Transcript
Well, it's my privilege this weekend to be opening the scriptures for us. So why don't you go ahead and go to Genesis chapter 45. We are deep into the drama. We have some things that are coming together for us in the story of Joseph, and the text that we have is kind of a consummation. It is a bunch of things are coming together and there is going to be a level of intimacy and emotional vulnerability, even just release. There is tension that has been building all throughout the story as we've gone along.
And we really reach a crescendo. I'm so thankful as it worked out that we had Matt teaching last week because that really has been a text that God's used in his life for years. I've heard him teach on it three times, and it's been powerful for me every time.
So if you missed what was going on with Judah last week, I want you to go back and listen to that because that is a driving force in the narrative that brings us to where we are, and there's some things that apart from Judah won't make sense. So you have to go back and get that.
But this is a beautiful text, and so as a result of that, I really just want to read the whole thing for us. We don't always do that. It takes time, and I am trusting that you're reading before you come. And if you aren't doing that, I'm asking you, even if you don't do the whole sermon prep plan, I'm asking you to read the text before we come.
But I want to read it because I want us to get in that emotional space. So here we go. Verse one. "Now after Judah did what Judah had done, Joseph could stand it no longer. There were many people in the room, and he said to his attendants, 'Out, all of you.' So he was alone with his brothers. And when he told them who he was-- And then he told them who he was. And then he broke down and wept. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians could hear him, and word of it quickly spread to Pharaoh's house."
And understand how these buildings are built. These buildings are built with stone. These are thick walls. So whatever's happening with Joseph in the moment, it's messy. It's undignified. It's ugly cry.
And he gets everybody out. He can't take it because he knows it's not appropriate. It would be improper. It would be, in a sense, beneath his standing with these people who all rely upon him for them to see him that way.
But even stone walls and heavy wooden doors could not insulate them from his joy. Verse three. "'I am Joseph,' he said to his brothers. 'Is my father still alive?' But his brothers were speechless. They were stunned to realize that Joseph was standing there in front of them," and they're paralyzed.
"'Please come closer,' he said to them. So they came closer. And he said it again, 'I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into slavery in Egypt. But don't be upset, and don't be angry with yourselves for selling me to this place. It was God who sent me here ahead of you to preserve your lives. This famine that has ravaged the land for two years will last five more years, and there will be neither plowing nor harvesting. God has sent me ahead of you to keep you and your families alive and to preserve many survivors. So it was God who sent me here and not you. He is the one who made me an advisor to Pharaoh,'" or as Matt called him, vice president, "'the manager of his entire palace and the governor of all of Egypt. Now hurry back to my father and tell him, "This is what your son Joseph says: God has made me master over all the land of Egypt, so come down to me immediately.
You can live in the region of Goshen, where you can be near me with all your children and grandchildren, your flocks and herds and everything you own. I will take care of you there, for there will still be five years of famine ahead of us. Otherwise, you and your household and all your animals will starve."'" "Then Joseph added, 'Look, you can see for yourselves, and so can my brother Benjamin, that I really am Joseph. Go tell my father of my honored position here in Egypt. Describe for him everything you've seen. Then bring my father here quickly.' Weeping with joy, he embraced Benjamin, and Benjamin did the same. And Joseph kissed each of his brothers and wept over them. And after that, they all began talking freely with him.
The news soon reached Pharaoh's palace: 'Joseph's brothers have arrived.' Pharaoh and all his officials were delighted to hear this. Pharaoh said to Joseph, 'Tell your brothers this is what you must do. Load up your pack animals, hurry back to the land of Canaan, and then get your father and all your families and return here to me. I will give you the very best land in Egypt, and you will eat from the best that the land produces.' Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, 'Tell your brothers, take wagons from the land of Egypt to carry your little children and your wives, and bring your father here. Don't worry about your personal belongings, for the best of all of the land of Egypt is yours.'"
He says, "You don't have anything as good as what we have. Just leave it. Come on. I'll give you everything you need and then some." "So the sons of Jacob did as they were told. Joseph provided them with wagons as Pharaoh had commanded, and he gave them supplies for the journey, and he gave each of them new clothes. But to Benjamin he gave five changes of clothes and 300 pieces of silver."
Favoritism continues. "He also sent his father 10 male donkeys loaded with the finest products of Egypt and 10 female donkeys loaded with grain and bread and other supplies he would need on his journey." Remember, it's months probably to get back and forth or a month and a half, two months. It takes a while. "So Joseph sent his brothers off, and as they left, he called after them." This is a great image.
So they're headed off into the desert and he's standing, he's like, "Now, don't quarrel about all this along the way." I think it's awesome. It's like your mom when she turns you loose. I remember my parents let me take my brother and sister to Charleston one time when I was 15 years old before we had cell phones. You could drive back then. And I've been driving since well before I had a license.
So we lived out in the country. So I remember final instructions for along the way. And Joseph knows all this has been disruptive, so he's like, "Hey, don't fight along the way." "And they left Egypt and returned to their father, Jacob, in the land of Canaan. 'Joseph is still alive,' they told him. 'And he's the governor of all the land of Egypt.' Jacob was stunned at the news. He couldn't believe it. When they repeated to Jacob everything Joseph had told them, and when he saw the wagons Joseph had sent to carry him, their father's spirits revived. And then Jacob exclaimed, 'It must be true.
My son Joseph is alive, and I must go see him before I die.'" This is a crazy story, and that's why I wanted to read the whole thing. I want you to feel the pathos of the story.
And there are really two sermons here. I'm only going to preach one, but I'm going to highlight the other, and I'm going to give you three big ideas that would come out of sermon number one. And here's what I want you to understand, is that in our lives, God is playing the long game. We have said this before. Whatever God is doing takes time. This is decades of time, and it often seems glacial.
And that does not mean that God has forgotten. That does not mean there is not purpose. Jacob had forgotten all of that, but God had promised to him, God had promised Abraham on pain of his own death. He said, "I'll die before I won't keep my promise to you, that I'm going to make a great nation of you."
Jacob had lost sight of that promise. And it's understandable because it takes a long time, and we do the same thing. Here's the second thing, is that God gives you enough to trust him, but not enough to trust yourself. And man, this is a kindness And the problem that we have when we have to endure is not that God has not given us enough. The problem is we want God to give us enough that we don't have to trust him. This is the way it is anytime you're dealing with your own brokenness.
In my early Christian life, there were parts of my life, simple impulses, and that came out of some deep brokenness that I could not manage and I could not control. And what I had to come to terms with eventually is that I was wanting God to do something so I didn't have to trust him and obey him. I didn't want to feel barren and empty. I wanted to keep the comfort of sin, and I didn't want to have to trust him in and through the barrenness that giving up my sin created for me.
Here's what I'm going to tell you. In the story, God gives them enough. Jacob had enough to trust him, to trust God, but he did not have enough to trust himself and just be at peace apart from trusting the promise of God.
And that's a big idea. You could preach a whole sermon on it. And then here's the third big idea, is that your joy in this world will absolutely be tied, your joy and let's say stability in this world, will absolutely be tied to your ability to trust that God is good, that he has good plans for you. That whatever's happening to you in this moment that doesn't feel good, he actually is good, and he has good plans for you. That there's a day coming for you like the day that Jacob had.
Now, it may not be like Jacob's, but there is a day that is coming for you where it's all going to make sense to you. It may not be until you have the beatific vision and where you're resurrected. I don't know what God has for you to walk. I don't know what your path is. I don't know what my path is.
But what we see, this big theme here, is that your ability to have joy is absolutely tied to your ability to trust God, and you need to be cultivating faith, and I need to be cultivating faith, and all of that. And so there's work that we can be doing, and we see that in this story because this story is written to us to be a paradigm for us and our story and how we have to live in this life. Now, if everything's going great for you and you can't relate to any of these characters in the story, I just want you to keep breathing, okay?
That's all you have to do. You just keep breathing because this is the human experience, disappointment, betrayal, forgiveness, reconciliation, learning to trust others and trust God in spite of brokenness and partial restorations, and sometimes you not getting back what you wanted, but having to trust God that he has something else for you. That is the human story.
That is everybody's story. That's why today, thousands of years after these events, we are still reading them and finding meaning in them.
But told you there are two sermons. That's the first. Now, here's sermon number two. In sermon number two, we see some things that are real clear, and it's amazing.
So you heard me read it, so I'm not going to read it all again. And let me just say a word about vulnerability before we get to verse five.
In order for these things to work for you, it's going to necessitate vulnerability. In order for Joseph to have the level of reconciliation he has with his brothers, it's going to require some vulnerability for him that is uncomfortable and that isn't even appropriate for everybody to see.
It's going to cost you in dignity. And this is the thing, when Jesus died for us, if you really want to live in the kind of relationships that involve forgiveness, reconciliation, growing trust, and possible restoration. If you want to have those kind of relationships in your life, this is what I can tell you is there's going to necessarily involve vulnerability, which means you can't self-protect. It means you have to throw caution to the wind at times. You have to make yourself vulnerable where other people can not appear to be vulnerable but be genuinely vulnerable.
You can't protect your dignity, and there's always a risk of rejection. And so at the very beginning of this story, Joseph gets everybody out of the room, and then he has to reveal himself to his brothers, and he doesn't know how they're going to respond.
But then we get to this amazing thing. So he reveals himself, and they're so overwhelmed, and I think probably we don't know this, but I think the way the story reads, it's shock and awe, but there's probably also because we're going to see later on, they're still fearful of him. Is that somebody that you did the most shameful thing you've ever done, you just find out they have the power of life and death, not just over you, but of everybody in the most powerful nation that you can imagine.
That's a crazy thought. It's just completely stunning for them. And so they can't even really grasp it and get their brain wrapped around it, and then as all that starts to register in their mind, they're trying to catch up.
Joseph says this thing that I think is one of the more amazing things that I've ever thought about being done. He says, "But don't be upset." And look at this. "Don't." Let's not be angry with yourselves.
In this moment, Joseph has so released his anger towards them that he is able to see them for who they are and what it must be like for them. Man, is that not amazing?
He is so not emotionally engaged around his desire to have them acknowledge how wrong what they did to him was that he doesn't need them to do anything for him. He's not waiting on them to say, "Oh my goodness, man, we're so sorry. We're so sorry."
He doesn't need that. He's not thirsting after that like he's thirsting after a cold drink of water. Now, I am sure that there was a long time. We're way down the road from the original offense.
But what we see is that over the years, what he's been doing is he has been looking to God with what was done wrong to him. He's been doing some work in his own soul.
And he actually is not thinking about them and what they've done to him, and so it frees him up to do good to them in this moment. He's already had his reckoning with God, and so now when they have their moment of reckoning, he's not delighting in their moment of reckoning. He is trying to ease them into the reality that they live in now. How amazing is that? And he's a man just like we are.
Don't be angry with yourselves, but look at what he says. For what? For selling me. Just think about that sentence. You sold me. You treated me like property.
You did that. But there's no ire in this. There's not bitterness in this. He's saying the truth out loud to them that they can't say. He's not even waiting on them to confess. You ever been in an argument with somebody and you've teed them up and you're just waiting on them to own what they did to you?
Good gosh, I've done this to my wife so many times. I just got convicted while I'm standing here. I'm sorry, babe. If this is challenging for you, trust me, I've been living with it.
All right? Where you need to hear that. Now, there's a place for that, but forgiveness is not the place for that. You don't forgive someone because they get it. He's already forgiven them thoroughly before they get it. They ain't gotten it yet.
They're still processing what's happened. How is it that he's able to do that? Now let's look at it. I've hinted at it, but let's make it clear.
He says, "You sold me to this place, but who really did it? It was God." Now, this is a fried noodle right here. This is a complicated idea.
You say, "Well, I mean, so we're saying that God does all the evil things that happen in the world?" Now, again, it's complicated. This is what I'm going to say to you. If you're expecting me to make this sentence make sense to you on your terms, you got to let that go.
You're just going to have to let it go because you worship a God that is greater than your ability to think. Praise Him.
Who wants to worship a God they can understand? I can't understand good literature sometimes. I just finished listening to a seven-hour poem. You think, who listens to seven-hour poems? This guy. I listened to a seven-hour poem.
Now, I did listen to it when I was having a hard time going to sleep, but I still listened to it. All right? And it's a retelling of the Arthurian legend by a Christian theologian who's also an Episcopal priest.
And I would listen to a section of it and it was so rich. It was clear, but it was so rich that I'd be like, "Yeah, I think I blinked. I missed some of it, so I'd have to go back and listen to it again." That's who I am.
I can't understand a poem that an English dude wrote. I got to listen to it over and over again. And if I listen to the whole thing again, I'll get something else out of it later.
I'm not going to explain the God who created that English poet to you. I'm not going to explain him to you in a way that you would understand. This is not just about God's sovereignty and evil in the world and whether God's responsible for it or not responsible and how he uses it. You're going to have to let that go. If you don't want to let that go, go find a god that you can understand.
But how's a god you can understand going to help you? Okay? So just think about that. Okay? So this is what Joseph said. Joseph says, "God was doing something. I'm not even really thinking about you."
Now, this is what frees him to forgive. It's the thing that frees him to release his brothers. Look at how he says it in verse seven.
In verse seven, he says, again, who's agent? God is the agent. He's the one who's acting. "God has sent me ahead of you." This is even crazier. He says, "When you sold me into slavery to get rid of me and make some money off of me, you weren't really doing that. You thought you were getting rid of me because you thought I was arrogant and you didn't want my favoritism. You thought I was arrogant and our dad was favorite, and you thought your life would be better without me. This is what was actually happening. What was actually happening is God was sending me ahead of you."
Why? In order to keep you and your families alive. He's like, "You were talking about killing me, but the reason you didn't kill me is because you wanted to profit from my sale. The only thing that kept you from killing me was the fact that you wanted a little money out of it. That's it. It's even worse than if you had killed me."
He says, "But when you did that, that really wasn't about you. That was about God saving you. God is saving you through the worst thing you ever did." Think about that.
Now, how's that for a gospel? Is it on your worst day, the worst thing you ever did, God was actually working in and through your free evil choices to actually create a future for you.
Now you think, I mean, how does that even make any sense? This is why I'm telling you, the text is inviting us to lift our eyes from the things that tyrannize us right in front of us and to realize there is an exalted throne that is bigger than all of that, that has good purposes to bless. You think, well, how do you reconcile all this with the gospel and God's love? Let me tell you what Peter said in the first sermon he preached after Pentecost when he went from being a betrayer and a man who was dominated by his fear and what other people thought of him, and he was full of the Holy Spirit, and fire came upon him, and he got up and preached.
Let me tell you what he said about Jesus. He said, "This man whom you crucified through the hands." He says, "You used the Romans to kill Him," and then he says, "According to the predetermined plan of God."
When he preaches the gospel to people on Pentecost and 5,000 people come into the church, and we're still in that day where the Spirit is working, we are in an ongoing, continuous revival. That's the period of history that we are-- And I know it doesn't look like it to you, but I'm telling you, that's where we are. We're still in that moment.
And what he says is, "This Jesus, whom you crucified at the hands of sinful men, you did it according to the predetermined plan of God." God was working in the crucifixion of Jesus. So the greatest evil that was ever committed in all of human history was also simultaneously the greatest act of love in all of human history.
Now, when C.S. Lewis writes "The Chronicles of Narnia," he talks about deeper magic, and this is what he's talking about. He's talking about there is a way that God works and a way that God loves that you cannot understand on this earthly plane, and evil can't overcome it. It's undefeated and undefeatable, always, continuously.
And Joseph had laid hold of that idea. And I know I am talking to people who have experienced all types of injustice, and you've been sinned against, and I've been sinned against, too. And I also know that I am talking to people who have committed what other people think of as atrocities. You've had people say those kind of things to you. I am talking to both the abused and to the abuser, and this is what I'm saying, is that you are not the most-- If you're ever going to forgive anybody and you're ever going to receive forgiveness, you're going to have to remember that the worst thing that's ever been done to you, that God is sovereignly working in and through that to bless you.
If He did that with His Son, He is absolutely doing that with you. Secondly, you're going to have to understand is that in your worst moment, the thing that you did that you are most ashamed of, God was sovereignly working mysteriously in some way. If you belong to Him and you have come to Him for the forgiveness of your sins, He is working to accomplish the good of you and the good of others and His greatest glory.
That's just the way it is. The Bible doesn't explain it. The Bible declares it. And this is the thing. If you can't get to a place where you own that, you're not going to be free to forgive, not in the way that we see in this story.
Because your forgiveness is going to be predicated on this earthly horizontal plane and you feeling like you got from somebody what you wanted from them. If you want to be able to be released so that you can do good to your enemies, this is the only way to get there.
This is how Jesus got there. Jesus models it when He's hanging on the cross and He says, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing." He identifies with His offenders while they are offending Him And he cries out for mercy because he understood that in their betrayal, God was sovereignly accomplishing the salvation of all who would ever put their trust in Jesus and his sacrifice.
And so he's able, in that moment, to see what God is doing and have empathy for those who are offending him. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's true.
Joseph sees himself as God's servant. He doesn't see his life as his own. He sees himself as a bit player in God's story of salvation.
And Joseph doesn't regard his brothers as villains who need to be punished, but as the people of God, as the people that God has promised to save and make a means of salvation for the entire world. He sees in his forgiveness and provision for them that "I am saving them. I'm being God's instrument of salvation, and it couldn't happen any other way." And he sees that through them, God is going to save the world. "This was necessary, and I'm good with it because it isn't my story, it's God's story, and I'm happy to be in God's story."
And that's the kind of freedom that not many people get to have. That's why Jesus says the way is narrow and there are few that find it.
This is the kind of thing Jesus was talking about when he said that. This is the deeper magic that C.S. Lewis talked about that confounds the wisdom of this world. Because you can go to therapist after therapist, and they'll tell you that you can't do this, unless they're real believers.
They'll tell you what you need to have in order to move on and limp through life. And what the gospel holds out to you is the possibility that you can actually be free to release people and do good to your enemies, whether they've repented or not. That's an amazing idea. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just saying it's true.
So forgiveness is the first thing we see. The second thing that we see is reconciliation. And in verse 15, we see this vision where Joseph kisses his brothers, he weeps over them, and after that, they begin to talk freely with him.
Now, we don't get their full confession, but they don't dispute what he's saying. They don't quibble over the details. They don't justify and say, "Man, you don't understand how arrogant you were and all these wounds our dad put on us because he made you the favorite, and what that did to us and all the trauma we had through all of that. And I know we did some things that were wrong, but if you had been treated that way, you would understand it better." They don't say that.
They agree to some degree on what truth is, and they are able to restore a measure of fellowship. And this is the thing that I really want us to think about as we go forward.
And this is just a pastoral issue for us as a church. And so I want to encourage you to think about this. And some of you are probably going to have to go talk to your pastors or your ministers on our staff, the men and women that have embraced the call to serve you.
All right? So you're going to have to have some conversations with some people in light of what I'm saying about trying to figure out what you have to do. But this is the thing. Joseph has released them.
He's forgiven them out of the gate. He did it before he'd ever met them. He's been doing good to them before this moment, but now he's waited until he sees now they've changed, and he makes himself vulnerable after he sees there's been some repentance. And that's what I would say is Joseph waits to reveal who he is until he sees not only did they not cut Benjamin off to save themselves, but Judah, the one who hatched the plan to sell him, is a new man. And Judah says, "No, you let him go free, but you keep me. I'll be his slave."
That's the thing that turns the corner. And now he knows that reconciliation has taken place. He knows these people, and he makes himself vulnerable.
These are separate issues. And then he weeps over them. They begin to talk. Immediately, there begins to be some version of a rebuilding of trust with them.
So much so that by the time they're leaving, he's like, "Hey, I know y'all are going to be blaming each other for who did what. I'm just asking you, I need you to not blow this thing up, do anything stupid. Just get back to Dad. Don't quarrel while you're going." There's been a measure of trust that's been restored so that he can speak into them, expecting them to receive it.
But then this is where things get challenging for us. All these things, we're like, "Yeah, the gospel produces all of that." But then this is where it begins to get challenging, is does all this have to be fully restored?
And this is what I'll say to you. Even with them, we're going to see none of this is perfect, and it doesn't get fully restored. They don't go back to living in a bunch of tents together. Joseph stays up in the palace, and they go with their herds to Goshen, which is a little ways away. He can take a trip and he can get to them, but they're not all living together like one big happy family.
He's still who he is now because of what's happened, and they're still who they are now. And we're going to see in chapter 50, it's still a problem for them. They're wondering, "Has he really forgiven us or is he playing a game?"
And you can't undo all of it. There's a measure of all of that that is going to be the case in every relationship because this is the thing. The wages of sin is death. The free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
But if you sow to the flesh, you will from the flesh reap corruption. There's been corruption that has been released into this relational system. It's generational, and it ain't going to be perfect, and we got to trust God with that.
And the thing that I'm concerned about is for us as a people, I see us struggling with this all the time. And part of how I see us struggling with it, and this is something we're going to have to think about a little bit as we go along. This is the part that gets complicated. When I put a question mark around restoration.
Because here is what I'm saying. There are partnerships, one partner embezzles from another. They both go to church together.
The offended party needs to forgive. Jesus says, "You owe me forgiveness. I forgave you. Now you go forgive others." He owes that to Jesus.
If the other party owns what they did, then some reconciliation is possible, which begins the process. Over a period of time of seeing, oh, they really recognize that. They make some restitution. There can be a restoration of trust.
But that partnership, it probably never needs to be restored again. The spouses of those people, the children of those people, the suffering of what happened, the loss that was there, you probably aren't going to restore that partnership. I've watched all this happen pastorally. Same thing with marriages. You saying that some marriages don't be restored, I'm saying some marriages have been broken in such a way that they are no longer marriages. And you could say, "Well, how do you know?"
And I can't answer all your questions about all this. That's why I'm saying you got to go talk to people. But this is what I am saying, is that there are some marriages that even if there is a measure of these things, that marriage doesn't need to be restored. And you say, "Well, which ones?" I can't give you black and white answers. I'm just telling you that this has to be a question mark.
And let me tell you what I think and what I see happening. I don't think. I know this. I know this is happening. We have something that blows up a relationship, and we so desperately want to get back what we had that the first thing we try to do is we try to restore it. And we say, "I can't even entertain the notion that this marriage, this partnership, this friendship, this thing, it has to be the same, otherwise I can't live my life."
And so what we do is we make restoration the absolute goal. It's the first thing, and we rush to do it. And when we do that, we restore something without there having been a process of trust really being rebuilt. And the reason the trust hasn't been rebuilt is because there's never been time for some shared truth to actually be established.
It might need to be restored, but when we restore the structure first And we load all the pressure onto that. We don't get to go through this whole process. And then we have people who are in partnerships, or we have people who are in relationships, we have people in marriages who have restored something structurally, but they still lay in bed and have revenge fantasies.
They don't trust God, that God's got the offense that was done to them. They feel like they have to minimize the offense that was done to them, and they haven't worked through all that and given that to him, and that never works, and so they punish their spouse over and over and over again because they've never really gone through this process in the way that God would have us go through this process. And so I am saying to a certain degree, although this text is not about it, this text is illustrative of it, is there is a process that has to go on.
And sometimes it doesn't need to be restored. And all you have to do is look at churches who are restoring pastors who have committed egregious sins, and they get on such like, "In 12 months, we got to have this guy restored and back in the pulpit to ministry, or the gospel is not true." And the desire to restore all of that and help everybody feel better about it just leads to all kinds of chaos.
And I'm asking you, if I commit those kind of egregious sins that make me not qualified to ministry, don't you restore me in a year, in two years, and certain things, restore me ever because I can't be above reproach again. You say, is that possible? Yes, it is possible for someone to be forgiven, for someone to be reconciled to his brother or sister in Christ, for them to be trusted to a certain degree, and yet for them not to be restored to the place they have before because of the nature of sin and the consequences of sin.
And you say, "Well, how can we know the difference?" Well, this is why I say it takes wisdom, it takes discernment, it takes humility and community, and it takes time. I'm going to go back to the first sermon that I didn't preach, that I just gave you the highlights of. God is playing the long game, and we have to play the long game.
And the thing is, it requires us to live in tension longer than we want to live in tension, and it requires us to trust him with outcomes. That's what it requires of us. And if we're not willing to play the long game because God's playing the long game, then what does that mean? It means that we're not working with God in the process.
It means that we're not a part of what he is doing. We're trying to make him be a part of what we want him to do, and that's not how it works. It's just not how the universe is set up.
And what I would say to you is that he's trustworthy and good, so you can release. And if we both have a shared truth, then we could greet one another in peace again.
And over time, trust can be rebuilt, and then in the process of rebuilding that trust, we can hold things openly, and we can say, "Hey, maybe God is going to restore this." But maybe God's not going to restore it to what it was. I can tell you that's not going to happen. He's going to restore it to something that's new and different.
And that may just mean something completely new and different, or it may mean that he's going to restore it to something that was what it was originally intended to be, and this was just part of the process. But that's in God's hands. That's not in our hands. We can't force that. God has to sovereignly ordain that, and that's why we have to trust him that he's good.
We have trust him that he's good. Let me pray for us. Father in Heaven, we are frail children of dust, and as the hymn writer said, and feeble as frail.
So we are easily rattled, and then once we get rattled, our best efforts to stabilize ourselves, we're just not that capable. We're just not that capable.
And we confess that. And I pray you help us all to see that in the face of the challenges that we face in our lives, the enormity of your call on our lives, that you're asking for everything. I pray you help us to see our weakness, to see our frailty.
But Lord, we are also sinful people, and we're people who've disregarded you at times, and we've delayed to do the good that we knew we should have done, and that's put us behind eight balls. We've got to do a little bit of remedial work. We're behind. We got to catch up.
So we're all over the spectrum, and we're all dealing with not just the sins we've committed, but we're dealing with the sins that have been committed against us, and we need to know that your plan is good, and we need to know that in this moment, your grace is enough for us, that you yourself are enough for us right now. Nothing needs to change right now, that you are enough for us in this moment. And I pray that by your Spirit, you would give us a felt sense of that where we need it.
And for those who condemn themselves and for those who condemn others, Father, I pray that in the cross of Jesus Christ, we would have freedom to be released and to release. And for those of us who are trying to hang on to the outcome, I pray that you would help us to see that you have a better outcome in mind, and we can live in the tension to see where you want all this to go. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
