREAM.
If you start to read Joseph's life you’ll find out that he’s a very different man than his father Jacob. Genesis 37:2 Joseph, a young man of 17, was tending the flock with his brothers. He brought his father a bad report about his brothers. That’s not a good idea, this sibling rivalry thing. “Now Israel [Jacob] loved Jacob 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 and when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them they hated him.” Then Joseph had a dream.
The difference between Jacob and Joseph is very easy to describe. Jacob was a schemer. Joseph was a dreamer. That’s the difference. They’re very different people. Most of us can relate to Jacob. We look at Jacob and think, “That’s me. Those are the things I face in my life. That’s the struggles I face. That’s the struggles I’ve been through.”
You’re not going to feel quite the same way about Joseph. We all relate to Jacob but we can all be inspired by Joseph. Jacob is a person we look at and say, “That’s where I am.” Joseph is a person we look at and say, “that’s where I’d like to be.”
Joseph had a dream in v. 5 and he told it to his brothers and they hated him all the more. Why? Listen to the dream: “This is the dream I had. We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheave rose and stood upright while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.” Great dream, Joseph! Your brothers felt great about this! “His brothers said to him, ‘Do you intend to reign over us?’ And they hated him all the more because of the dream he said he’d had.”.
There are some immediate reactions. First of all Joseph has an immediate reaction in v. 5. He has the dream and the first thing he does is share the dream. That’s a reaction. That’s what many of us want to do. As soon as we get a God given dream we want to share it with anyone and everyone, especially with somebody who was in the dream like Joseph's brothers. Do you think it was a good idea for Joseph to share this dream with his brothers? Not a good idea! But we often make this mistake. We share the dream with the wrong people at the wrong time. Even when it’s a God-given dream. We’re so excited about it and we just want somebody to know. We share the dream with the wrong people at the wrong time and all of a sudden they immediately start to try to quench the dream in our lives. If it’s a God given dream, it’s going to last. Have you ever had that experience of somebody trying to quench your dream?
Joseph shared the dream, that was his reaction.
Jacob had a little bit different reaction. V. 10-11 “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 before you?’ His brothers are jealous of him but his father kept this matter in mind, kept thinking about it.” Jacob rebuked the dream. Jacob, a man who had two dreams himself, hears about the two dreams his son Joseph had had and asks, “What are you talking about?” He couldn’t see in his own child’s life the very things that God had done in his life. It’s easy for us to miss that isn’t it, parents? God’s doing in our children’s lives the very thing He’s done in our lives and we miss it. Jacob certainly did. But he didn’t entirely miss it. The Bible says he did keep the matter in mind. He thought about it.
Then there was a third reaction, the brothers. Jacob shared the dream, Jacob rebuked the dream, and the brothers hated the dreamer. They didn’t care about the dream; they just went straight for Joseph. They hated him. They were jealous of him. It’s interesting how Jacob had set up in his family the very thing that he’d experienced as a boy. As a boy, he and his brother Esau had been separated from each other because the parents favored one over the other. Here’s Jacob repeating the pattern in his own family. Here’s Jacob who was the younger of the brothers and who does he love the most? The younger of the brothers. He loves this one more than the others and it separates him from all the rest of the sons in the household.
Joseph and Jacob and the brothers, all had different reactions to this dream. I want to give you something to watch for as we study the life of Joseph this week, a question to think about. Which of these three are going to be most used of God to accomplish, to begin the process of accomplishing this God given dream? Is it going to be Joseph and some decision he makes? Is Jacob going to turn around and begin to see the light and do something that encourages Joseph to begin to go in the right way? Who’s it going to be?
It’s going to be, believe it or not, the brothers. The ones who hate him. The ones who are furthest from God’s will in this thing are going to be the ones most used of God to begin the process of accomplishing this dream. God’s amazing that way. He can take the worst things that Satan tries to throw at us and turn them around for His good. Notice as we go through this story how God uses the brothers to begin this process of making the dream come true.
Think this week. pray this week. Dream this week. What is God's plan and purpose for you. What's the vision for your life and marriage and family? What's the big picture? Where are you headed?
I love you guys. Stay faithful. Stay the course.
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