Sermon Tone Analysis

“Oh, My God!”

God is Great, God is Good?

Jeff Jones, Senior Pastor

March 2~/4, 2007

 

 

We are in our new series, “Oh, My God!”

Last week Lanier Burns was here and spoke about “the greatness and goodness of God.”

It was a great message, and a great truth, the greatness and goodness of God.

Even kids sometimes pray that before meals: “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.”

Sounds great, but has life ever made you wonder how both of those things can really be true?

That God is both great, meaning he is in control of your life, and good, meaning that he has your best interest at heart.

At times life makes us ask an honest question:  If God is good and great, than why does he allow to happen in the world and in your life and mine all that he does?

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Today we are not talking about the problem of evil, why God allows evil in the world.

That’s a big question that God hasn’t explained.

Today we are going to talk about the problem of suffering, why God allows certain things to happen in our lives.

In other words, if God is good and great, than why does he allow some of the painful, hard things into our lives that he does?

I’d like you to take a few minutes right now and do something for me that we don’t do often…but I want you to get in a group of 5 or so people and one person in the group share an experience in your life or in the life of someone you know that really does make you ask some hard questions about why God would allow it…that make you wonder how God could be both good and great and still allow it to happen.

Take a couple of minutes and talk about it.

Those things you just talked about make you wonder, don’t they?

I wonder in my life why I had to go through a time of depression…I wonder why Christy’s mom had to die when Christy was only 14…I wonder why God allowed my granddad who was a pastor for 50 faithful years to get Alzheimer’s and discover so from the pulpit as he got up to speak and couldn’t remember why he was up there…why did *that* have to be his last sermon?

Interesting to me is the fact that God doesn’t seem to mind us wondering.

He doesn’t feel the need to explain himself either, but when you read the Psalms which he included in the Bible, many of them are songs of complaint, the psalmist wondering why.

Today we are going to talk about hard things, about a God who is good and great but allows things to come into our lives that make us doubt how both of those can be true.

And what we will see today is that maybe it is not God who is out of whack, but just maybe it is our perspective that is out of whack.

We have a hard time putting the words “good” and “hard” together, but maybe that is our issue.

If you think about it, our whole lives in 2007 American suburbia are built around making life as easy as possible.

We are consumed with making our lives easier.

Advertisers know that, and they appeal to our desire for safety, comfort, and speed.

Sometimes on airplanes I get bored enough to read those Skymall catalogues, like this one.

*Slide: _________________ :* Skymall catalogue .jpg

They are so cool, because they have all these things designed to make life easier.

I sit there thinking, “Oh, that would be great…how have I lived without that?

I’ve got to get that!”

It’s like this Staples Easy Button.

We look for every easy button we can find.

And if we are really honest, most of the time we expect God to be one big cosmic Easy Button.

Really.

Our assumption goes something like this:

 

*Slide: _________________ :* If God is in control of my life, and He is good, then He will make my life easy.

He will not allow hard.*

* 

 

Hard is bad, and easy is good.

Yet, the Bible has a very different perspective that we need to be challenged by.

Turn with me in your Bibles to Genesis 39-40, which is the story of a guy named Joseph who definitely got a bad rap in life.

But much of his life sounds super, like God is really both great and good and making it obvious, like this passage

 

*Slide: _________________ : Genesis 39:2-6*/ /

/ /

/2 The Lord was with Joseph and he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master.

3 When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did, 4 Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant.

Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned.

5 From the time he put him in charge of his household and of all that he owned, the Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph.

The blessing of the Lord was on everything Potiphar had, both in the house and in the field.

6 So he left in Joseph’s care everything he had; with Joseph in charge, he did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate.

Now Joseph was well-built and handsome…/

 

Okay, this makes sense.

God is with Joseph, which means he makes Joseph successful in all that he does.

Like those “Life is Good” t-shirts and hats, God is giving Joseph a life is good experience.

He is so successful that Potiphar promotes him to be the manager of everything, and Potiphar is freed up to worry about more important things, like which tee time is he going to take at the country club today…at the Chic-fil-A drive through is he getting the nuggets or the sandwich.

All is good.

Yet, there is this troubling little word that we kind of snuck right over:

 

*Slide: _________________ :* /The Lord was with Joseph. . .

and he lived in the house of his Egyptian *master*./

Master?

What is that all about?

Joseph was a slave, and he was a slave because he was kidnapped, beaten up by his brothers, and sold into slavery by them.

Joseph grew up as the favored son of his father, and his brothers hated him for it.

One day they decided that they would tell his dad that Joseph was killed by a wild animal, and they sold him into slavery…they got rid of their brother and got some cash at the same time…a pretty good deal.

Just not such a great deal for Joseph.

He ends up in a foreign land as a slave, far from his family, far from all the dreams he once had for his life.

He was sold into slavery, but the Bible says that the Lord was with him in slavery.

But do you know what happens next?

Next on the scene is Potiphar’s wife, who has watched too many /Desperate Housewives/ episodes and decides she wants Joseph for herself.

Joseph rejects her sexual advances, but one day she comes on very strong, and he runs away leaving his cloak behind.

She makes up a story that he tried to rape her, and you wonder what is going to happen.

Well, if God is good, then the truth will come out.

Potiphar will realize his no-good wife is lying and that Joseph who has been nothing but faithful and honest is telling the truth…but no.

Joseph gets thrown in prison.

But then there is this crazy phrase that gets repeated four times in the Joseph story, “the Lord was with Joseph.”

*Slide: _________________ :* Genesis 39:20-21

 

again says, /But while Joseph was there in the prison, 21 the Lord was with him; /Wait a minute.

I thought if the Lord was with him, he wouldn’t have allowed him to go to an ancient near eastern prison, which would have been a horrible existence.

Again, though his story improves:

 

*Slide: _________________ :* Genesis 39:21-23

 

[God]/ showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden.

22 So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there.

23 The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.

/Okay, so now we are back on track.

But if you know the story, you know the trouble that Joseph is going to have in prison.

Someone promises to get him out but forgets about him for 2 years.

For two extra years, God just leaves him there in prison.

It leaves us with some big questions.

If God was truly with Joseph, then why slavery?

Why prison?

Why did he get the promise of freedom from prison only to be forgotten?

Any of that make sense?

What we learn from the Joseph story is a challenge to our assumption we shared a few minutes ago:

 

*Slide: _________________ :* If God is in control of my life, and he is good, then he will make my life easy.

He will not allow hard.

*/ /*

God was in complete control, and was with Joseph the whole time.

But he was with Joseph “in the hard.”

Here is the corrective from Joseph’s life, and the rest of the Bible:

 

*Slide: _________________ :* God is in the hard, and his goodness is often expressed in difficulty.