As you look back on your life so far, it might amaze you to think about the huge changes in direction that your life’s taken, based on seemingly small decisions that you’ve made along the way. In fact, the more you think about it, the more mind-boggling it becomes.

God-Given Opportunities

I wonder if you can point to one seemingly small decision that you’ve made along your life’s journey that had huge consequences, or perhaps, it was a seemingly chance encounter or some small twist or turn that changed the course of your life. When I ask that question, people often answer: ‘Well, no, I can’t really think of anything like that’, and my response is: ‘I don’t think you’re thinking hard enough’.

My father was Romanian. After World War II, when Romania looked like falling into communist hands (which it did), his parents, his sister, and he decided to get out of there, but where to flee? So they decided that they’d apply to each embassy in alphabetical order until one of them accepted them as immigrants. Now, if you have a look at the alphabetical list of countries, it goes something like this: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Antigua, Argentina, Armenia, and then Australia. The earlier ones rejected them. When they arrived at the Australian embassy, they went through the process, and the official there said no too.

Well, they left dejected, but as they were walking out and through the car park, that same official came running out to tell them he’d changed his mind. They’d be accepted, and they could emigrate to Australia and that, that’s why I’m an Australian, and not an Afghani, Albanian, Algerian, Angolan, Armenian or anything else. That one small twist, years before I was born, has defined my whole life.

Decades later, I almost didn’t go to the church service one Sunday morning because I was sick and I was running a high temperature, but I really felt I should go, and that is where I met my wife. She was visiting from interstate and that is the only morning I could have met her in my life. It’s funny the twists and turns that life takes.

I know that if you think back, you’ll be able to see some amazing things that happened along your journey, that have completely changed how your life’s turned out. Some people put it down to co-incidence; others to fate; yet others to destiny. What do you put it down to? Me – I believe, in fact I know that I know, that it’s none of those because the God who created us (you, me) has a plan for our lives. He has a plan for your life; He has a plan for my life, and along the way, He hands us opportunities and He expects us to take them and do something with them. Don’t believe me? Have a listen to how Jesus put it:

As they were listening to Him, He went on to tell a parable because He was near Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately. So He said: ‘A nobleman went to a distant country to get royal power for himself and then to return. He summonsed ten of his slaves and gave them ten pounds, and said to them: ‘Do business with these until I come back.’

But the citizens of his country hated him and sent a delegation after him saying: ‘We don’t want this man to rule us.’

When he returned, having received royal power, he ordered these slaves to whom he’d given the money to be summonsed so that he might find out what they’d gained in trading. The first came forward and said: ‘Lord, your pound has made ten more pounds.’

And he said to him: ‘Well done, good slave. Because you have been trustworthy in a very small thing, take charge of these ten cities.’

Then the second came, saying: ‘Lord, your pound has made five more pounds.’

And he said to him: ‘And you, go rule over those five cities.’

Then the other came, saying: ‘Lord, here’s your pound. I wrapped it up in a piece of cloth because I was afraid of you, because you’re a harsh man. You take what you don’t deposit and you reap what you don’t sow.’

And he said to him: ‘I will judge you by your own words, you wicked slave. You knew, did you, that I was a harsh man, taking what I didn’t deposit, and reaping what I didn’t sow? Why, then, did you not put my money into the bank? Then when I returned, I could have collected it with interest.’ He said to the bystanders: ‘Take the pound from him, and give it to the one who has ten pounds. 

And they said to him: ‘Lord, he has ten pounds!’

’I tell you, to all those who have more will be given, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. But as for these enemies of mine who didn’t want me to be king over them, bring them here and slaughter them in my presence.’ (Luke 19:11-27)

The easiest thing in the world for us to do is to read that like some fairy-tale. Heard this one so many times, some of us, that it’s like water off a duck’s back, but let’s just remember who Jesus was speaking these words to: The everyday man and woman in the street; Jews – a proud nation, God’s nation. These people were farmers and peasants, nobodies when compared to the Roman empire and the power of Caesar; an occupied nation, oppressed, with little or no future.

And so along comes the Son of God, and tells them a powerful story about the fact that God is handing them something. In the parable it’s the pounds – the money, and God expects them to do something with it. What this story is about is God handing His people, even the peasants, even the farmers, even those who live in an oppressed land, a substantial opportunity with the expectation that they’ll grab hold of it, and do something with it.

Now let’s take a moment, you and I, to apply that parable (that powerful story) to our lives, the way the men and the women who were listening to Jesus on that day applied it to theirs. God comes to you; He hands you your pound – your opportunity, with the strongest of expectations that you’ll do something with it. How do you handle that opportunity? Are you too busy to notice? Are you too busy to take hold of it? Is it perhaps an inconvenient opportunity? Do your circumstances maybe tell you that you couldn’t possibly make a difference in this world? What do you do with that opportunity?

See, all too often, God’s opportunities come disguised as calamities, impossibilities, and even sometimes seemingly insignificant decisions, but what we do with God-given opportunities is going to impact the rest of our lives.

Dreams of Greatness

When we’re young, we have dreams for how we want our lives to turn out. Those dreams are all different in one sense, and all pretty much the same in another, in that they include some common elements. Most of us when we’re young dream about being wealthy, famous, and finding love. Some dream about having children. They’re like all the happily ever-after dreams, and in fact, we don’t just dream those dreams when we’re young; we continue our daydreaming pretty much the whole of our lives. It’s when we stop dreaming big dreams that we know we’re plumbing the depths of human existence. Whether we realise it or not, we’re all day dreamers. It’s part of what keeps hope going, and hope, when the going’s not quite what we want it to be, hope is what keeps us going.

We’re chatting this week and over the coming few weeks about not missing out on God’s opportunities. Because He loves us, He has a plan for our lives and time and again, He drops opportunities in along our path: Opportunities that we can choose to pick up and run with, or ignore and bypass, something which many people do. But often God places a dream in our hearts: A dream that He planted there when we were quite young; a dream that somehow He brings to fruition as we grow and mature.

When I was young, daydreaming wasn’t encouraged. ‘Daydreamer’ was a detrimental label. It implied laziness, and yet I dreamed dreams. In my early teenage years, I had an encounter with God, and I dreamed about becoming a minister. I dreamed about telling people about Jesus, but by the time I’d finished high school, I went on to study at university and set out to build a career and make lots of money (which I’d also dreamed about). The idea of me becoming a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ was lost, and yet it came back, and it came to fruition in my late thirties/early forties and here I am, well into my fifties, living out that dream. My point is that the dreams that God lays on our hearts are often appointed to the opportunities that He’s planning on laying before us further down the track.

That’s exactly what happened to young Joseph (the son of Jacob) way, way back in the Old Testament. Let’s have a listen (Genesis 37:1-11):

Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. This is the story of the family of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers. He was a helper to the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives, and Joseph brought back a bad report of them to their father. Now Israel (that’s Jacob’s other name) now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his other brothers, they hated him, and they couldn’t speak peaceably to him.

Once, Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said to them, ‘Listen to this dream that I dreamed. There we were, binding up sheaves in the field. Suddenly, my sheaf rose up and stood upright. Then all your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf.’

His brothers said to him, ‘Are you indeed going to reign over us? Are you indeed going to have dominion over us?’ So they hated him even more because of his dreams and his words.

Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers, saying: ‘Look, I have had another dream. The sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.’

But when he told it to his father and his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, ‘What kind of dream is this that you’ve had? Shall we indeed, I and your mother and your brothers, come and bow down to the ground before you?’ So his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.

Now it seems like a pretty grandiose set of dreams, doesn’t it, a dream of greatness? And when we have those sorts of dreams and tell others about them, the most common response is mocking and rebuking: Exactly what young Joseph ran into. It’s what I ran into when I shared my dream as a teenager too.

When finally at aged thirty-nine or forty I found myself studying to become a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ, I had another dream: To share the love of Jesus with millions of people. Millions. Now that’s outrageous! I didn’t tell anyone about that dream; it was too ridiculous, and here I am with you today, living out that dream.

Dreams don’t have to be big to seem ridiculous. Most people’s dreams actually aren’t huge, but if they were to verbalise those dreams, they’d no doubt draw the same response that Joseph’s dreams drew. I’m not saying that every dream we have in our hearts is from God; sometimes we dream of fame or comfort or wealth; sometimes we dream away the problems that we’re facing in the here and now, visualising what our lives would be like if only that one problem would go away. No, not all our dreams are from God, but some of them are. They’re the ones that inexplicably warm our hearts and bring tears to our eyes, no matter how difficult or how outrageous they might seem.

Joseph’s dream was outrageous, wasn’t it? Being a ruler, where his father and mother and brothers were going to bow down to him? They all put it down to the fact that he was Dad’s favourite, spoiled little brat, and his brothers hated him. And yet, if you know Joseph’s story (something that we’re going to explore over the coming weeks), that’s exactly what happened.

The dreams that God puts in our hearts when we’re young, and sometimes when we’re old too, the ones He puts there (as opposed to the selfish ones that we dream along the way), those dreams from God are an opportunity that many, many people miss because they write them off as just some crazy idea. What a tragedy it would be to miss out on the dreams that God’s put into your heart.

A Fall From Grace 

Before the break, we were talking about the dreams that God places on our hearts. They often seem outrageous at the time, and yet those dreams are what open our eyes to the opportunities that God brings across our path from time to time. Often without that dream in our hearts we miss the opportunities. The God-given dream gives us a new set of eyes to see what God’s up to from His perspective. That’s what it’s there for, that dream: That, and to give us hope.

And when we met young Joseph (the son of Jacob) way, way back there in the Old Testament in the book of Genesis, he was a young man with a dream. A young man who dreamed that one day he’d be a great ruler, and being the naïve young man that he was, he stupidly shared this dream with his brothers, not realising how offensive it would be to them:

‘Listen to this dream I dreamed,’ he said. ‘There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly, my sheaf rose up and stood upright. Then your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf.’

His brothers said to him, ‘Are you going to reign over us? Are you really going to have dominion over us?’ So they hated him even more because of his dreams and his words.

I mean, who wouldn’t be offended, right? People are often offended by the dreams God puts in our hearts. Often, that’s motivated by jealousy. They make fun of us; they tell us that the dreams are impossible … Of course God’s dreams are impossible! If He gave us dreams that were possible, dreams that we could realise in our own strength, we wouldn’t need Him then, would we? In fact, one of the ways we can tell whether a dream comes from God is that it is almost always impossible to achieve in your own strength. That tends to be a pretty solid marker that it’s from God. There are others too and we’re going to talk about those another time.

So, young Joseph has this dream. Hey, come on! It’s a great dream. Right? But then his life takes a terrible twist, a shocking twist, one that neither he nor his beloved father Jacob could ever have predicted. Genesis 37:12-24:

His brothers went to pasture their flocks near Shechem, and (Israel – that’s Jacob his father; Israel’s the name that God gave to Jacob) … Israel said to Joseph, ‘Aren’t all your brothers pasturing the flock out at Shechem? Come on, I’ll send you to them.’

And he answered, ‘Here I am.’

He said to him, ‘Go now, and see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock, and bring word back to me.’ So he sent him from the Valley of Hebron.

Joseph came to Shechem, and a man found him wandering in the fields. The man asked, ‘What are you looking for?’

‘I’m looking for my brothers,’ he said. ‘Tell me, please, where are they pasturing the flock?’

And the man said, ‘Look, they’ve gone away, for I heard them say, ‘Let’s go to Dothan’, so Joseph went after his brothers and found them at Dothan.

They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. They said to one another, ‘Look. Here comes that dreamer! Come on, let’s kill him and throw him into one of the pits, and then we’ll say a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his stupid dreams.’ 

But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying: ‘Let us not take his life.’ Reuben said to them, ‘Shed no blood. Throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but don’t lay a hand on him’, that he might rescue him out of their hands to restore him to his father. 

So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore, and they took him, and they threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it.”

Can you begin, just begin, to imagine that something so terrible would happen to you? That your brothers, your own flesh and blood, would conspire to kill you, and then take that precious robe that your dad had given you, and throw you into a pit? It’s totally beyond imagining, isn’t it? And yet, this is a pattern that anyone who has ever dreamed a dream will recognise. You have a dream in your heart; a God-given dream that really you don’t fully understand. You have no idea whether it’ll ever come to pass and if so, how God could possibly make it happen.

When my life and my hopes and my dreams lay shattered at my feet, I was praying one Saturday afternoon and God gave me a dream to tell millions of people about Him, millions. His presence in that hour or so, as I sat on the top stair in the stairwell in my townhouse, was palpable. It was the craziest dream that anyone could ever have, but I knew it had come from Him. How could that be? Everything around me was in such devastation; I was travelling through such a lot of pain at the time.

As I think of young Joseph lying there in that pit, his life in the balance, not knowing what was going to happen to him, I bet you he was thinking about those dreams that he’d dreamed. His reality must have screamed at him that the dreams were a fake.

Have you ever had that happen to you? Reality decisively, emphatically, tells you that the God-given dream you had, was a lie. The evidence seems irrefutable. There you are in your pit; you look at the wall; you can’t get out, dream over.

Well, I’m here to tell you that if that’s from God, it’s never dream over. To the absolute contrary, dreams and adversity seem to go hand-in-hand in God’s scheme of things. Let me say it again; maybe it didn’t sink in the first time: Dreams and adversity seem to go hand-in-hand in God’s scheme of things. Why? Listen to what the apostle Paul said thousands of years later, out of a not dissimilar situation. 2 Corinthians 1:9:

Indeed we felt that we had received the sentence of death, so that we wouldn’t rely on ourselves, but on God, who raises the dead.

My friend, when you find yourself in that pit with your dreams shattered at your feet, the last thing, the very last thing that God wants you to be thinking is dream over. Here’s the thing about God: What He starts, He finishes. Listen again to the apostle Paul, writing this time out of his Roman dungeon on death row, Philippians 1:6:

‘I am confident of this’ (he said), ‘That the One who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.’

Why are we talking about this stuff? Because God has a plan for your life, and along the way, He places opportunities before you – opportunities that you can accept or reject; opportunities that you can grab onto with both hands or push away, walk around, leave behind. If you let the God-given dream in your heart die, let me tell you, you’re going to miss out on those opportunities because the dream is what helps you identify a situation as an opportunity from God. The opportunity resonates with the dream, and bingo! You know that this is one to grab onto.

When the opportunity came to take a half-unit elective at Bible-college in media studies, I just knew that I had to take it. It spoke so clearly about the dream that God had laid on my heart. If I had let go of my dream because of the adversity I faced, I would never have taken that media half-unit, and I wouldn’t be sitting here chatting with you today. It’s that simple.

Joseph had a lot more bad stuff to travel through, let me tell you. We’re going to see some more of that in a little while, but here’s the thing: The dream never died, and just as well because it’s through Joseph, his brothers and their descendants that God brought Jesus into this world. Dreams and opportunities are vital if we’re going to live out the plan that God has for our lives.

The official statistics tell us that there are around 20 million slaves in the world today. Unofficially, the experts tell us it’s closer to 100 million. Staggering. But forget the statistics. Let’s just bring it down to one. Could you imagine, being sold into slavery? Can you imagine what that would be like?

Sold into Slavery

Last week on the program we spent a bit of time travelling along the road with young Joseph, son of Jacob (or Israel as God called Him) way back in the book of Genesis in the Old Testament. And it’s been an exciting journey of a young man who had big dreams for his life. Huge dreams – not born of himself, but given to Him, apparently by God.

Have another listen, as he tells his father and brothers about the amazing dream God’s given him:

Once Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said to them, ‘Listen to this dream that I dreamed. There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright; then your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf.’ His brothers said to him, ‘Are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to have dominion over us?’ So they hated him even more because of his dreams and his words.

He had another dream, and told it to his brothers, saying, ‘Look, I have had another dream: the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.’ But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him, and said to him, ‘What kind of dream is this that you have had? Shall we indeed come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow to the ground before you?’ So his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind. (Genesis 37:5–11)

When we give our lives to Jesus – and even sometimes before we do that – God puts dreams in our hearts, dreams that almost always seem to be crazy and impossible – that’s the point, right? If they were sane and possible, we wouldn’t need God to make them happen.

But whenever we have a powerful dream like that, something that some people refer to as their calling in life, adversity is always going to plunder that dream. It happened to Joseph that way, it’s happened to me that way and no doubt, it’s happened to you that way too. And when that dream is plundered by adversity, a bunch of people pull over by the side of the road and give up. A whole bunch of people who are passionate about Jesus, who love Him with all their heart even, have given up on their dreams, their calling, because the reality of adversity has screamed in their face, ‘You see, you were crazy! What were you thinking? Who do you think you are?’ Am I right?

Well, we’ve seen so far in Joseph’s story, if you’ve been able to join me, that his brothers hated him so much, they conspired to kill him. They beat him up and threw him into a pit – that’s where young Joseph was when we left him last time. So let’s pick up on that story, because things go from bad to worse for this young dreamer:

So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; and they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it.

Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels carrying gum, balm, and resin, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, ‘What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.’ And his brothers agreed. When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.

When Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was not in the pit, he tore his clothes. He returned to his brothers, and said, ‘The boy is gone; and I, where can I turn?’ Then they took Joseph’s robe, slaughtered a goat, and dipped the robe in the blood. They had the long robe with sleeves taken to their father, and they said, ‘This we have found; see now whether it is your son’s robe or not.’ He recognized it, and said, ‘It is my son’s robe! A wild animal has devoured him; Joseph is without doubt torn to pieces.’ Then Jacob tore his garments, and put sackcloth on his loins, and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and all his daughters sought to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted, and said, ‘No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning.’ Thus his father bewailed him. Meanwhile the Midianites had sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard. (Genesis 37:23–36)

I want you for a moment to put yourself in Joseph’s shoes. The story here is told much more from the perspective of his brothers and his father, but get into Joseph’s sandals for a minute and ask yourself, how does he feel in the pit? How does he feel when he’s hauled out, probably with his hands tied and sold BY HIS BROTHERS, by his own flesh and blood to a slave trader? How does he feel on the journey down to Egypt, walking chained to other slaves? How does he feel when he’s stood up in the marketplace, sold to an Egyptian official, this young Israelite, this young man who was his father’s favourite, this young man who’d lived in freedom and had had those dreams of greatness?

It’s difficult to imagine, isn’t it, that things could get any lower for young Joseph. Robbed of his freedom; robbed of his life; robbed of his future; robbed of his dreams. Have you ever been there? I have, and it’s a place I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. We’re not told what was going through his mind, but we can certainly imagine.

My point in sharing this story with you is this: none of what we’ve read about the devastating events in Joseph’s life, took God’s eyes off His goal; none of what’s happened to this point – terrible as it will have seemed to Joseph – has robbed him of his God-given dream. To the contrary, all these things – as we’re going to see soon – were necessary to make the dream happen. For without them, Joseph wouldn’t have ended up in Egypt, which is where all that had been in Joseph’s dreams would come to pass.

The opportunities that God hands us to live out the dreams that He places on our hearts, so often come disguised as adversity and tragedy. That’s what this story is telling me – this story not just about Joseph, but about how God brings His plans and purposes for Joseph’s life to come to pass.

Now it’s easy for you and me to sit here and say, sure, that’s fine for Joseph. But that’s not how it’s going to happen in my life, because me, I’ve got a plan for my life and guess what? I’m going to make it happen differently. I’m not going to travel through that sort of devastation. I’m going to go from dream to fulfilment in a few weeks, on easy street without any pain or diversions. I’m going to …

Oh, really? Let me say it again. It’s as true for you and me as it was for Joseph. The opportunities that God hands us to live out the dreams that He places on our hearts, so often come disguised as adversity and tragedy. Do you get it? Are you listening to God’s Word for you today? Are you letting it sink into your heart? Hmm?

I know that this is a bitter pill to swallow but just think about the powerful encouragement in this truth. Of the millions of people listening to this program around the world today, a bundle of you are travelling through adversity right now. Perhaps you’re travelling through adversity right now, and the dreams that you had in your heart, the things that you thought God was calling you to – seem over, dead and buried.

But I have good news for you today. God hasn’t given up on you. His dreams for you are alive and well. He’s taking you on a journey you may not have chosen for yourself, but his plans for your life will not – WILL NOT – be defeated. Your King reigns and nothing in this universe will stop Him from finishing what He started. Nothing! That’s good news, don’t you think?!

Punished for Doing the Right Thing

Well we saw that young Joseph, son of Jacob back in the book of Genesis way back there in the Old Testament, this young man with great dreams had been sold into slavery.

Dreams shattered, freedom gone, family done, in a foreign land, gone from being his father’s favourite to a common slave, owned by another man, that’s where Joseph was.

Now for most of us that would be enough to makes us give up. But Joseph … Joseph knew something intuitively, something that had, I don’t know, been put inside him by God – something that kept him going. And it’s that something, that you and I are going to discover for ourselves from God’s Word today.

Because we all have dreams that are shattered; we all have times in our lives when we need that special something from God, to keep us going; to help us nurture our dreams through the dark days. So are you ready to discover that special something? Let’s dive into God’s Word – it comes to us in two parts today. First part:

Now Joseph was taken down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there. The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man; he was in the house of his Egyptian master. His master saw that the Lord was with him, and that the Lord caused all that he did to prosper in his hands. So Joseph found favour in his sight and attended him; he made him overseer of his house and put him in charge of all that he had. From the time that he made him overseer in his house and over all that he had, the Lord blessed the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake; the blessing of the Lord was on all that he had, in house and field. So he left all that he had in Joseph’s charge; and, with him there, he had no concern for anything but the food that he ate. (Genesis 39:1–6)

So what do you get out of that? Here’s what I learn. Joseph continued to honour God, Joseph continued to do what’s right, Joseph continued to use his natural giftings to the full, even though his circumstances have taken a terrible turn for the worse; even though he’d much rather be at home with his father and mother.

And as a result – God was with Him, even this heathen Egyptian Potiphar could see that. Turns out the young Joseph was a pretty capable administrator – so, what happened as a result of Joseph doing what’s right, and using his gifts, despite what was happening to him? Joseph found favour in Potiphar’s site and Potiphar put him in charge of all that he had. He became the overseer of Potiphar’s house. That’s not bad. That’s pretty good. But just as he was getting to the top of the roller coaster ride, you guessed it, there was a rapid downhill run? Let’s listen to the second part of what happened to Joseph here in Potiphar’s house:

Now Joseph was handsome and good-looking. And after a time his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, ‘Lie with me.’ But he refused and said to his master’s wife, ‘Look, with me here, my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything that he has in my hand. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then could I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?’

And although she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not consent to lie beside her or to be with her. One day, however, when he went into the house to do his work, and while no one else was in the house, she caught hold of his garment, saying, ‘Lie with me!’ But he left his garment in her hand, and fled and ran outside. When she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and had fled outside, she called out to the members of her household and said to them, ‘See, my husband has brought among us a Hebrew to insult us! He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice; and when he heard me raise my voice and cry out, he left his garment beside me, and fled outside.’ Then she kept his garment by her until his master came home, and she told him the same story, saying, ‘The Hebrew servant, whom you have brought among us, came in to me to insult me; but as soon as I raised my voice and cried out, he left his garment beside me, and fled outside.’

When his master heard the words that his wife spoke to him, saying, ‘This is the way your servant treated me,’ He became enraged. And Joseph’s master took him and put him into the prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined; he remained there in prison. But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love; he gave him favour in the sight of the chief jailer. The chief jailer committed to Joseph’s care all the prisoners who were in the prison, and whatever was done there, he was the one who did it. The chief jailer paid no heed to anything that was in Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with him; and whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper. (Genesis 39:6-23)

When Potiphar’s wife accused Joseph of doing the wrong thing, when all along, all he’d done was the right thing, man I have to tell you, that would be enough to have just about any of us throwing up our hands, looking God in the eye and saying to Him, ‘You have to be kidding right, God? Are you just out to get me here? Do you really love me? What the blazes are you doing?’

And yet again, a second time – just in case you or I missed it, just in case you or I think, Great for you Joseph, but when bad things happen to me, I’m just going to react badly, just in case we’re thinking this message isn’t for you, Joseph does it again.

Things go from bad to worse, what happens to him simply isn’t fair – and even though this trip to prison was absolutely a necessary step to his dream being fulfilled, he had no way of knowing that, did he? All he saw was the injustice and the pain, thrown into prison. But young Joseph does the same thing again. He honours God. He gets on and makes the best of his terrible lot and so the Lord honours that, the Lord is with Joseph. The jailer puts him in charge and even here in this prison, where he could have been rotting in self pity where told: because the Lord was with him, in whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper. Are you getting this message?

We can be pretty dense about this you and I. Bad things happen to us. Unfair things happen to us. And our natural reaction is either to come out punching and destroy the people, who did this to us, or to withdraw into our shell, and become all bitter and twisted about what’s going on. Am I right? Oh, and just to put the icing on the cake, we blame God, and we conveniently choose to forget that He loves us so much that He sent His one and only Son to die for us so that we could be forgiven and have eternal life.

When bad things happen to us, we want to respond by doing bad things. But look at what happened to Joseph – twice in one Chapter God puts it there, first in Potiphar’s house, second in the Kings prison – just because God knows how hard it is to get through to us on this.

Joseph honours God, he behaves well, and instead of using adversity as an excuse – wait for this, because this is the crux, this is the punch line, this is the bit that God really wants us to get today – Joseph uses his natural gifts and in doing so discovers God-prepared, God-anointed opportunities right there in the adversity.

That’s the power of what God’s saying to you and me today through his Word. God’s opportunities abound just as much in adversity as they do in the good times. Even if the whole world seems to be against us, God is for us. That’s why the Apostle Paul a few thousand years later, wrote if God is for us, who can be against us?

My friend, if you have a God-given dream in your life, you can be certain that adversity will come against you. Absolutely certain. That place of adversity is your opportunity to honour God. In fact the very best time to honour God, is when no one else is. That’s what Jesus did. That’s what got Him crucified. Opportunities abound, no matter how dark the day may seem.

God’s Amazing Stepping Stones

When we, like young Joseph here, are travelling through difficult times, one of the things that we do – we all do this – is we lose sight of the big picture.

You and I can read through the whole of Joseph’s story – the book of Genesis Chapters 37 to 46 in about half an hour. So we read the story, we say, fine – I get that and we move on.

But that story unfolded in Joseph’s life over many years. He spent two years in prison. He spent a good many years toiling away serving Pharaoh before the happy ending being reunited with his father and brothers.

Years of things happening to him that weren’t fair. Years where what God was up to, not being obvious to him. Could he ever imagined that he would become the ruler of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh himself, when he was in the pit that his brothers threw him into, or on his way to Egypt as part of a slave train, or when he was being sold to Potiphar, or when we was rotting in the King’s prison for at least two years?

He had no idea did he? Not a clue what God was up to. Not a clue that God was still making his dream happen? And if God was still on the case (that must have seemed pretty doubtful there on at least a hundred thousand occasions) how God could possibly make it all happen and bring it all to fruition.

But when you stand back, as we can, and see the big picture, the whole picture – a picture that only God could see, a picture that at the time simply wasn’t available to Joseph, stuck as he was down in the weeds – we can see not only that God did make it possible. But that each step along the way, the brother’s reaction, the becoming a slave thing, working in Potiphar’s house, going to jail after being falsely accused, rotting there, and all the other stuff – each part of that story was a necessary stepping stone to get Joseph to where God wanted him to be – the ruler of Egypt.

Miss out on any of those steps, and Joseph would never have made it to the end and God’s plan and Joseph’s dream would never have been realised. Right?

That’s obvious. That’s easy to see when you can see the big picture. But we like Joseph, most of the time, can’t see the big picture. All we can see are the walls of the pit, the betrayal, the pain along the way, in injustice of being unfairly treated. And if we focus on those, we’re bound to get lost along the way.

If all we do is focus on the bad bits, we miss the opportunities that God is handing us along the way. That’s what made Joseph different and that’s the thing that we learn from this story.

Firstly, that those bad bits were in fact God’s amazing stepping stones to get Joseph from where he was, to where God wanted him to be – physically, emotionally and spiritually. And secondly, that at each of those stepping stones, we can look for, find and lay hold of God-given opportunities despite the mess that things appear to be in, simply by honouring God and exercising our natural gifts and abilities.

That’s a huge lesson. That’s a lesson that you and I will be learning for the rest of our lives, if we’ll let God teach us. But grumbling, complaining, giving up along the way is not how we’re going to learn the lessons. Grumbling, complaining and giving up closes our hearts and when our hearts are closed, they’re unteachable.

That’s how we miss God’s opportunities. That’s how we miss out on God’s plan for our lives, one opportunity at a time. And that my friend is a huge tragedy that is playing itself out in the lives of many a Christ-follower. It’s a tragedy of massive global proportions. And it’s a tragedy, I pray, that will not play itself out in your life.

That’s why we’re opening God’s Word. To discover that his opportunities abound all day, every day. All we have to do is open our eyes to them, and accept them just as they are.

There are times in life when opportunities seem to have passed us by. You’ve done all the right things while travelling that hard road and yet still, things just don’t seem to turn out your way. What’s going on?

A Missed Opportunity?

We all have hopes and dreams and you know how it goes. They bubble away in our hearts; we do a lot of daydreaming about our dreams; we paint the picture; we imagine what it’ll be like when our dream is realised, and little by little, things seem to be heading in the right direction, but then things take a turn for the worse. It’s in that moment that I’d like to spend some time with you today, because those moments are as difficult as they come.

I was in one of those places recently. It was a ministry thing: A relationship we were working on with another ministry organisation. It’s something we’d put a lot of work into and we’d hoped that it would go really, really well. And then, on the morning that I was preparing today’s message in fact, things took a turn for the worse. The details don’t matter, but you should know that we all go through this stuff from time to time. I certainly do, and I know you’ve been through it as well, and we’re going to find ourselves in that moment again one day.

Over the last few weeks on the program, we’ve been taking a look at how to make sure that we don’t miss God’s opportunities, and we’ve been doing that by travelling the way along the path with young Joseph, the son of Jacob (or Israel as he became known) in the Old Testament, because Joseph had more than enough reasons to give up on God’s opportunities. Loved by his father, his brothers turned against him and plotted to kill him because he was dad’s favourite.

Eventually they sold him into slavery, whence he was shipped to Egypt, sold to one of Pharaoh’s officials (Potiphar), and made a slave. He did well at that and Potiphar put Joseph in charge of his whole household, until Potiphar’s wife (who fancied young Joseph) wrongly accused him of making improper advances, so Joseph was thrown into prison. He did well there too, so much so that the jailer put him in charge of the prison, just as Potiphar had put him in charge of his whole household, and it’s here in prison that we pick up the story because it’s here, languishing in an Egyptian jail, that Joseph has one of these moments – a very long moment actually, where it appears that his opportunity of getting out of jail passes him by. Let’s have a listen to what happened. It comes from Genesis 40 in the Old Testament:

Some time after this, the cupbearer of the king of Egypt and his baker offended their lord, the king of Egypt. Pharaoh was angry with his two officers – the chief cupbearer and the chief baker, and he put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, in the prison where Joseph was confined. The captain of the guard charged Joseph with them, and he waited on them, and they continued for some time in custody.

One night they both dreamed: The cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt who were confined in the prison, each his own dream, and each dream with its own meaning. When Joseph came to them in the morning, he saw that they were troubled, so he asked Pharaoh’s officers who were with him in custody in his master’s house, ‘Why are your faces downcast today?’ 

They said to him, ‘We have had dreams, and there’s no one to interpret them.’

And Joseph said to them, ‘Do not interpretations belong to God? Please tell them to me.’

So the chief cupbearer told his dream to Joseph, and said to him, ‘In my dream, there was a vine before me, and on the vine there were three branches. As soon as it budded, its blossoms came out, and the clusters ripened into grapes. Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup, and placed the cup into Pharaoh’s hand.’

Then Joseph said to him, ‘Here is the interpretation: The three branches are three days. Within three days Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your office, and you shall place Pharaoh’s cup in his hand, just as you used to do when you were his cupbearer. But remember me when it is well with you; please do me the kindness to make mention of me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this place. For in fact, I was stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, and here also, I have done nothing that they should put me into a dungeon.’

When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was favourable, he said to Joseph, ‘Well, I also had a dream. There were three cake baskets on my head, and in the uppermost basket, there were all sorts of food for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating it out of the basket on my head.’

And Joseph answered, ‘This is its interpretation: The three baskets are three days. Within three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head from you and hang you on a pole, and there the birds will eat the flesh from you.’

On the third day (which was Pharaoh’s birthday), he made a feast for all his servants, and he lifted up the cupbearer and the head of the chief baker among the servants. He restored the chief cupbearer to his cup-bearing, and he placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand, but the chief baker he hanged, just as Joseph had interpreted them, yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.

See, not only did the chief cupbearer forget Joseph, it was actually another two years before he remembered Joseph and things started to happen. Two years is a long time, even when you’re having fun; two years in a dungeon is unimaginable. I can’t imagine spending one night in a prison, but two more years in prison, when you’re there because you’ve been wrongly accused and because before that, your brothers turned against you and sold you into slavery and shipped you to a foreign land – I mean, come on!

Put yourself in Joseph’s shoes. How do you feel? Everything’s piling up against you: Your family’s turned against you; your master’s turned against you because his wife lied about you (she was the one with the evil things in her heart, Joseph was the one who’d done the right thing, yet here he was in prison); and now, you do this wretched cupbearer a favour. I mean, God’s given you this amazing spiritual insight and gift of interpreting this dream. God’s here, right? So let me ask you: Would you be tempted to give up on God in those two years?

A Step of Faith

I have a confession to make: I hate heights. I remember once standing on top of a thirty-metre tower when I was training to become an officer in the Australian army. It was a water jump on an obstacle course. The idea was simple: Climb the tower, and jump into the water. Hey, thirty metres doesn’t sound an awful lot, does it? I can cover one metre in a single step. Easy. Thirty metres, not that much.

I was a little bit nervous that day as I queued at the bottom of the tower watching my mates climb up and jump, but as I headed up the tower, I became more and more fearful. By the time I stood on top of that tower looking down, I was completely petrified. To do this was so unnatural. I still remember looking down and my stomach was tied in a knot. All I wanted to do was run away. I couldn’t of course. Everybody else so far had taken the jump, apparently fearlessly. Peer group pressure was overwhelming, so I jumped. Let me tell you, the fall seemed to take forever, and of course, not a single person died that day or was injured that day; we all survived to tell the tale.

Leaps of faith can be scary, can’t they? And sometimes God comes along and gives us an opportunity that is just as scary. Perhaps you’ve felt a call in your heart to go and do something, and the fear of failure has just paralysed you, or maybe you’ve been hit over the head by failure so many times that you’ve started believing that failure is your default mode of operation: The world, people, circumstances have been telling you that you just won’t amount to anything. You’ll never succeed.

That’s the place that young Joseph, son of Jacob (or Israel as he became known) found himself, rotting for over two years in a prison in Egypt after being sold into slavery by his brothers, and then being wrongly accused of attempted rape by the wife of his master Potiphar. The reason that we’re taking a look at Joseph’s journey through life is that perhaps more than any other Biblical character, this guy faced catastrophe after catastrophe in his life, yet at each turn, he grabbed a hold of the opportunities that God gave him, and that’s what made all the difference.

So there he is; he’s rotting in prison; he interprets correctly the dream of a fellow-prisoner, Pharaoh’s cupbearer, and soon the cupbearer is released and restored to his position serving Pharaoh. But this guy, he forgets all about Joseph in jail and does nothing, until Pharaoh himself has a perplexing dream that troubles him.

So finally, two years on, the cupbearer remembers Joseph, and suggests to Pharaoh that maybe this Joseph guy that’s still rotting in jail could help interpret his dream. Let’s pick up the story. Genesis 41:8-16:

In the morning, his spirit was troubled (this is Pharaoh), So he sent and called for the magicians of Egypt and all its wise men. Pharaoh told them his dreams, but there was no one who could interpret them to Pharaoh. 

Then the chief cupbearer said to Pharaoh, ‘I remember my faults today. Once Pharaoh was angry with his servant, and put me and the chief baker in custody in the house of the captain of the guard. We dreamed on the same night, he and I, each having a dream with its own meaning. A young Hebrew man was there with us – a servant of the captain of the guard. When we told him, he interpreted our dreams to us, giving an interpretation to each according to his dream. As he interpreted to us, so it turned out. I was restored to my office, and the baker was hanged.’

Then Pharaoh sent for Joseph and he was hurriedly brought out of the dungeon. When he had shaved himself and changed his clothes, he came in before Pharaoh and Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘I’ve had a dream, and there is no one who can interpret it. I have heard it said of you that when you hear a dream, you can interpret it.’ 

Joseph answered Pharaoh, ‘It is not I. God will give Pharaoh a favourable answer.’

And so Pharaoh told Joseph his dream and Joseph interpreted it for him. The outcome of that interpretation, ultimately, led to Joseph being appointed as the ruler of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh himself.

Now it’s so easy to read this as one of those ‘And he lived happily ever-after’ stories. You skim over it and think: ‘Well, yeah, that really turned out pretty well for Joseph’, but imagine how Joseph felt after his shower and shave, whisked from prison and now standing before Pharaoh, a man who had the absolute power of life or death over him.

One slip up, one mistake, one bad or unfavourable interpretation, and Joseph could well have been relieved of his head. Executions at the whim of Pharaoh were commonplace. There would have to be a mixture of excitement and trembling in his heart: Excitement at the thought that finally this may be his God-given opportunity to get out of jail, fear at how Pharaoh might react, and it’s that very mixture of anticipation and fear that so often accompanies the God-given opportunities that come our way, because when the opportunity appears, most times, it doesn’t come with a guarantee of success.

A fear of failure in our hearts can outweigh the excitement and the anticipation that also comes with those new opportunities, and it’s in that place that we have to make a decision. We can succumb to the fear (fear which immobilises us, fear which stops us from stepping out into God-given opportunities), or we can take that leap of faith, at which point we’re completely at God’s mercy. Like jumping off that platform, I had absolutely no control on the way down, which by the way felt like it was taking forever – the longest few seconds of my life.

When God next places an opportunity before you, what will you do; turn back in fear, or step out in faith? The reason I’m asking you that question is that it’s at this point that so many people miss out on God’s opportunities for their lives, and in my book, that’s an absolute tragedy.

God’s Gifts in Action

Life is this crazy mixture of appointments and disappointments. God has this funny way of setting up appointments for us: Appointments that are part of His plan. The word anointing in the Bible means literally an appointment from God. God appoints you to do a certain thing; He anoints you with His Spirit so you can do that thing.

Other times we see an opportunity to get ahead or to do something that apparently on the surface seems pretty good, but a little way into it, we come to realise that this appointment is … well, really a disappointment. It wasn’t from God after all. Have you ever felt that sense of regret after you’ve taken an opportunity and it hasn’t worked out, and you’ve realised it wasn’t from God to start with?

Not that every God-given opportunity turns out to be successful from a worldly perspective. Sometimes God puts opportunities in front of us for us to learn through our mistakes, but some opportunities are God-given, and others are not. That’s just the way it is, and anybody who’s set their heart to follow Jesus with their lives has been in that place of wondering: ‘Is this one from God, or not? Should I step into it, or not? Should I marry this person or not? Should I take this job promotion or not? Should I move to this suburb or this town or this village, or not? Should I …’ You know the story.

Quite a few years ago now, I was involved in an IT consulting firm that we started way back in the late 1980s. Graham, Mark and I were the partners who owned the business. It had grown internationally and was a pretty successful and profitable outfit, to the point where a publicly listed company sought us out and purchased the business from us, on the condition that we stayed on for at least three years to manage the transition.

At the end of three years Graham, who was the CEO, decided it was time for him to retire. Well, I can tell you, I was the heir apparent. Everyone expected me to stand up and to take the reins of this business and drive it forward, but I had this deep unease about it. I thought long and prayed hard, and finally God showed me why I was uneasy. There are many things that I enjoy doing, but managing people, managing detail, isn’t amongst what I like doing. I can lead, but I’m not a manager; there’s a difference. I came to the conclusion that my gifts and talents weren’t a good fit to the opportunity of stepping up into the CEO’s role, and so much to many people’s surprise, I declined the appointment.

Looking back on that decision, it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever made, and it’s this match between what we’re naturally good at (our natural gifts and talents), and the nature of the opportunity that is one of the best ways to determine whether an opportunity is from God or not.

When we last left young Joseph, son of Jacob in the Old Testament, he’d just been handed an opportunity by Pharaoh to become the overseer of the whole of Egypt, and in particular, the overseer of the God-given plan to store away surplus food during the years of plenty, so that Egypt would be ready for the years of famine that lay ahead. Let’s take a look at what happened. Genesis 41:44-57:

Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘I am Pharaoh, and without your consent, no one shall lift up hand or foot in all the land of Egypt.’ And he gave him Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera, priest of On, as his wife. Thus Joseph gained authority over the land of Egypt. Joseph was just thirty years old when he entered the service of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh and went through all the land of Egypt.

During the seven plenteous years, the earth produced abundantly. He gathered up all the food of seven years, when there was plenty in the land of Egypt, and stored up food in the cities. He stored up in every city the food from the fields around it, so Joseph stored up grain in such abundance (like the sand of the sea) that he stopped metring it. It was beyond measure.

Before the years of famine came, Joseph had two sons whom Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, priest of On, bore him. Joseph named the firstborn Manasseh, for, he said: ‘God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house.’ The second he named Ephraim, ‘For God has made me fruitful in the land of my misfortunes.’

The seven years of plenty that prevailed in the land of Egypt came to an end, and the seven years of famine began to come, just as Joseph had said. There was famine in every country, but throughout the land of Egypt, there was bread. When all the land of Egypt was famished, the people cried out to Pharaoh for bread, and Pharaoh said to all the Egyptians, ‘Go to Joseph. What he says to you, do’, and since the famine had spread all over the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians, for the famine was severe in the land of Egypt. Moreover, all the world came to Joseph in Egypt to buy grain because the famine became severe throughout the whole world.

Now ok; Joseph was given the power to make it all happen, but you’d have to be a pretty good manager to bring this grand scheme together, wouldn’t you? I mean, it turns out that that was exactly what Joseph was good at. Back as a slave in Potiphar’s house, what happened? Potiphar saw how good a manager Joseph was, so he put him in charge of all his affairs. And in prison, the head jailer saw what an effective manager Joseph was, so he put him in charge of the prison.

See, that was Joseph’s gifting – his natural talent and ability, and this opportunity that Pharaoh gave him was a perfect fit with whom God made him to be. It’s a pattern that repeated itself through the hard times as a slave, as a prisoner, and now, during the good times as the ruler of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh.

See, God’s plans (God’s opportunities) that He sets before us invariably have this strong fit with who He made us to be. It kind of makes sense when you think about it, and testing opportunities against our natural abilities is one of the best ways I’ve ever discovered to figure out whether this opportunity is going to turn out to be an appointment or a disappointment – whether this opportunity is one from God, or not one from God.

And the Bible tells us that we should test all things so that we can grab a hold of that which is good, and keep away from that which isn’t (1 Thessalonians 5:20). Not everything that glitters is made of gold. There are plenty of imposters that come along, pretending to be good; pretending to be God-given appointments, when all along, they’re nothing but disappointments. Even Satan, we’re told, disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14).

One of the reasons that we end up missing out on God’s opportunities is because we just choose the wrong ones. The devil doesn’t want you living out the life God planned for you. The devil does not want you impacting this world through your God-given gifts, and one of the great tactics of the enemy is to deceive. That’s why it’s so important for us to learn how to discern those opportunities that are God-given, and those that aren’t.

If God is truly God, if He really knows what He’s doing, then surely He’s going to make us to be a good fit with the things He calls us to do, and that’s exactly what the Bible teaches. Ephesians 2:10 says:

We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, in order to do the good works that He prepared beforehand for us to walk into.

You and I need to know the things we’re good at, and the things we’re not good at. Invariably, the things we’re good at are the things that we enjoy doing. They’re the things we get excited about and animated about, and that excitement (that animation) is a really good pointer for what we’re good at, and what we’re good at is a good pointer towards the things that God’s made us to do, and the things that God’s calling us to do. So the next time an opportunity comes your way, ask yourself: ‘Am I a good fit with this opportunity, or not?’

Last time on the program, we talked about the fact that one of the best ways to discern whether an opportunity that’s before us is God–given or not, is to consider the fit between our natural gifts and abilities and the demands, or the requirements of the opportunity. Does this opportunity really fit with who God made me to be? But you see, sometimes God calls us to do things that don’t come naturally.

The Challenge of Forgiveness

Over the past few weeks we’ve been travelling along with young Joseph, son of Isaac in the Old Testament, on his journey through life. A journey that had some real downers, much like your journey and mine; and yet a journey that was heading in a direction that only God could foresee.

There was Joseph, one of twelve brothers, the youngest one and dad’s favourite. His father was Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham – although God had given Jacob a new name – He’d called him … Israel. And unbeknown to anyone, these twelve brothers were the fathers of what would become the twelve tribes of Israel. That was a long way off yet.

Here is what the relationship between Joseph and his brothers looked like when Joseph was young. Genesis 37:1-4:

Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. This is the story of the family of Jacob.

Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers; he was a helper to the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives; and Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father.

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all the other brothers, they hated Joseph, and could not speak peaceably to him.

But things only got worse from here, because Joseph had two dreams which he shared with his brothers and father: that one day he would rule over them and they‘d all bow down to him.

That was it, that was the last straw. His brothers plotted to kill him, but ultimately instead, they sold him into slavery. From there he is transported, as we’ve seen to Egypt, he becomes Potiphar’s slave, is thrown into prison, where he rots for a few years and finally, finally through a set of circumstances that only God could have orchestrated becomes the ruler of all of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh.

And again under God’s hand, Joseph as the ruler has stored up in Egypt surplus grain that was produced in the years of plenty, so that when the famine hit, there would be enough to eat in the land. And not just in Egypt, people travelled from all over the known world to purchase grain in Egypt, because they were starving. And, as God would have it, some of Joseph’s brothers travelled to Egypt to buy grain as well.

They had no idea what had become of Joseph after they sold him into slavery. They’d told their father Jacob that he was dead. But low and behold, one day they stood before Joseph and bowed down to him, just as he had dreamed in that dream all those years before as a young boy. Genesis 42:1-8:

When Jacob learned that there was grain in Egypt, he said to his sons, ‘Why do you keep looking at one another? I have heard,’ he said, ‘that there is grain in Egypt; so go down, buy grain for us there, that we may live and not die.’

So ten of Joseph’s brothers went down to buy grain. But Jacob did not send Joseph’s brother Benjamin with his brothers, for he feared what harm might come to him. Thus the sons of Israel were among the other people who came to buy grain, for the famine had reached the land of Canaan. 

Now Joseph was governor over the whole land; it was he who sold to all the people of the land. And Joseph’s brothers came and bowed themselves down before him with their faces on the ground.

When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them, but he treated them like strangers and spoke harshly to them. ‘Where do you come from?’ he said. They said, ‘From the land of Canaan, to buy food.’ Although Joseph had recognized his brothers, they did not recognize him.

Now, we don’t have time to go through the whole story, of how Joseph dealt with his brothers – it runs for several chapters, Genesis 42 to 46 – it’s really worth a read, so if you have a Bible, grab it in the next day or two and check it out for yourself.

But can you imagine how Joseph felt? These mongrels of brothers, who had plotted his murder and then sold him into slavery, now stood before him and bowed down to him, just as God had told him, in that dream as a young lad, would occur.

He was now the ruler of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh and he now had the power of life and death over them, just as they had had over him. Finally, a chance for revenge. Finally, here he is, justified, with God’s favour on him, and these men who did him such a terrible injustice were begging for food before him. What an opportunity.

And, as you read the story, Joseph was seriously tempted; he was torn; he struggled between his hatred for them and his love; between revenge and forgiveness.

He accused them of being spies and locked them up for three days, and then he took one of them as a hostage in prison, to force them to go back and get their youngest brother, Benjamin. He played tricks on them; he gave them an incredibly hard time.

You see, one of the things that just doesn’t come naturally to us, is forgiveness. He had been so hurt and damaged by his brothers; he was tempted to kill them all after he’d toyed with them in a dark and terrible cat and mouse game. It went on for some time, but …

Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, and he cried out, ‘Send everyone away from me.’ So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the house of Pharaoh heard it. Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?’ But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence. 

Then Joseph said to his brothers, ‘Come closer to me.’ And they came closer. He said, ‘I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now don’t be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither ploughing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors.’ (Genesis 45:1-7)

Joseph took the greatest opportunity of his life. The greatest opportunity God handed him – he forgave his brothers not just in word, but in deed. He saw that God had sent him, even through their evil, to preserve their lives.

Have you ever had an opportunity to harm or to forgive someone who has hurt you? Which way did you lean, naturally, in the flesh? Towards extracting your pound of flesh? That’s what Joseph wanted to do.

And yet, he’d been travelling too long with God to do that. God had been with him in the pit that his brothers had thrown him in. God had been with him on the journey to Egypt in chains, in the slave market when he was sold as a slave, in prison where he was thrown after being wrongly accused. God had been with him every step of the way.

And at each turn, God had placed an opportunity for Joseph to do good, or evil; to behave well or to behave badly. To use his natural gifts and talents to grab hold of opportunities, or not. And at each turn, Joseph stepped up to the plate, and took a hold of those God-given opportunities.

He didn’t realise it at the time, but it’s that consistent pattern of behaviour, that brought him to the place of power and privilege in which he now found himself. And it was in this place that he faced his biggest test of all – to forgive, or to take revenge.

Forgiveness goes against the grain. Forgiveness, when you think about it, is unjust, because we choose to forego our right for punishment and recompense. But no matter how badly you’ve been hurt, no matter how unnatural that step of forgiveness appears to you in the place that you’re at, it is the greatest opportunity that God will ever give you. 

So seriously does God take forgiveness that He sent His only Son, Jesus, to die for you, to pay for your sins. And it cost Him everything, it cost Him the life of His Son. So, when this opportunity to forgive presents itself, what will you do? Take revenge, or forgive?

The Big Picture

I’m convinced that one of the hardest things in life, is to keep our eye on the big picture. Maybe it’s a project at work that involves a lot of people and a lot of complexity. Maybe it’s a plan you have for your life, and yet time and time again things happen to derail your brilliant plan. 

Or maybe, it’s simply setting your life on a course to follow Jesus with all your heart, and yet you discover that the road is narrow and hard and inconvenient and uncomfortable and some days, downright painful. And when that happens, what happens to the big picture, the end goal, the reason that you’re following Jesus with all your heart? 

It just kind of … just evaporates, doesn’t it?

Here we are in the last message, in this series that I’ve called Don’t Miss God’s Opportunities. Well one of the main reasons that we do miss God’s opportunity to do good on those days when we feel that following Jesus ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, is that on those days, we lose sight of the big picture.

Now, to be fair, we can’t always see the big picture and that makes it even harder. When the Lord our God has us on one of those dark, scary, uncomfortable valley journeys, you actually can’t see far enough ahead to know what comes next; to know how it’s going to turn out; to know why He’s put you in this place to start with. Often it’s only in hindsight that we can see what He was up to all along, and even then, sometimes, we don’t get the full picture.

I was speaking at a businessmen’s breakfast fellowship just recently, all successful, high-powered businessmen. They asked me to share my testimony – and it is a story, let me tell you, of as many low points as it has high points. 

And as I retraced those steps, sharing the incredible things that God has done in my life, I again just had that quiet assurance from the Holy Spirit, that all along, I’d actually been on the journey that God had planned, even in those dark and difficult times; especially, in fact, in those dark and difficult times.

It’s the sense that Joseph, Jacob’s son in the Old Testament, had, when he finally stood in the place that he’d dreamed of as a young teenager – a position of power and privilege as the ruler of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh himself.

And as we saw before the break, his brothers now stood before him. Those same brothers who had sold him into slavery out of their jealousy and hatred all those years before. Instead of exacting revenge, he forgave them, and he explained to them why God had allowed this all to happen. Let’s take another look at this together. Genesis 45:4-15:

Then Joseph said to his brothers, ‘Come closer to me.’ And they came closer. He said, ‘I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither ploughing nor harvest. 

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and the lord of all his house and the ruler of the land of Egypt.

Hurry up, go to my father and say to him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me, do not delay. You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children’s children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have. I will provide for you there, since there are five more years of famine, so that you and your household, and all that you have, will not come to poverty.’ 

And now your eyes and the eyes of my brother Benjamin see that it is my own mouth that speaks to you. You must tell my father how greatly I am honoured in Egypt, and all that you have seen. Hurry and bring my father down here.’ 

Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept, while Benjamin wept upon his neck. And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him.

What a beautiful picture of reconciliation after such treachery that brought so much suffering. But the bit that I really want you to notice here is that Joseph finds meaning to all the suffering, because he sees the big picture to explain what was going on:

God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on all the earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he’s the one who made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

In other words by looking back and seeing the journey through God’s eyes, he sees what God was up to all along. God’s purpose was to do his family good; to preserve and protect them, and for that purpose, a purpose that he couldn’t see in those dark places along the way on his journey which had taken now over twenty years.

That’s why he had to suffer treachery and slavery and injustice and imprisonment, because God had had a plan. And now Joseph could see it looking back. And yet even at this point, can I say, Joseph really had no idea – none whatsoever, of the important part that his small journey was playing in God’s overall plan for humanity.

In that passage we just read, did you notice the brothers were to go back and get their father Jacob, or Israel as God had renamed him, and bring the whole family down here and settle in Egypt? Out of that, over the next four and a half centuries, grew a mighty nation of Israel, whom God saved through Moses, crossing the Red Sea, with forty years in the wilderness, before he brought them back to the Promised Land.

Through Judah, one of the twelve brothers, God started a lineage of generations that finally, many years later, resulted in the birth of Jesus, who came to save you and me, by dying on that cross. Joseph’s story, Joseph’s journey is still having eternal ramifications, in your life and mine, through Jesus, of Israel.

That’s mind blowing. The big picture is so big that none of them really knew what God was up to through this terrible journey of Joseph’s.

Honestly, the only way to lay hold of the big picture when we’re immersed in the trials of our journey is by faith. Just believing that God has a plan; that God knows what He’s doing, it doesn’t matter how much it hurts along the way; that eventually, God will reveal to us through hindsight, that part of the picture that He wants us to see.

Holding onto God’s picture by faith, is what keeps us going, step-by-step, doing good, doing right, looking for the God-given opportunities that He sets before us:

And faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen has been made from things that are not seen. (Hebrews 11:1-3)

When we lose faith in the faithfulness of God and His big picture, although we can’t see it for ourselves, we stop doing what’s right; we stop looking for His opportunities; we stop hoping and dreaming; we stop doing what we know is right, even when the rest of the world seems to have gone stark raving mad and none of the pain and suffering makes any sense.

My friend I want to implore you, don’t give up. Don’t lose faith. Don’t stop looking for those God-given opportunities to use your gifts and abilities, to do what you know is right, to forgive those who’ve hurt you.

Don’t give up. Because one day, you will stand before God and you want to hear Him say, ‘Well done good and faithful servant’. That’s why Jesus died for you. That’s why Jesus sent His Holy Spirit to dwell in you the moment you put your trust in Him. That’s the big picture.

So … whatever you do … don’t miss out on God’s opportunities.

God Expects us to Take Hold of His Opportunities

I want to imagine for a moment, that you are a parent, some of us are, some of us aren’t. But just imagine for a moment, you are a parent, and you have these children that you love with all your heart. What do you do for them?

Well, you work hard to give them new opportunities. You pay for their education, you run them to music lessons, or choir practice, or training for the sports or athletics team that they are part of. What’s all that about? It’s about creating opportunities for them to discover who they are, what they’re good at and what they want to be doing with the rest of their lives.

All that we do for our children is about equipping them, and providing them with opportunities. Now imagine that this child of yours, for whom you’ve sacrificed so much, is lazy and disrespectful. Instead of grabbing those opportunities that you’ve sacrificed so much for, they laze around, they don’t apply themselves, they whinge and complain about everything.

How pleasing do you find their reaction to the opportunities that you’ve created? That’s not a difficult question to answer, it’s not a trick question.

So, why do you and I imagine that God is any different? If we as parents know how to give good things to our children, even though we are flawed and imperfect, how much more do you think your Father in Heaven, is prepared to give good things to you, and open doors for you, and create opportunities for you.

And He expects us to grab hold of them, and to do something worthwhile with them. Not to be a lazy and immature and grumbling and complaining individual who never achieves anything with the abilities and the resources that God’s given you, through the opportunities that He’s prepared for you.

So to bookend this teaching series, let me begin with a scripture that we kicked things off with a few weeks back:

As they were listening to this, he went on to tell a parable, because he was near Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately. 

So he said to them, ‘A nobleman went to a distant country to get royal power for himself and then return. He summoned ten of his slaves, and gave them ten pounds, and said to them, ‘Do business with these until I come back.’

But the citizens of his country hated him and sent a delegation after him, saying, ‘We do not want this man to rule over us.’

When he returned, having received royal power, he ordered these slaves, to whom he had given the money, to be summonsed to find out what they had gained by trading.

The first came forward and said, ‘Lord, your pound has made ten more pounds.’ He said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! Because you have been trustworthy in a small thing, take charge of ten cities.’

Then the second came, saying, ‘Lord, your pound has made five pounds.’ And he said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, you will rule over five cities.’

Then the other came, saying, ‘Lord, here is your pound. I wrapped it up in a piece of cloth, because I was afraid of you, because you are a harsh man; you take what you don’t deposit, and you reap what you don’t sow.’

He said to him, ‘I will judge you by your own words, you wicked slave! You knew, did you, that I was a harsh man, taking what I didn’t deposit and reaping what I didn’t sow? So why then didn’t you put my money into the bank? Then when I returned, I would have collected it with interest. 

He said to the bystanders, ‘Take the pound from him and give it to the one who has ten.’ (And they said to him, ‘Lord, he has ten pounds!’) ‘I tell you, to all those who have, more will be given; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

But as for these enemies of mine who didn’t want me to be king over them – bring them here and slaughter them in my presence.’ (Luke 19:11-27)

Are you getting this? God has blessed you and me with an awful lot, each according to our own gifts and abilities. And His expectation isn’t that we waste it; His expectation is that we do something of eternal significance with all that He’s given us.

His expectation is that we’ll live a life that counts, and a life that bears much fruit for His Glory. His expectation is that we’ll grab onto each God-given opportunity and do something with it for Him.

Are you getting this? Your life matters. You matter. And you can make such an awesome difference in this world.