45 then Joseph could no longer control himself before all of his attendants, and he cried out, make everyone leave my presence. So there was no one with Joseph when he made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him and Pharaoh's household heard about it. Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph. Is my father really still living?

But his brothers were not able to answer him because they were terrified in his presence. So Joseph said to his brothers, come close to me. When they had done so, he said, I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now, there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years, there will be no plowing and reaping.

But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me a father to Pharaoh, the lord of his entire household and the ruler of all Egypt. Now hurry back to my father and say to him, this is what your son Joseph says. God has made me lord of all Egypt.

Come down to me and don't delay. This whole story has been so full of family drama up to this point that it's worthy of something like Maury Povich's show or who knows what. But it was. It was intense. And it didn't just start with Joseph's family or his dad and all of his dad's wives, but it also came back into the generation before that and even the generation before that, which was Abram and Sarah and Abraham and Sarah had the bit of their own drama.

And so, you know, it really goes all the way back to that. And it stems through this whole family. And so it's no wonder that they were kind of messed up by the time Joseph's brothers had sold him into slavery. And so we're going to pick up the sermon here in kind of part of it where we'd started talking about that family relationship and some of the places it was broken and where God's following God's plan and God's love has brought healing to this family and where it can do the same for us. And so Jacob's now father in law tricks him.

He says, hey, I want you. You're going to marry this girl. But he gives her the wrong one. He gives him Leah, the one that, mmm. She didn't look as pretty, you know, he gives him the older daughter to be his wife, and he's like, this wasn't the arrangement, you know, like, I was supposed to marry the pretty one, the one that I love.

I married her. He says, well, we don't do it in that order. You got to marry. We got to marry off the oldest one first. And he's thinking nobody's going to want her, so we got to do some trickery to get her married off, you know?

And so they. They did that. And he says, well, I'll work another seven years for the one that I want. So he marries her and then works another seven years, and then he continues working for him, and then he gets out of there. But he has kids with not only each of those women, but also they bring, because they're in competition with each other to provide more sons for their husband.

They each provide one of their servant girls to provide sons to their husband. It's kind of real weird, right? Like I told you, the drama in this is, like, kind of off the charts. And so they each one are providing sons for the husband, and yet he still has the favorite wife, Rachel, the beautiful one, the first one that he really wanted. And so when she bears a son, finally, that's his favorite son, Joseph, the guy we were reading about here.

And Joseph, he's. Have you ever had maybe a child or someone or a spouse who knows somebody that you just wanted to protect and make sure that there was no harm that came to them? This was what Jacob did with Joseph. So he gave him a coat. Now, we call it a coat of many colors, and it might have been a very ornate and beautiful coat, a coat that you don't get dirty.

You know, you don't go out and pick up sheep that are in the mud and bleeding and hurt when you're wearing that coat, you don't want to get that coat dirty. So guess what? It's like a status symbol. He's not the worker out there. He's the one that just kind of, you know, gets to take it easy and be protected.

Now, it could be also, it might be that we translated it wrong when they translated a coat with many colors. It could have actually been a coat with long sleeves. Now, you're thinking, what does that have to do with anything? Well, it would have been meaning sleeves that were, like, below the fingertips. In other words, you're not doing any work with that coat on because your hands are covered.

So either way, no matter what it is, it's a status coat. You know, it's a status symbol that says, I'm not out here doing this work. And his brothers knew it. His brothers knew that he was the favorite son. The second favorite was his younger brother that was born to the same mother to Rachel.

And so Joseph is this treasured son, this favorite son, and he's going to be groomed to somehow take over things. It seems like even though there's a birth order, a birthright that would happen. And that birthright would mean the oldest son would get a double portion that the other ones would receive so that he could carry on the family business and continue providing for the family. But instead of that, it seemed like Joseph was headed that route. And so what they decided to do was they decided to get rid of him.

Now, interestingly enough, Joseph had been having these dreams throughout his life. He'd been having these dreams of something happening where the other people in the family, like, bowed down before him, almost like they were worshiping him or paying respect to him. And he would share these dreams with his brothers and with his parents, and they would be like, man, we really hate you, you know? Like, we just hate you so much, Joseph. And even his dad was like, hey, man, maybe just calm down, okay?

Next time you have that dream, just write it in your journal or something, like, don't tell everyone. And so Joseph, he goes through. He has these dreams. He tells them, and so they nicknamed him the dreamer. They nicknamed him the dreamer.

So one day, his father sends him out to the fields to check up on his brother. Now, maybe he's supposed to see if they need anything. Are they low on, like, supplies or food? And Joseph could go back and arrange that. Who knows?

But they see him. They're like, here comes that dreamer. Let's take care of him for good once and for all. And so they're talking about killing him. Well, finally, the eldest brother, Reuben, decides that he's going to, like, take charge, and he's going to say, you know what?

Let's not kill him. I'm going to save him. So instead of killing him right away, they put him down in a well or a pit for a while, and Reuben's planning on taking him out of there and, you know, just kind of getting him away to safety, away from his brothers. Except before he could do that, some men came past that. Were you.

They were traders. They were like, I mean, I don't know. Like, today we have people that'll buy and sell just about anything, you know? And so it's like they've got a train of camels. And they got all kinds of stuff on there that they've bought along the way and they're taking it somewhere else to sell it and they're willing to also do that with people.

And so the brothers sell Joseph to these traders for a price to become a slave somewhere. And then those people will take him into Egypt and they'll put them up and put them up for auction or sale or whatever and sell him as a slave. Now what ends up happening with Joseph is Joseph ends up being sold to a man that was of high authority named Potiphar. Potiphar worked in, you know, kind of in Pharaoh's courts. He was a.

He was a wealthy man, a powerful man. And Joseph starts out in the bottom there as a servant, but he does so well with everything he does that he gets named to be the head of all of Potiphar's household. He has control over everything. And Potiphar doesn't have to worry about it. He says, hey, this is a good deal for me.

Like, I just, I go about my day. I don't worry about anything. And Joseph has it handled and everything's going well. And Potiphar's wife takes note of him and says, he's a good looking young man. My husband's gone all the time.

I want to get with him. Joseph says, nope, you're the only thing that's off limits for me. I got a key to every door, but I don't have permission to be with you and I'm not going to do that because that would be a sin before God. He didn't say because Potiphar wouldn't like it or any of that. Joseph had this fear of God and he says, I'm not going to do that.

And so what he ends up doing is she keeps after him day after day and finally she just gets tired of being rejected. So she actually turns it and says, joseph tried to force me and I got away, but he needs to go to jail. And so Potiphar has no choice. I think he didn't even believe his wife, but he still had to do it anyway because he has to live with her. And so he's like, fine, you know what?

Okay. And so he gets Joseph locked up in jail and now Potiphar has a job again of running in his own household. Things aren't good for this guy, but it doesn't matter. He's kind of like this scene, you know, he fades out. Now we see Joseph.

The spotlight comes on him. Joseph is in a dungeon, but rather than being kind of feeling down about himself, he just kind of goes about being a good citizen of the prison, and he gets noticed by what we might consider the warden, who puts him in charge of it. This is like Shawshank redemption here, you know? I love that movie. It's such a good movie, and it's like, so there he is, and he's just running things for the warden of the prison, and he's doing well at it, so much so that the warden doesn't worry about anything.

It's like we have that saying, the inmates running the asylum. Well, he's the prisoner running the prison. He's doing that, and it's working well. And then one day, a couple guys have a dream, and Joseph's like, I'm good with dreams. Do you guys know my nickname?

It's the dreamer. I was here for this moment, you know? And so Joseph, he. He hears their dreams, and the first one, he's like, oh, man. Good news for you.

Like, your job is the cup bearer to the king, which, there's that person I always mix up the name, the sommelier or whatever that picks the wine. You know, that's part of his job. The other part of his job is, like, also drinking it to make sure nobody poisoned it. So your life expectancy isn't too great if the king isn't doing well. You kind of want to check, like, you know, we have our, like, presidents have their approval rating.

You kind of want to check the approval rating for the king every day when you wake up and make sure that nobody's really hating him right now because they might have poisoned his drink, and you might be the first one to sip it and make sure it wasn't poisoned. And if it was, you're dead, you know, and so it saves the king's life, but you're kind of not having a good day after that, but at least you're not in prison. And he has this dream, and Joseph interprets it and says, good news. You're going to go back to your job. In three days, you'll be out of here scot free.

You'll be back to your position of putting the cup in the king's hand. This other guy's like, oh, good. What's my dream mean? I'm the chief baker, you know? And he's like, oh, sorry.

Bad news, my brother. Like, in three days, the king's gonna take your head off. And that happened, you know, like, both dreams were interpreted correctly. And Joseph said to this guy that was gonna live, he's like, remember me. Like, when you get to the king, like, put a good word in his ear, remember me.

I'm not. I shouldn't be here. And he's like, yeah, buddy, we all have heard that, like, everybody in prison shouldn't be there, right? And so he's like, I shouldn't be here. Well, two years passes, and finally the king, pharaoh, king of Egypt, like, the biggest guy in the world at that day, has a dream that troubles him.

He actually has a couple dreams, and they troubled him so much that Joseph says, the cupbearer says, I know this guy named Joseph, and he can interpret it. So they get Joseph out of prison, clean him up, probably bring him in before pharaoh. He interprets the dream. And Joseph says, this means there's going to be seven years where everything, everything's growing really well in the land. It's going to be like a bumper crop every year for seven years, followed up by seven years of drought that'll be so bad that you won't even remember those seven good years.

And so Pharaoh said, you know what? The spirit of the gods is in this man. So who better to take over running things than this guy? So now Joseph, for the third time in just a few years, is going to be running something this time, it's the entire land of Egypt. And he will eventually have basically an influence over, literally, if people live or die throughout the known world around there, because Egypt will be the only place that has any grain.

And so then two years into that cycle, where there's a famine throughout the whole region, the whole area, these people, the family of Joseph, who had sold him and told their dad that Joseph was dead, and they think his dad thinks he's dead. They've forgotten about Joseph, probably. Unless they start thinking and having guilty thoughts, they've forgotten about him. They're not expecting to see him in Egypt. By the time they sold him to the slave traders, they probably thought his life would only be a few years long, and somehow he would just expire from being overworked and mistreated and abused as a slave.

They think they'll never see Joseph again. And of course, he probably looks like an Egyptian. Probably has, like, hair, clothing, maybe even some kind of makeup that they had. Who knows? Joseph doesn't look like the Joseph they know.

So they show up to buy grain, and he does this great, like, abuse. Not abuse, revenge. I mean, revenge ritual kind of thing where he, like, you know, like, gives them back their money and their grain that they bought and just does all this stuff and toys with them. But what he's trying to do is get his, his younger brother, Benjamin, who's now their father's new favorite son. You know, he tries to get Benjamin and his dad there so that he can see them.

And what Joseph ends up doing is being, you know, working towards a restoration. I might not have gone through all this. I don't know what I would have done. But he goes through this process where he's restored with his brothers. So think about all these pieces in Joseph's life.

Think about every peace that was broken. First of all, he had these dreams of what he would one day do that he's actually doing now, but it keeps getting shattered. He gets shattered when he gets sold by his brothers. The people that you feel like you should be able to trust the most, and yet they're stabbing him in the back and selling him. He thinks that he lands in Potiphar's house and thinks maybe this will be a good place to live now until tragedy befalls him there.

And then he's in the dungeon and he gets out of the dungeon and now he's in Pharaoh's courts. The japanese people have this repair they do with bowls and vases called kintsugi, and they repair these broken vessels. I think we got a picture of this one. This Kintsugi is where you repair these broken vessels by gluing them back together and then putting gold down the cracks. Like, you repair them with gold and then glaze over it.

It's a way of repairing it that it actually looks better than before. Also, it has gold in it. So, like, that's a savings account, right? You can always take that gold off if you need it later. That's a bad joke.

Anyway, so they make these vessels more beautiful, like they're treasured more after they've been broken. Now, of course, you can't break it on purpose and then do this. It has to be broken by accident. I don't know why. That's just their rules.

Okay. Like, I don't have these rules. So when I look at that, I think about our relationships today. I mean, not just this bowl. I mean, us as human beings.

There were four relationships that we were created to have. Four relationships that we are created to have. And I'm going to talk about them for just a couple minutes. The first relationship that we were created to have was our relationship with God. We are created to be in relationship with God.

I'm going to talk about these each in just a minute. The next relationship that we are created to have is simply with other people that might be neighbors, friends, family, relatives, whatever it is. We are created to have a relationship with God and relationship with others. Those two are quite obvious. When Jesus was asked what's the greatest commandment?

He talked about those, too. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. That's the second commandment. He says all the other commandments are hanging from those two, or they've come out from those two commands to love God and love others. Now, the next relationship we have, and this one is a little bit different because it's not that same type of relationship.

It's not necessarily a spiritual one. And yet there's some type of connection we have. We might call it our environment or the earth. I don't mean like environmentalism like, you see these people going to these summits in their private jets and then riding a bike the last hundred yards to make it look like they care about the environment. You know, I don't know if you guys see that hypocrisy on the world stage.

I'm not talking about environmentalism as big business that countries get involved in and corporations get involved in. I'm talking about simply, we live here. If we trash the place we live, it's not a good place anymore. Is that. That's simply we have that kind of relationship with the earth.

When we read the creation story, it says that God formed mankind out of the dirt or dust of the ground. We say things that memorial or funeral services that comes from the scripture. From dust you came to dust, you return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We think of that sometimes on ash Wednesdays.

A lot of times you'll see people with the ash cross on their forehead, and it's a reminder that, you know, we're simply made out of these organic materials and we belong to God out of the earth that he made. We'll talk about that in just a moment. The last one is our relationship with ourself or to ourself. And you're thinking, how do I relate to myself? Hang on a second.

We'll get there. The first one, obviously, the relationship with God. Just take a couple minutes on each of these. If we don't have our relationship with God figured out, in other words, if we don't get that into the right place in our lives, in other words, if we put God on a back burner or up on the shelf, only to pull him down when we need him, we don't have a good relationship with God if you have somebody that you don't talk to for years and you call them up or you go visit them, you might have a great meeting or reunion with them. But that relationship isn't as deep or true as it could be.

If you spent more time with them, maybe it's somebody that you don't really want to have that long or close of a relationship with and you're happy to see them every few years. I've got some friends like that that I can see them, and I'm happy to see them, but I don't feel the need that I have to stay up with them all the time. And so if I'm in their town or in their state, I might make, you know, the opportunity, take the opportunity to go see them and catch up. But I don't feel like we have to be close all the time. But there's some people that if I don't see them every week or two, I feel like we've grown distant.

And it's like, hey, we need to hang out, get back together, grab dinner, or go. Go to each other's house or something like that. If we don't put our relationship with God in such a way that we're staying close with him, what we end up missing out on is the very purpose for which we are created primarily. We were created to be in relationship with God. We were created to know God and to be known by God.

And when we know God that well, we understand our purpose on this earth, we understand our own existence. People that don't focus on their relationship with God or on knowing God have a lot more questions about why do we exist? Why are we here? They tend to not understand that or grasp that very well, and they look far and wide for that answer, never quite understanding that our purpose for existence is found in our relationship with God. As we relate to God well, we understand our need to relate to others well.

God is a God that is in close relationship or close fellowship. We call God the Trinity, the three and one, the Father, the son and the spirit of. Now, this is a complex thing that we're going to try to boil down as simply as we can. Three in one. There's three distinct persons in the Trinity.

God as father, God as son, God as holy spirit, and yet they are one God. And so there are three and yet one. And it's a complicated thing that we don't have time to focus on the whole bit of it today. But Goddess, by his nature, is in community with himself. That seems kind of odd, right?

And yet that's how it is. And so when we understand that, that God is a God of relationship, a God that is in, we could call it community. Together, as himself, as one, we understand that we are also created for community. We're created to have relationships with one another. Now, that's difficult sometimes for us to grasp.

Like, how do I go about that? How do I have these relationships with other people? Do I have to have relationships with my next door neighbor or the person across the street? Do I even have to be close to those who I am closely related to by blood? I don't know.

I don't have answers for that. But I do know that you're created to have close relationships with other people. And in other words, you weren't made to be alone. God says that when he creates human beings, but the first one is a man named Adam. And he says he looks at Adam, and Adam has all these animals, and they pass before him, and he names them, he calls them what they are, and then he looks around and there's nothing like him.

And God says it's not good for a man to be alone. Now, his ultimate solution for that was creating not just a woman, because he had already created mankind and male and female, but he creates a special woman just for Adam, this woman named Eve that becomes Adam's wife. The two are joined as one flesh. They become united as one. This is why we talk about what biblical or christian marriage is, this, this uniting of these two people that become one flesh.

When we do that, when we see that, when that happens, that is something that God is putting together that we can't do under human terms. It's a spiritual thing. It's not a moral thing, a legal thing. It's not a regular relationship thing. This is only something that God can put together.

And when God puts a marriage together, when God puts these two together, they have become one. This is why by the time of Jesus, they had questions about what happens when somebody gets divorced, what is happening there? And Jesus essentially throws it back to the beginning. He says God created them for this union. And if you break that apart, there's no longer two whole beings.

It's two torn and separated beings. Now, the beautiful thing is that God can bring restoration to us. When that happens, some of us are walking testimony to that amenity. And so we are made for marriage, for family, and to care for those who can't care for themselves. Those are some of the core relationships that God has designed for human beings.

Then the next one we talked about was our environment or the earth that we live in. The earth was created to sustain our lives. Everything God made was so that we could have our lives sustained from it and benefit from its blessings. So when we live in, let's call it harmony with earth. When we live in a.

In a state where we aren't abusing the earth, but rather we are taking care of it, it takes care of us. That's not a kind of a mother nature viewpoint or a spiritual viewpoint about it. That's just simply God created the earth and created us to live in it as its caretakers. In the garden of Eden, the first people were made. They were placed there to care for the garden.

God set it in motion. It's our job to keep it healthy. In a way, God still has his hand on our earth, but yet he has put it here for our benefit and for us to not, let's say, overrun it or abuse it. In fact, I heard something just this week. It was a pastor speaking at a conference on technology.

You think, well, what does that have to do? You know, how did that happen? He's given a biblical perspective on technology, and this is really interesting. He said that God has placed all of the natural resources that we have found. He has placed them in the earth for our benefit.

And at different times, different civilizations and different countries have needed different things. At a time where they learned what coal could do, they found lots of coal. And they were digging for coal. And then fossil fuels, oils and petroleum and things like that. Maybe it's a mineral or an element, a metal of some kind that they need at different eras, and they learn how to work that metal.

Now we're looking for new deposits of things like cobalt and lithium for a lot of the batteries that they use and all kinds of different things. I don't know how long that goes into the future, but they keep finding more and more of that. And it's interesting that that was never a concern until recently, when we start putting it in the technology that we have. In other words, for the time that we live in, in the technology advancement stage that we're in, God has provided resources in the earth for our benefit. But how we go about getting those from the earth and how.

How we use our human resources, our people, to get those things and how we treat or mistreat and abuse them in that process are the things that we are held accountable for. Technology isn't bad, and using the earth's natural resources isn't bad. It's when we mistreat people along the way or mistreat the earth to get to them where we end up suffering. And so what God is doing in all of these things is working to bring wholeness and healing to relationships that have gone bad. The last one, though, maybe the trickiest one to explain to, is our relationship to ourself.

And I can hear if, especially if you haven't heard me talk on this one before, I can hear what you're thinking, pastor. I am myself. How do I relate to myself? Well, when you think of me, you're like, close your eyes and you're like, okay, this is who I am. Not who nick is, but who you are.

Do you picture that part of you that you can't see, or do you picture your body? You see, the thing is, we are an eternal being. We are a soul. That part of us goes on in eternity. Your soul has a body.

And within that union of soul and body, you have your mind, your will, your emotions, and those things have to line up in a certain way. In other words, even though your soul lives on forever, you are still in this body right now, here on this earth. And in this body, you kind of need it to be, like, healthy enough to get through life until that moment where you step into eternity. Right? And so we have our bodies that we try to take care of, and sometimes we do that better than other times.

And sometimes things are out of our control and we go see doctors, maybe have medication or surgery or things like that. But then there's the. This part. This part. There's a part in our mind, there's a part in our heart, our will, our emotions.

And that's all part of how we might say we relate to ourselves. Sometimes people have what we might call a dysphoria about their body. They don't like its shape. They don't like its size. They don't like its gender, whatever.

I don't know. There's all these things going on in the world today, and people struggle through all of these things. And they, as they were doing that, we have to begin understanding who we are. That as God created us, and there are times that the way the world tells us we should be doesn't line up with how God created us. The question is, who are we going to listen to God, who has given us his word and told us about ourselves and about our bodies and about who we are?

Are we going to listen to whatever the flavor of the day is in news media and social media, we're about at the end of a month that to celebrate people becoming something other than what God created them to be. I'm not mad about it. It breaks my heart, though, because as I look at the word of God and I look at how God has created us, I see people, their families, being torn apart by differing opinions on this. I see people living in such a way that they say, you know what? I don't think that I was born right.

So I need to change how I am. I see people that. I mean, when I was a teenager, the biggest thing of the day was like, anorexia and bulimia. All these girls that I knew, and some of the guys were struggling with that, and they were using it as a way to change their body or control their environment in some way or another. And that was sad, and that broke my heart too.

And so when we look at that and we say, this relationship we have with ourself, we have to understand how we were created, who we were created to be. And that doesn't work unless we get that first relationship, right. And then if we're worried too much about what others think, that's that second relationship, right, our relationship with others. God created us to have healthy and good relationships in these four areas. When one of those areas starts getting out of a healthy zone, those relationships start to crumble and they need to be restored or healed.

Kind of like Kintsugi with the pottery. God desires to heal what's been broken. God desires to bring some type of restoration. And sometimes there's still those marks or scars of where things were broken. And yet the way God puts us back together is perhaps more beautiful than how it started, or at least how we could have ever imagined it.

In all four of these broken relationships, God desires to bring healing to us. All throughout the Bible, we see different words about it. I mean, I could rattle off a whole bunch of scriptures, but I didn't write them all down and I forgot them. All this full of it. You start reading the Bible about all the times that God talks about restoring, healing, bringing some type of wholeness to us.

It's all over there. Interestingly enough, just in these verses we read in Genesis 45, we see it hinted at these four relationships being restored in some way or another. We see Joseph understanding his role that God had placed him there for. He says to his brothers, it wasn't because of you that I ended up here. I mean, yeah, it was their fault, but, like, God was the one that ordained that.

Joseph understood that he was there because of God's will, because of God's plan to save all kinds of people. Joseph was there. Joseph was there because God had been preparing him for that moment for years now, years upon years. And Joseph was there because God had a plan to save people. Eventually that would be through one of the descendants of the children of Israel, who is Jesus Christ, our messiah.

Joseph, he not only is reconciled to his brothers and to his father, who thought he was dead, we seem to see that Joseph had a good relationship with God, that Joseph understood himself very well, that he knew that he wasn't going to do anything that was harmful to him. Even though he could have taken on all kinds of depression, self pity, self hatred, all kinds of things that he could have done at any point along the journey, whether it was when he was in the pit just before his brother sold him or whether he's being dragged along behind the traders to be sold as a slave or being bought into Potiphar's household or later thrown in the dungeon. At any one of these points along the way, Joseph could have gotten into a very unhealthy place. But I believe he focused on knowing that God had promised him some things, that God had shown him these dreams back in the day, that Joseph was going to do something for God's purposes. And so he stayed close to God, he stayed rooted in his relationship with God and then he had a healthy relationship with himself.

And if you think, well, pastor, you're missing one. Yeah. That whole thing with, like, the environment, because of what God had shown him, Joseph, he didn't do anything special himself. He just understood that God created all of this and that things were going to go wrong for a few years when the rain stopped and the crops wouldn't grow, but that for all these years he was going to take the resources that the ground provided by the hand of goddess. Seven plentiful years, not just healthy years, not just bumper crop years, seven years where the ground produced more produce than anyone could have ever dreamed.

And Joseph starts storing it up and saving it up so that they would be able to use it when everybody is hungry and to preserve life. So Joseph works through all these things. And in all these four relationships, he allowed God to bring holiness and healness and restoration in there. I wonder where we have in our lives which one or ones of these relationships you need the most work in. I wonder if maybe your walk with God just is kind of like, you know, second tier, third tier, just far down on your list.

I wonder if you've never really thought, like, well, I don't know. You know, I think God's there. I think he's real. But I don't really know if there's much for me there. I don't really know if I need to walk with God.

I don't understand that. Well, okay, maybe. Maybe that's where you've been. But I'll tell you, how much better would your life have been at different points along the way if you had been relying on God, resting in him, taking the words of Jesus, where he says, come to me, all those of you who are weary and heavily laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, for my burden is easy and my yoke is light.

I wonder if, when Jesus talks about being the light of the world, if you've walked in a bit of darkness and you say, God, I could use some of your light in me. You know, it's interesting. We came from a place that had these tall windows and the sunlight would come into them. Our house has these short little windows. And I just noticed this morning, I woke up and I was like, it's kind of dark in here.

It's just amazing how much different a little bit of light makes you feel. And God is a God of light. He says, my light is the life of the world. And yet, so often we're content to walk in darkness. We're content to walk far from God.

He desires to have that relationship with you. If you don't have that in the proper place and perspective in your life, all the other places will fall apart. It'll be so easy to look at every little thing that goes wrong, every little problem that comes up, every little time where somebody says something or does something, and you'll just fixate on all those things. But when we get our life focused on God, when we focus on that relationship with God, it's not about a whole bunch of rules. And did you follow all of these things?

It's not about, like, did you conform to the proper things to become a Christian or whatever? You know, there's some people that are christians only in name and not in practice. And there's some people that are christians only by practice but not by relationship. Have you ever met anyone like that? They look like they do all the things that a Christian is supposed to do, and yet there's nothing in here.

There's nothing in their heart between them and God. And sadly enough, it's obvious in those people. Oh, I know. We're not supposed to judge people, right? Like, we're not supposed to judge people.

I'm really nothing. It's just what we observe. It's just a matter of seeing it in their lives and in their hearts. Folks, if you don't have that relationship with God, you're going to miss out on so much and every other relationship is going to fall apart from there on. Joseph sought to be restored to his brothers.

And the story goes after this, that especially after their father, that everybody moves to Egypt. But then later their father dies and now his brothers are thinking, oh man, he's really got it in for us now. Now that dad's dead, he's going to come after us. And Joseph says, guys, calm down with that, okay? Like, I could have done stuff to you a long time ago.

Do you know who I am? You know, I'm the guy. Like, Pharaoh doesn't even have to do anything anymore because I've got all this authority and I run it for him. I could have done away with you a long time ago. I could have left you to die in the famine.

But goddess, God has restored us together. Joseph knew that that was important. I'll close with two scriptures that I want to read to you first, one of them is in two corinthians, chapter five, verses 18 and 19 says, all this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and he gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That while God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, he was not counting people's sins against them and he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. Then I want to share.

Colossians 313, bear with each other and forgive one another. And if any of you has any grievance against someone, forgive as the Lord forgave you. We are created for deep relationships that are healed and restored by understanding God's purpose for our lives and by forgiving one another. Amen. Hey, thanks for checking in with us.

Hope your relationships are everything that God wants for you. Be sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel or to the podcast platform of your choice so that you can stay up to date with everything that we put out there that's designed to help you in your walk with Christ.