Sermon Tone Analysis
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Intro
Hello.
Thank you Reverend Yu for asking me to speak tonight.
Before I start, next week, most of y’all will be going back to school.
Some of you are starting middle school, some of you are starting high school, and for some of you, you’re starting your final year of high school, and for some of you, you’re starting college.
Most of y’all have a plan.
You have a plan for how you want this next year to go.
Your classes are planned, your schedules are planned, everything is planned out so that whatever goal you’ve set for your future can be reached.
But, as most of you might know by now, and if you don’t know, you will learn soon enough, that life tends to disrupt our carefully crafted plans.
When I moved away for college for the first time, I moved to Clemson, South Carolina.
It was about 600 miles (or 10 hours) away from all of my family, and I was super excited to be in a different state, surrounded by new people, but right before I left, my grandmother got put in the hospital.
Now, as a kid, my grandmother was my best friend.
I was the first grandkid, on her side of the family, so she always spoiled me.
And there’s still a running joke in my family that I was her favorite grandkid.
But, she’s in the hospital, I’ve moved 600 miles away, and I get a phone call the day before classes start, and my mom says she has cancer, and it doesn’t look good.
And so what happened, is I made it through the semester, barely, and after it was all done, I moved back home.
And in February of 2012, so about two months after I moved back home, my grandmother passes away.
And during those few months that I was away, life was hard.
My first semester of college wasn’t filled with the success that I had planned.
It wasn’t filled with the excitement and friendships that I had planned.
It was an extremely lonely point of my life.
I’m a pretty extroverted person, but I spent most of that semester hiding in my dorm room.
I just didn’t want to see people.
I hardly went to church, and I had no community.
I prayed every single day for God to heal my grandmother.
And during all of that, I was like, “God, where are you?”
Why am I suffering like this?
Why is my family suffering like this? Don’t you love your children, God? Don’t you want what’s best for me?
How is this what’s best for me, God? Don’t all things work out for the good of those who love you, God? That’s what your word says?
Where are you, God?
So that’s what we’re going to try and see tonight.
Where is God when we’re suffering?
Where is God when our lives aren’t going how we planned them?
How is God in control of all things?
So, turn in your bibles to Genesis chapter 37. I’ll ready the first 11 verses, and then I’ll tell the rest of the story, which spans from chapter 37 all the way to chapter 50.
Exposition of the Story
We start off here with Joseph introduced as the favorite son of Jacob.
Now, Jacob had two wives, Leah and Rachel.
If you want to read that story on your own, it’s pretty interesting, but we don’t have time to get into it tonight.
Just know, Jacob had two wives.
But, Rachel was his favorite.
And for many years, she was unable to have children.
And so, she finally does, and they name him Joseph, and Joseph is Jacob’s favorite kid.
And because he’s the favorite, his dad gives him the nice multi-colored robe.
He’s literally wearing favoritism.
And his brothers see this, and they hate Joseph because of it.
Not only this, but Joseph is kind of a snitch.
Back in the middle of verse two it says “and Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father.”
His brothers did something, and Joseph told on them.
So, they don’t like him.
And to make matters worse, Joseph has a dream, and in his dream his brothers are all bowing down to him.
And so he wakes up and thinks “oh man, I gotta go tell my bothers this!” Now picture this with me.
Some of y’all have younger siblings.
Imagine if one day they come up to you and say, “Yo, at some point in the future, you’re going to bow down to me.”
If my brother would have ever said this to me when we were growing up… he would been out!
So, Joseph didn’t necessarily help with his brothers hate towards him.
But the story continues, and one day the brothers are out working in a field, and from a distance they see Joseph walking towards them, still wearing the coat.
And they’re like “Here he comes, the dreamer.”
You know what, one says, I’m really tired of this kid.
Let’s get rid of him for good.
And so they plot to kill him, but one of the brothers, Reuben, speaks up and he says, nooo, let’s just throw him in a pit.
And Reuben planned to come back later to get him out, but as we’ll see, he never gets that chance.
Reuben leaves, then the brothers grab him, and throw him into the bottom of a pit, and then they sit down and eat lunch.
And as they’re eating lunch, they see a caravan of Ishmaelites, another tribe, coming towards them, and Judah, another brother, comes up with the idea of selling Joseph to them as a slave.
So they grab Joseph, take his coat off, and they sell him for 20 shekels to the Ishmaelites.
And he’s then shipped off to Egypt to be a slave.
Then the brothers they take the coat, dip it in some blood, and make it look like Joseph was attacked and killed by an animal.
And then they go and tell their father their made up story of what happened.
And then Jacob, their father, spends the next 22 years mourning the death of Joseph.
We’ll fast-forward a little bit to .
Here, Joseph is in Egypt serving as a slave in Potiphar’s house.
Potiphar was a high-ranking official within the Egyptian government, and he purchased Joseph from the Ishmaelites.
Look with me at
Joseph is a slave in Egypt, but God is with him, and everything Joseph does in Potiphar’s house is seemingly blessed by God.
The circumstance isn’t ideal, but God is still working in it, but then the wife of Potiphar approaches Joseph.
And she makes a few passes at Joseph and tries to get him to sleep with her.
Joseph resists the temptation each time, and the final time, he flees from it.
And here is a helpful side note: All of us are going to be faced with temptation towards sin this year.
Maybe it’s sexual sin, maybe it’s looking stuff up on the internet, maybe it’s the temptation to start vaping with your friends.
I don’t know what is, you probably don’t know what it’ll be, but the mistake we often make is, let me just do it once, or let me just stay here, and I’ll just fight it.
But we can’t fight it.
Joseph couldn’t fight it, and he knew that, so he ran.
We have to run.
Your friend offer you their juul, you gotta run from it, or you’ll ending up doing it.
We can’t fight it off.
The LORD fights for us, but if we remain in the situation where temptation is always present, we’ll eventually give in to it.
And another I want to say here: This story has often been used to blame girls for tempting guys.
The text, when abuse by people, can be twisted to say that.
Let me just say, that’s not true.
You might be tempted by an individual, you may be tempted by another guy or another girl, but if you fall into the temptation, only you are to blame.
All that to say, is that this text should not be used to blame our sisters for the temptation that a guy might experience.
But anyway, We have to flee temptation just as Joseph did.
The only problem with Joseph, is that as he ran away, Potiphar’s wife grab his robe and pulled it off of him.
She then used it to frame him, and Potiphar threw him into prison.
So at this point in the story, Joseph has gone from favorite son, to hated brother, to slave, to being placed in charge of his master’s household, and now he’s in prison.
Things got a little better for a minute, but now it’s way worse.
Joseph didn’t do anything to deserve this.
He remained righteous and pure and holy, but bad things continue to happen to him.
And he’s in this prison for about 13 years.
But look at
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