Drip

Message Transcription

We're launching into a new series. We're going to spend the month of June and the beginning of July together thinking about the story of Joseph. So if you have your Bible with you, I invite you to turn over into Genesis chapter 37. Uh, we'll look at that passage that Tracy so wonderfully read for us just a moment ago. Uh, but before we get there, I want to ask you this question. Have you ever done anything that you regret? Have you ever had that moment in life when you realized, oh, I wish I could have a do over? I think most of us could could identify with that. How many of you that regret happened when you were a young person? Maybe younger than you are now, right? Uh, isn't it amazing how often that happens? But isn't it a gift of grace that God allows us to mature and he puts people into our lives that help us to mature, that help us to grow and become more of who he's created us to be. And we're thankful for that. In fact, I'm surrounded by many today in my family who helped me grow up and mature into the person that God called us to be. Because we don't start out even as followers of Jesus. Fully devoted. We don't start out knowing everything that we need to know, and being experts in all the areas that we need to grow in. We have to grow up and we have to mature.

In fact, that's what this series is going to be about. We're going to look at this person, this guy named Joseph and and kind of follow him around. As Joseph had some challenges, he had some blessings in his life. He had a dream, a dream or two that God had given to him, and he had to find a way to relate to that dream. He had to find a way to connect to it in such a way that it went just beyond his own dream and satisfaction and fulfillment. But how? It might be a blessing or or of help to others. His story, to me is very encouraging because it reminds me that God's always working, even when things don't look like they're working out the way they're supposed to be. Even when my life doesn't go the way that I hoped, when those blessings or those gifts that I get don't seem to be working out in the way that that I thought they were going to be. A couple things as we get started, first thing you may notice by looking at the title there, it's it's let them cook. Now, some of you may be familiar with that phrase. It's, it's a Gen Z phrase. It's, it's a newer term, uh, and it simply meant just somebody who's doing something that they're good at, allowing somebody to keep doing something that they're good at. Some of you may have heard it as popularized by an NFL player named Russ Wilson.

And they'd say, Let Russ Cook write, let him do his thing, get out of his way. Stay out of his way. Let him do it right. This idea of of letting someone cook is, is allowing them to kind of them be them. But in the midst of that, having to grow, having to learn how to make decisions based on circumstances that are happening all around us. As we think about Joseph, I want us to be thinking about how is he cooking? And how does God let him cook? There are some moments in his life when that cooking experience is is not going to be all sunshine and rainbows. In fact, there are times in his life where he's going to be cooking and it looks like he's getting grilled. He's the one taking all the heat. But as the series unfolds, I want us to watch and notice how God gives him a dream. But God's not going to superimpose his own, uh, ideas about how that's going to happen. Rather, he gives he gives Joseph some freedom to make some decisions, to have an influence on how this dream is going to play itself out in his life. And so this summer, we're going to let Joseph cook a little bit, and we're going to watch the process as it unfolds. God blesses Joseph, and Joseph experiences blessings in the tangible way. One of the challenges that he faces is how is he going to relate to that? How is he going to relate those blessings to other people around him? You see, one of our core beliefs here at Broadway is the most important thing God gets out of your life is not the stuff you do.

It's the person that you become. What kind of person are you becoming? So we're going to watch Joseph Cook a little bit this summer. And we're going to follow him as he's trying to become who God created him to be. And I hope along the way that we'll have a chance to to learn some things about ourself, to each have our own chance to cook a little bit, if you will. You see, we first meet Joseph here in Genesis 37. He's already 17 years old, a teenager, right? His family life is incredibly complicated. If you don't know his story, I invite you to go back and reread Genesis 30 and 31 and on up into 37 to kind of learn some of the background, right? His his dad has had kids with four different women. Right? Two of those women were his wives. Two of those women were his wife's helpers, kind of slaves. It's complicated. Right. He's one of 11 and they're all in the same house, and they're all trying to figure things out. And Joseph is the youngest. Now, if he were alive today, Joseph, at this point in his life, he'd be a Gen Z.

He'd be a zoomer, as they're known. Which brings us to the second thing I want to point out about this series. You may have noticed the title that I gave our sermon today. It's called drip. All right. Another term from youth culture, and it simply means trendy or fashionable. Kind of a cool sense of style. Uh, swag is another word you may have heard, but if someone looks good, they look really good. In fact, if you go back, it's like, yo, preach, your outfit is dripping, bro. I heard that on the way in this morning from a couple of y'all, right? Now, a word of warning. Uh, do not use these terms if you're not of a certain age. Okay, sparks. I'm looking at you, buddy. Now, some of you may be wondering, am I? Am I young enough to be using these terms? Okay, if you're asking that question, you're not right. If you don't already know, then you don't know. So don't use it. All right. But each week we're going to come to a zoomer term, right? As we follow Joseph through this stage of his life, we're going to come back to a different term that's used in our culture to try to understand a little bit more about the stage that Joseph's going through, maybe learn a little bit more about the Zoomers that you're living around and are interacting with. In fact, I don't know if you saw this, but they have a Gen Z Bible.

Did you know this? They've come out with a Gen Z Bible. It's actually only the New Testament right now. So I did a little work this week, a little translation work, got in touch with my buddy ChatGPT, and we translated Genesis 37 one through 11 back into Gen Z terms. Now, if you're one of my Gen Zers, I want you to listen and tell me if this rings true. So Jacob was kicking it in the land of Canaan, where his pops was from. He had a son named Joseph, who was 17. He worked out in the fields with his bro chasing that cheddar. Only things started going sideways after he threw some shade their way to his pops. Now Jacob's love for Joseph was off the charts. Yo! He even hooked him up with this bougie coach. Straight up baller status dude was dripping, but yo, his brothers weren't feeling it. They were jelly hating on Joseph hard. One time Joseph had this trippy dream and he had to share it. He was like, listen up fam, low key. We were all out in the fields working those sheaves when suddenly no flex. My sheaf stood tall while y'all's all bowed down to mine. Crazy, right? His bros were like, bro, you're captain. You really think you're going to be CEO while we all bend the knee? Sus? Then Joseph had another wild dream and he told his bros all about it. He was like, check it.

I had another dream. The sun, the moon, the 11 stars were all bowing down to me for real. His dad was like, son, you're tripping. Are you saying that me, your mom and all your sibs are going to be bowing down to you? That's next level. His bros were salty at his cringe behavior. They knew Joseph was thirsty, but Joseph didn't sweat it. He kept on dreaming and spilling the tea. All right. Now, I had this verified by a gen-zer who lives with me. Okay? And she said, dad, the translation work is pretty good. But you doing this is sus. And she's right. Right. So I won't do that again. But I hope you hear in the lingo of the day, right? This story translates and we've all been there. We've all done that. Turns out, you know a couple things here I want us to see this morning. First, Joseph grew up with some chaos in his family. Now I know some of us we can identify with that, can't we? There was some stuff going on and he was having to navigate and figure things out all in the midst of that. And Genesis points us out pretty early. 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 an ornate robe for him. Turns out Jacob was up to some of his old tricks. Now, some of your translations may say Israel.

Back in Genesis 35, Jacob's name is changed to Israel, but here in 37 it's still Jacob. And I'm going to refer to him as Jacob. But if you see Israel, that's who we're talking about. Jacob had his old tricks going still. He had a favorite wife. Now he's got a favorite son. And not only that, his the siblings knew, right? They understood it. And he makes this ornate robe and he gives them this bougie robe and they all see it and they're like, dude, Jay, you you're dripping. What's up? Where'd you get that? Oh, pops gave it to me. What? What? Joseph gets a special coat. Now, as you can imagine, this didn't go over well with his siblings. So let me just ask you, how many of you have a sibling? Just a handful of us, right? How many of you have ever felt like your sibling got special treatment that you didn't get? All right, now, with the same hands. Hold up. How many of you are older siblings? Yeah. Look at how many hands right. We're like mhm. That's kind of an older sibling thing. I have a little brother. He's here today. There were times in our relationship where I felt like he was getting a better deal than I got. That's not fair. What's up with that. That's not cool. We're told in verse four, when Joseph's brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, and they saw it.

We don't know how they saw it. We just know they saw it. And they hated him, and they could not speak a kind word to him. Now, the English translations don't quite catch this, but the word there is the Hebrew word shalom, which means peace. They hated him and they could not speak. Shalom. There was no shalom in their family. They were not able to be at peace because they knew things weren't right. And we see it and we feel it. There was chaos in Joseph's family. I'm so thankful to a buddy of mine, Jared Robinson, who preached this series a couple of years ago, and it's been chasing me. It's been haunting me as I've been thinking about this reality, this story of Joseph, right where there was no peace in his family. In fact, a little bit later on in verse 14, Jacob's going to send Joseph out to check on his brothers again. He's going to say, go find them and speak some shalom to them, and then come back and tell me. Now, I don't know if that was Jacob's hope, that maybe getting him out of the house and there in a different place and he's in a different place, and maybe somehow the environment or things will kind of set up differently that that they'll be able to to find a little bit of shalom in between them. But if you read the rest of 37 and we'll jump deeper into that part of the text next week, you'll see it does not go well, for there's no shalom in his life.

Again before we lay too much of this at Joseph's feet, loving and having a favorite, giving special gifts that he doesn't give to everybody. Joseph had a part to play in all this too. Only on. He's out shepherding with his brothers. Right. We learn that in verse two. And he didn't like the way they're handling his business, their business. And we don't know why. We're not told why. All we're told is he gives his dad a bad report. That if you've ever tattled on your sibling, you know a little bit about what Joseph's dealing with. But not only that, Jacob just favors him, right? We're told. Jacob loved him more and the whole family knew it and the siblings knew it. And the youngest brother, he knew it too. He understood it. In fact, he wore it like a robe as he was wearing his robe. But not only that, we learned that. That God gives Joseph a couple dreams. Joseph has some dreams, and I think they're legitimately from God. We don't know that they're from God. Like, the text doesn't tell us that. The writer doesn't say, and then God gave him this dream. That's not what we're told. We're just told he has these dreams. And I think they're from God, because we're going to find out a little later in his story.

They come true. They just don't come true in the way that he thinks they're going to come true. But Joseph had a part to play in all this. I wonder sometimes if it wasn't just so much the robe as how he wore it. If it wasn't what he said, it was how he said it. Have you ever had that experience? You got an argument with somebody not because of what they said it was how they said it. Right. Joseph had a part in, like he was relating to some of the events and things that were happening in his life in a particular way. And it's obvious that he doesn't really care about how others relate to it. He's only relating it to it in his own way, and he has these two dreams that basically tell the same story that his brothers and his mother and his father are all going to end up bowing down to him. But the only way that he can interpret these dreams is by relating to them, thinking God's treating him in that special favor way, the the way that Jacob's treating him right. So he sees it as I'm special. I'm the one. The rest of you bozos are going to be bowed down to me. Right. That's how Joseph interprets his dream is for dominating, not reconciling. Remember, there's no peace in his family, and it's in large part due to Joseph and the way that he acts and reacts, what he talks about and what he doesn't.

I can't help but wonder if Genesis 37 is kind of poking us. And prodding us to wrestle with some of the same some of these same things, right? God's given us a dream. You see, Joseph's dreams are about these, this promise of a good future that God has for him. And how it's going to take shape in the future. But God doesn't control how Joseph interprets it, and he doesn't control him in such a way that that there's only one pathway for it to go. And he gives Joseph the ability to make some decisions, to behave in some ways that are going to affect how this dream comes true in his life. And God doesn't do all that for him. And we don't know all the stories. Right? We're running into Joseph now when he's 17 and we don't know. But all we what we do know is he hasn't been shaped in such a way that would allow him to interpret this dream as anything other than its more special treatment. You see, now God's saying it. Dad's been saying it the whole time, and you guys are like, nah, nah. Well, now God's got a dream for me, baby, and y'all are bowing down. What's up with that? That's Joseph's interpretation. It's as if he thinks, I can't wait to be in a position where I finally get to force you to do what I want you to do.

Not only am I in power, not only am I the one standing in front of everybody, but I get to be in charge. Right. And here's the statement that Joe, that my friend Jared said, that just has been hounding me. He says, I don't think Joseph is the last child of God to make that kind of mistake when it comes to thinking about the future. You see, all through Scripture, we have these beautiful descriptions of God's good future that he has in store for his people. We read over time again and again, promise after promise of of God doing this amazing thing. It's going to happen. There is this dream and he's given us all a part to play. But is our interpretation of that? Oh, we finally get to be in charge. I finally get to be the one that forces you to do what I think you should have been doing all along, and you just were so stupid or just hard hearted, you wouldn't do it. All right, so it can't be a surprise then, like Joseph finds out just a few verses later that the response of all the people around him is to beat him up, try to kill him, and throw him into a pit. Right? Church. So is it any different for us? And if our interpretation of God's good future is that we get to be in charge and we get to tell everybody what to do, that the response to those who hear that is to try to take away what little power we have and to get rid of us.

And then we go, I can't. Can you believe this? We're God's people. How could they treat us like this? Well, gee, I wonder. Let's see. Joseph, what do you think about that? What might Joseph have to say? Right. Jesus talked about this. You may remember in Luke's gospel, Jesus told his disciples who might find themselves in position of power someday. He says, whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. Now, have you seen anybody who's been dishonest with the little get into power and be dishonest with much? Yeah. Jesus also said the kings and the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors, but not so with you. Rather, the greatest among you must become like the youngest and the leader. Like the one who serves. You see, church, all of us, in one way or another. All of us have social influence and power. We all have influence. The question is, what will you do with yours? Will it be just for your own benefit or for the benefit of people who think like you? Is that what it's all about? You see, God has this dream, right? And Jesus explains this incredible dream of of there is the kingdom coming, and it's breaking through all the time.

And it's not fully here yet, but it's going to be. And I need you to do a job. So I'm going to give you some influence. I'm going to give you an opportunity to use that influence, and I'm not going to force you. But do you have a chance to make a difference? You can use your social influence, your power, your wealth, or whatever gift he gives to say, will you play the role in the dream that I'm giving? Will you think about others? You see, Joseph's dreams are going to come true, just not in the way that he's he's thinking. And when they do come true. Thank you, Lord, that Joseph's a very different person. He's a very different person by the time he gets to that dream fulfillment. He's going to relate to his power and his authority very differently than he would have as a 17 year old, wearing a coat of many colors. You see, Church God has given each one of us a dream, and he's given us a role to play. The question is, how will we? How will we use our influence? Are we going to spend time trying to convince other people how special we are? And that's what Joseph did. Are we going to spend time telling people why we're better than them? But again, we hear echoes of that in Joseph's stories. And again, by the end of Genesis 37, we're going to find that doesn't get him very far.

It gets him in a hole in the ground and in a jail cell. Instead will we use our dream, our role, our power, our authority, our influence? Will we use it to help others who can't quite dream the dream yet? And not hold that against them. Right. They can't quite see what we see. And our response is not to say, well, fine, then get out of here. It's to say, well, let me just keep showing you. Let me just keep loving you. Let me just keep forgiving. Let me just keep reconciling. Let me keep demonstrating to you that money is not the most important thing. So I'm not going to make decisions based on that. And let me just keep living in such a way and relating and and reconciling in such a way that you'll see that dream. You see, God wants us in places of power, right? He wants us to be county judge, not because we can say, well, there's a Christian as a county judge also, because we believe he's going to be the best one to serve in that role because he's thinking about how does this help people? How does this help the kingdom break through? How do more people find their place, their home? Find a home to live in? Find a dream to be a part of? Right. That's why we want that. Sabercats not going to force you into that role.

He's going to allow you to make decisions and to grow, to be a part of that. Trusting that you're going to be shaped over your life in such a way that as this dream continues to come true, that you'll be like Joseph, a different person, and you'll begin to relate to those dreams and relate those dreams to other people. Not as wow, look how great I am, but instead wow, look how great God is. You see, Joseph's dreams come true. Not because of Joseph, but because of God. And God worked in and through Joseph. See, the culture is going to tell us that your drip is all this stuff. That's what's on the outside. We know a different story, right? It's what's in here. It's the kind of person that we're becoming. Oh, God. May this be true for us this summer as we listen and follow along, Joseph as he cooks, and God, you're going to be doing a little cooking in his life. He's going to be doing a little cooking. He's going to struggle and wrestle with some really unfair things that happen to him, and he's going to wrestle with some things that are results of decisions that he's made, consequences. And God in the midst of it all, the temptation is to think you've just left. You're far away. But God, you are right there. You're continuing to work, partnering with us, trusting and believing that your kingdom is so good.

It's so good that when people encounter it, they sell everything. They walk away from a life of sin and brokenness. Like God, they chase after you because it's so valuable, O God. May we be those kind of Christians this week that we not pin our hopes on who gets elected, but trusting in believing that we're going to be the kind of community, the kind of people who allow the kingdom to break through in our world just a little bit more every day. And God will start with ourselves. Start with us. Yeah. May we continue to be. May we be even more so. Just a people known for radical love and radical acceptance and radical grace and radical forgiveness. Not because we're great God, but because you are that you have this incredible dream that one day every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth of every tribe and nation and tongue, and they'll confess that Jesus is Lord. We see that good future and we will live in harmony with you and one another forever. But God, that dream that we don't have to wait until we die. That we can be kingdom bringers even now. So, God, would you let us cook this summer? And would you be with us? Be present with us. God help our drip to be more than just the outward external stuff. It may be an inner reality that gets lived out every day. Oh God, may it be so. In Jesus name, Amen, Amen.