faithfully trusting when the assignment is hard

Should anyone’s life illustrate the maxim, “If God brought you to it, he’ll bring you through it” it’s Joseph. Very much against his will Joseph was “brought down to Egypt.” But it would not be the end of the story. Faithful Joseph, as you know, went from the pits to a palace and became the vice-ruler in Egypt!

I’ve been thinking about Joseph a lot these days. His brothers contemplated murdering him, and then they settled for the lesser crime of trafficking him into slavery. By the providence of God he finds himself in a rather favorable arrangement. That all blows up when his sex-starved employer’s wife falsely accuses him of attempted rape.

All this and Joseph is still only 17 years old.

His employer explodes and throws him in prison. Even still, Joseph conducts himself in such a way that impresses the warden and is given special privileges. If he thought his good conduct might gain him an early release, however, Joseph, now in his 20s, had another thing coming. Literally.

This is the life of young Joseph. Misunderstanding. Betrayal. Mistreatment. Injustice. One thing after another, and still more after that. Thirteen l o n g years.

All of it, every last bit of it, was intended to get Joseph next to the ruler of Egypt where he could be positioned to do greater good in the world. Talk about earning a promotion!

Could you handle that assignment?

After all he had to endure, Joseph grabbed hold of his God and clung to him for dear life. There are quite a few sterling moments to draw out of his testimony, but I want to highlight just this one:

Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I had a dream, and there is no one who can interpret it. But I have heard about you, that you can interpret dreams.” Joseph replied to Pharaoh, “It is not within my power, but God will speak concerning the welfare of Pharaoh.”

What startles me about this is that Joseph, in spite of everything, still believed God was all-powerful and he was motivated to do good. There doesn’t seem to be a shred of bitterness in him. Joseph still believed there was a divine plan at work and God was using his story of faith to bless others.

Fellow struggler, trust God down there in your Egypt. There is a way forward even though you wake up to the same thing day after day. You think this is it, this is all, just grit your teeth and bear it. I assure you there’s a plan in the mind of God and it is good.

One thing you don’t see Joseph doing — quite remarkably — is playing the victim. He shows us if we can thrive in and rise to the level of excellence in our adversity, by the grace of God, we will be overcomers. It may take 13 years (Joseph) or 20 years (Jacob) or 25 years (Abraham & Sarah) or 40 years (Moses), or however long, but you won’t find a better alternative than to

TRUST

GOD’S

PLAN.

I must hasten. In studying the travails of Joseph I want to leave you with two immutable truths:

1. it’s always right to do good even if you don’t see a reward for it

I get it; everything about this makes you want to scream. Where’s the justice? The equity? You wonder why you have to smile and take it. Do right though the stars fall, I once heard. Keep your hand to the plow, Jesus said. Don’t do right for right’s sake, Paul said, do right for Jesus’s sake.

To that end I read this aloud from my prayer book this morning:

I would serve in imitation of you, who poured out your life for me. I would serve knowing that your Spirit is ever at work in the lives of those I serve, ever calling, ever drawing, ever seeking to soften hearts encased in fear and disappointment and anger and idolatry. So let my kindnesses and sacrifice fall like warm shafts of sunlight on icy ground.
I cannot know the end of another person’s story… So let me be content to minister regardless of visible outcomes, trusting that the small mercies I extend will be woven into the larger theme of redemption at work in the lives of others, as you woo them to yourself…
Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1, p. 158

2. God’s favor will find you even in your darkest trial

Okay. If we’re being honest, none of us is going to be a ruler over a nation. We probably won’t get our story published; this post won’t go viral. But is that what it’s about anyway? Could we (hear me out) say amen to God even if we knew nothing would change?

I leave you with this. At the end of his grave injustices, Joseph got married and raised a family. I beg you to read about that here. The names of those two boys, Manasseh and Ephraim, tell quite a story. Your homework is to study their meanings. What I’ll say about it is this: Joseph married an Egyptian bride, but their sons bore Hebrew names.

That tells me Joseph wanted to remember his journey. None of it was a mistake. Not a single year was wasted. Even in Egypt, Joseph’s God was faithful, his trials were necessary, and the outcome was favorable. I have a feeling if Joseph never got out of that prison, never sat on a throne, never had a family, he’d still say

“It’s not me, it’s God.”

Joseph lived to be 110. He learned to love Egypt but his hope was in the home country. He wanted to go home. That’s all that matters in the end. When you’re finished with me in Egypt, Lord, take me home.

Hey, beloved of God, if he brought you to it he’ll bring you through it. He gave you the assignment; he must be pretty certain you will come through to the other side to tell your story. And what a story you’ll have.

Selah.

music to our ears

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about God?

Jesus told a story that is clearly about God the Father. In the story there are two villains, a younger brother and an elder. While the older brother stews in his self righteousness the younger son repents of his many reproaches and heads back with tail tucked. In the story we are surprised to find the Father running to meet him.

Imagine: God, with robe gathered, feet flying, running!

There’s another place in the sacred text where I’m caught off guard by God. We know about his communication skills but how many knew God could sing?

In Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, we find Aslan singing the world of Narnia into being:

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing…Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once…One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world…All the time the Voice went on singing…The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose.
—C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: Collier), pp. 98-99.

I am in a season right now where my most challenging obstacle is not disability. I confess it’s gotten the better of me on those especially trying days, but God faithfully meets me in his Word and whispers, “I’m for you, child; stay the course. Trust that I’m up to something good here.” Those words quiet me.

God doesn’t just speak, however. Sometimes he sings. Elihu told Job of a God who “gives songs in the night.” I know of such a God. I’ve heard his night songs echoing softly in my mind when I thought I was out of my mind, lost and forgotten.

The Almighty has been singing a long time. Twenty-five centuries ago Zephaniah, great-great grandson of Hezekiah, said, while God “quiets” us by his love (‘ahava’, e.g., Song of Songs 2:4), he also anthems over us and silences the roar inside our hearts.

The LORD your God is among you;
He is mighty to save.
He will rejoice over you with gladness;
He will quiet you with His love;
He will rejoice over you with singing.

Zephaniah 3:17

The Hebrew text reads, “he exults over you with loud singing.” Great peals of thunder ring out from the bellows of God’s voice when soothing words won’t do. The NLT fashions it, “He will rejoice over you with joyful songs.”

How very cool is that? When we are cowed by the dissonance of our skewed culture, our Heavenly Father starts singing, and when he sings all the noise fades into the background.

The people God sings over are so beleaguered they want to quit. They’re flat-out exhausted from battling the insufferable. All they can hear are the “slurs and taunts of Moab”; the “pure speech” of Zion’s completely drowned out. God’s whispers do them little good; they need him to SHOUT his love in their ears.

That’s the beauty of Zephaniah 3:17. The word we get isn’t “lullaby”; of course there’s a time when a lullaby is appropriate. I love when the Holy Spirit quietly sings over me, calming me with his sweet reveries.

But sometimes we need reveille! Life can get so messed up we need a victory song. We need God to ROAR with assurance that all this is under Aslan’s massive paw. That’s the idea in this text. Sometimes he quiets us with love, sometimes he rejuvenates us with a victory chorus.

God is so happy in the love he bears to his people that he breaks the eternal silence, and sun and moon and stars with astonishment hear God chanting a hymn of joy.
—Charles Spurgeon

The older I get, the quieter I get. And the quieter I am, the better I’m positioned to hear the still, small Voice, so familiar, so intimate. But there are times I need an anthem, not a sonnet. God’s playlist always seems to give me just what I need in any given moment.

How about you? Are you greatly bothered by the noise in your life? Can you hear your Father in heaven sing over you? Or is the tumult drowning out the truth you need to hear? I pray the Lord of the Dance surprises you with his playlist in coming days. May God grace you with his joyous reveille and surround you with songs of deliverance.

Selah, indeed.

God is in the groaning

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:15-5:4

Fellow pilgrim, follower of Christ, brother and sister in the faith, we are not built for this world. We are made for the next.

Paul invites us to GROAN over our situation. He puts us in a chapel with a soft organ playing “Abide With Me” and “I Come To The Garden Alone” in the background.

Candles flicker in the stifling air.

Grim-faced pallbearers line the front pew and fellow mourners flank us on every side.

He sets us in front of an open casket; we look inside and see…ourselves.

This life has taken its toll on us and we see the effect of it in our corpses. We mourn. Lament. Groan.

Reality hits us:

We are not made for this world.

C.S. Lewis wrote in ‘Mere Christianity’,

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.

Paul tells us the most natural thing for us to do is GROAN.

We’re not alone, either. Romans informs us even creation feels deep pangs of anxiety and later in the same chapter, that the Holy Spirit himself groans wordless prayers in his intercessions for us.

“Jesus knows all about our struggles,
He will guide till the day is done,
There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,
No not one; no not one”

It might surprise us to turn around inside that funeral chapel and see who the mourners are. Trees and mountains, seas and forests, flowers and soil, stars and planets. Each weeping alongside the broken-hearted saints who long for release from the pain of this earth.

Nightbirde

A young 30-something singer/songwriter known to her fans as “Nightbirde” experienced career-ending cancer in her lungs, spine, and liver. The pain of her battle with cancer is found in these words she penned last March, nearly a year ago:

“After the doctor told me I was dying, and after the man I married said he didn’t love me anymore, I chased a miracle in California and sixteen weeks later, I got it. The cancer was gone. But when my brain caught up with it all, something broke. I later found out that all the tragedy at once had caused a physical head trauma, and my brain was sending false signals of excruciating pain and panic.

I spent three months propped against the wall. On nights that I could not sleep, I laid in the tub like an insect, staring at my reflection in the shower knob. I vomited until I was hollow. I rolled up under my robe on the tile. The bathroom floor became my place to hide, where I could scream and be ugly; where I could sob and spit and eventually doze off, happy to be asleep, even with my head on the toilet.”

Then she courageously added,

“Call me cursed, call me lost, call me scorned. But that’s not all. Call me chosen, blessed, sought-after. Call me the one who God whispers his secrets to. I am the one whose belly is filled with loaves of mercy that were hidden for me. Even on days when I’m not so sick, sometimes I go lay on the mat in the afternoon light to listen for Him. I know it sounds crazy, and I can’t really explain it, but God is in there—even now. I have heard it said that some people can’t see God because they won’t look low enough, and it’s true. If you can’t see him, look lower. God is on the bathroom floor.”

Nightbirde died last month.

Did you hear her groaning? This precious girl, blessed with singing talent and promised a future? Her candle snuffed out. Her song tragically morphed into her obituary.

Nightbirde groaned, but found in her groaning on the bathroom floor that God was there.

God groans when we hurt

Nightbirde included this paragraph in her brief ‘memoir’:

Call me bitter if you want to—that’s fair. Count me among the angry, the cynical, the offended, the hardened. But count me also among the friends of God. For I have seen Him in rare form. I have felt His exhale, laid in His shadow, squinted to read the message He wrote for me in the grout: “I’m sad too.”
—Nightbirde, ‘God is on the Bathroom Floor, March 9, 2021

Our Lord promised us in Isaiah 63:9 “when we suffer, He suffers.”

Mary and Martha groaned because their brother was gone. Jesus visited them in their sorrow… and what did he do?

He GROANED.

Before “Jesus wept,” he groaned. “He was deeply moved” (ESV) is, quite literally, “He was angered in spirit and troubled himself.” The word describes a warhorse snorting and stomping its hoof, itching to charge into the fray and face the enemy.

Sometimes our suffering, or seeing another suffer, makes us just plain mad.

Jesus knew that anger.

Our Savior doesn’t just “feel your pain.” He also hates it. He hates what it does to you. Yes he knows the long game, that every eye will be dried one day and there will be no more pain, but he also meets us in our moment with mercy and justice on the bathroom floor.

God is on your side in the groaning

The Lord is with you when your spouse leaves you for another; he’s with you in the doctor’s office when she tells you the bad news, the worst news. The Father’s with you at the bottom of a cliff. He’s with you when you’ve cried yourself to sleep over your prodigal child; and he is with you when your bleeding heart is inside a casket as it’s being lowered into the ground.

I’m spending my mornings reading from the book of Jeremiah.

Just this week I was reading where he felt “deceived” by God. He had just preached a sermon that got him slapped and put in chains and in a very raw and earnest moment he accused God of “deceiving him.”

This word is used throughout the prophecies of Jeremiah. The major “flaw in the system” in Judah was deception and lies and Jeremiah calls it out again and again.

Now, however, he applies it to God.

How could you, God?
Why?
This is unbecoming of you! How dare you! I am your prophet and you are treating me this way?

He threatens to retire. To quit. To just walk away.

But four verses later, he has a change of heart. God meets him in his anguish and gives him a vision. Jeremiah saw in the Spirit that God was with him…and not just as a friend!

Jeremiah saw God as a WARRIOR standing over him, protecting him, shielding him.

A eulogy of no regrets

Paul, the officiant, delivers a pitch-perfect eulogy. In our fog of beleaguered sorrow, he waxes pastoral as he answers each of our complaints with gospel hope.

“Yes, you’re wasting away…but that’s just your ‘tent’; the real you is glorious!”
“I know these troubles are all you can see; to you they seem impenetrably mountainous. I assure you, God’s love for you is an eternal mountain range and these trials are but dust in the wind.”
“Beloved child, you can see no end to your groaning, but your Father is wise, loving, and good; BUT YOUR FATHER SEES…AND HE KNOWS; he keeps his eye on the clock and his hand on the thermostat.”

We groan, but don’t give up.

Why?

Because we know a secret.

Paul stacks hyperboles, showing how small our worst trials and troubles are here on earth (as well as our happiest moments) compared to what is being prepared for us in glory.

The day after tomorrow Sandy and I will be venturing out west with friends to see the Grand Canyon. I’ve never seen it. I cannot tell you how excited I am.

Even so,

Pastor Paul tells me I can put that glorious event on one scale — standing on the precipice of the Grand Canyon — then pile on the other side of the scale, higher than the heavens, the Day of my uncovering as I stand in the presence of Jesus.

Now, that’s something for which I really, really, really can’t wait.

I only have one message. I’ve shared it forty years in life, word — and groaning — all across the country. It’s my soulsong, my life verse, my core theology, and my eulogy:

God is God,
God is good,
God is good at being God.

And (don’t forget this),

God is good at being God in all our groaning.

Selah, beloved.

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