Genesis chapter 41. Genesis 41. This morning, I want to preach a message, and the title of my message is How to Deal with Hardships. How to Deal with Hardships. And I hope the Lord blesses your heart with this and some teaching here that the Lord wants us to have. Can we begin in verse number 46? And our text will be taken from verses 50 to 52. But I want to start in verse 46 and read the context. And Joseph was 30 years old when he stood before Pharaoh, king of Egypt. So here he is at this age, but he spent most of the last 20, 18 years or 15 years in terrible hardship. But now he's raised to the place of second in command of the entire country. Keep going here. And Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh and went throughout all the land of Egypt. And in the seven plenteous years, the earth brought forth by handfuls. And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt and laid up the food in the cities and the food of the field, which was round about every city laid he up in the same. And Joseph gathered corn as much as sand of the sea, very much. until he left numbering for it was without number. Verse 50. And unto Joseph were born two sons before the years of famine came, which Asenath, the daughter of Potipharah, priest of On, bear unto him. And Joseph called the name of his firstborn Manasseh. For God, saith he, hath made me forget all my toil and all my father's house. And the name of the second called he Ephraim, for God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction." We're going to preach today about how to deal with hardships. Let's have a word of prayer. Lord, we come to this time, Lord, on a weekly basis, but we look to this as so much needing the power of your Holy Spirit. Deal with us, Lord. Lord, we deal with hardships in our lives, Lord, the devil is always confusing us and making things more difficult than they should be. Help us with simple faith to learn this lesson today of Manassas and Ephraim. Please bless this time in your word in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Obviously, these names for the children of Joseph were chosen because of their meaning. and not because of their sound, like is our custom today. People pick today names and you say, was that a family name? Sometimes it is. But sometimes it's just, no, I just like the way it sounded. And that's very common today. But these were names chosen with a specific meaning in mind and something that Joseph had gone through. And much of his story, I'm taking for granted that you understand and we'll review just the main things, but There's so much of his life that seemed terribly unfair. He is a boy of great promise who ends up losing and losing and losing and losing until he's down in a dungeon, forgotten by everybody but God. And if you're here and you're saved, the worst state you'll ever be in is that you will be forgotten by everyone but God. because he can never forget his own. You will always be cared for at our worst. And Joseph is a testimony of that. But our hardships are all around us, times when we feel we are surrounded by sorrows, by financial difficulties, by tragedy, by trials at our own home, problems in the marriage and problems Perhaps with children. Trials at work. Interpersonal relationships that don't go right. Times when you come home from work saying, I couldn't wait to get out of there. So much pressure. So much disagreement. So much hardship. There are trials of health. Hardest part of that is not knowing. You know something is wrong and you have these symptoms, but you don't know yet. You hope the doctors can find out, and after much of that hardship, you get to the realization that they're practicing medicine. They're still learning. Our health is seriously in the hands of the Lord. There are mental problems that come upon people. And don't misunderstand me, those are real problems. They're emotional difficulties. Lots that people carry about their life, their whole life, because of problems that happened to them early on. And they carry these emotional scars or disabilities all the rest of their lives. And we look back and say, well, I react this way because of these things that happened in my life. This is why I am the way I am. Hardships. I don't believe those difficulties are permanent. I believe we should always as Christians, and I say that because we live in a victimhood type of culture now that has robbed you of your ability to overcome, or is trying to rob you. Friends, seek victory. Don't seek to be a victim, seek to be victorious, and see what God will do with your difficulties. But these are true and real. Hardships can be just a lot in life that seems to be like Man, is this a grind? What you called to seem like everything is difficult. Well, God has placed you there and you say, I know I'm where I'm supposed to be doing what I'm supposed to be doing, but man, this is a grind. It is hard. Hardships all around us. Joseph faced hardships, debilitating and irreversible. Things that happened to him. You remember that he was rejected by his brethren, a rejection that is a very difficult part of life. I think we should have a class for young people that somewhere is included. Maybe they need to learn it in Sunday school, how to handle rejection, just that one issue. Because as life goes on, it is filled with times when rejection becomes our plate and our dinner table. I mean, it's just what we have. We have all, my family, we understand that rejection. We've been through some of that. You're rejected by family. Some have gotten saved and your family you thought would be happy are not happy. In fact, they've rejected you because of that. You tried to do what's right and now they're being spiteful towards you or just because of the problems of our past. And then some go through homes that are broken and deal with some of the worst rejection feelings Yeah, hardships. Somewhere we have to deal with this. How does God want us to deal with that? And Joseph's an example where his brother saw him coming and said, Oh, look, here's this dreamer coming. Let's kill him. How could a relationship between siblings become so strained that they're willing to even entertain the thought of killing one of their own? and they might as well have killed him. They put him and sold him into slavery, and then he went off by the Midians that came by. The Midianites carried him into Egypt. They lost track of him, and their words later are, one is not. They're meaning he's probably, in all of our understanding, he's probably dead. But he's dead to us. That kind of rejection. Who can stand up to that? I'm just asking you, who can, in our hearts, now, before that we had a victimhood culture, we had a overcoming culture. In other words, you go all the way back to the time of our pioneer days, and we were people that had pioneering means you're facing firsthand the difficulties of an uncivilized area, and you are carving out. I mean, the more difficulties meant more things to overcome. And all the way up until this present generation, largely Americans looked at difficulties in the sense of a challenge that needed to be overcome. Even to the point where we look back at the challenges of our life and say, I take, we thank God for it because we're Christians. But our culture largely would say, I am proud of the things I had to overcome to get where I am today. Well, today's culture says you're a victim and you're a victim even if you're not a victim. They'll make up a category of victimhood for you just so you can allow yourself to be conditioned. And even there's a conspiracy that it is in order to create a subjected mindset that can handle the control and expect the control of government over our lives. That's a conspiracy, but it's hard to argue against. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But it's like it's creating, the government keeps creating ideals that you could say, well, I've had this problem, I am a victim of this, I am of this class and this kind of victimhood, in order that you might have the feeling like, hey, because of that, the government should pay my way, the rest of society should give to me, and I deserve any kind of prescription that I think makes me feel good. Instead of looking for victory, instead of looking to overcome. And then they're creating, I mean they base it on race, they base it on your economic status, they base it on the tragedies you had faced when you were younger. They look at all of these things. Well, your parents were divorced when you were younger. Therefore, you're a victim of that emotional trauma. And yes, it's emotional trauma. Nobody's saying it's not. Yes, it is mental anguish. Yes, it is all of those things. But the Bible teaches us not to have a victimhood philosophy, but to take God at His word and become a conqueror. To overcome. To look at our stability coming from God and not from within. The answer is not here. The answer is in the Bible. And the answer equips the Christian to much, almost everything that you'll face in life. The Bible says it's given to us all things that pertain unto life and godliness. A victorious mindset. Yes, challenges. Think about what it was like to be approximate. We don't even believe he was even 18 years old. But here is this teenager, mocked by his brothers, lied to his father saying he was dead and they killed some kind of goat that they found and mixed his, tore his coat up and mixed it in the blood and brought it to the father and said, and they watched their father mourn knowing it was a lie. Imagine all of that. That's an injustice, I think. I think when I read this, I'm encouraged because as bad as the things that have happened to me over the years, I never was that bad. I mean, things never crumbled to that extent. But I thank God for the hardships that I've been through. He was then sold into slavery. He becomes a slave. He was lied about by Potiphar's wife for doing right. She's begging him to be immoral with him and to have adulterous relationship. And today's society says, oh man, what a cool opportunity. He could have a fling on the side. And he says, no, how could I do this thing and sin against God? And for that, he gets thrown into prison. Now there's a little bit of that issue with Potiphar as one of the leaders of Egypt that he must have believed Joseph enough not to kill him. Normally he would have had the power in that kind of case that if he were accused of making a pass at his wife, he could have just taken his life and snuffed it out. But apparently there was enough circumstantial evidence that Potiphar in his love for Joseph said he might have believed him enough in his explanation to save his life, but he still threw him into prison. What a life is that? He goes down there and he begins to serve. And in there he is doing his best. And he's got the notoriety from the jail leader of the jail, the prison leader, that he is trustworthy and I mean, he hands him the keys to the jail and say, you take, I mean, he really just was a help. So he's doing his best. And he's supposed to have an opportunity and that old butler forgot about him. Oh, speak a word when you get out of here. I'm not supposed to be in here. His only hope. It's not like he had a Supreme Court to appeal to. It was only, please mention me. This is an injustice. And for two years, he's totally forgotten. Joseph kept his integrity. He never gave up. What a testimony. Joseph's life, I mean, Pastor Winters told me that he preached like, I don't know how many sermons just on the life of Joseph. I wish we had time to do that. But if you look back at chapter 39, go back a few chapters and look at verse one and two. I want you to see the center focus of Joseph's success. 39 verse 1, And Joseph was brought down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him of the hands of the Ishmaelites, which had brought him down thither. Now here's the key. Verse 2, And the Lord was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man, and he was in the house of his master, the Egyptian. The center focus of everything with Joseph was that he protected his relationship with God. God was with him. You know, the first thing when we have hardships we like to do is blame God. God must be against me. This is God's fault. Where is God? Or just saying, I've looked and I can't find God. But Joseph said, Hey, God was with me, I know it, even when it was hardest. Do you know that in my life, I have felt the presence of God more in the times of hardship? It's like when I need him most, I have found him and I have found of his presence to be everything that I needed. We even sing this song on page 100 in your songbook, Jesus is all the world to me, but I'll tell you, he is not all the world to you until he is all that you have. And when you find that position when there is nothing left but Jesus, and you run to Him, you'll find He's everything you ever needed to begin with. You needed nothing else, and so He is ever adored in your heart, because at the end of the difficulty and the hardship that you thought was impossible, you found that God was with you in the middle of it, and at the end, He has done something for me that I can give a testimony for. Look at chapter 39, verse 21. Verse 21 now. But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him mercy and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. The key was his relationship to the Lord. But the Lord was with him. But the Lord was with him. He promised you, I will never what? Leave thee nor forsake thee. Joseph kept his integrity. Look at chapter 40, verse 23. Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forget him. You wish that somebody, if you're reading this story, I wish at that point somebody helped Joseph. You're like, I know the end of the story, but even though I know the end of the story, I'm saying, why doesn't somebody help this young man? I have kids that are that age and that maybe that he had been there long enough to be in his early 20s. I would want somebody to take care of my son. God in His mercy looks down upon every one of us. He knows that we're just dust. He says, you live in a sin-filled world and you're going to go through hardships. In fact, when He found me, I was enslaved to sin. I was imprisoned in darkness to the things of this world. I was trapped in unbelief. I could not get out. And if I'd have died in that state, I'd have been forgotten by everybody. but God who is rich in his mercy, for his love, his great love wherewith he loved us. He died for me, rose again, and showed me salvation. So he's exalted now in chapter 41 in our text, in verse 46 through the end there in chapter 41. He's exalted. The prison doors were opened. And since we know that when we read the story, it's hard sometimes for us to put ourselves into that very time schedule, knowing he was destitute and forgotten for so long. The Lord does not tell Christians you will be immune from the hardships of life. But he does tell you something about dealing with it. He says that everything is depending on your relationship with Him. Everything. And the key to it is you keep your heart right all of the time with God. So that the most important thing you have is not your IRA, your retirement accounts, or your job security. It is not your social security, and it is not anything about the government that's gonna ever be the deliverer for you. Your hope and your trust must be in your relationship with Jesus Christ. Your salvation and your prayer time with the Lord means everything. It is your sustaining power. It is your ability to get a hold of God. And if you have a doubt in your heart whether you're really saved and you know the Lord for sure, you need to settle that. There isn't anything more important in life. Otherwise, you're going to be like a lot of people in this world, that when they go through the hardships, they have no God to lean on, nowhere to go. And they fall to pieces. How do you deal with hardships? He is given a position in Egypt and a purpose, the storage of those foods for seven years during that time. But he's also given a wife. When he was in the dungeon forgotten, I bet he thought he'd never have his own family, never have his own house, never have the freedom to own anything that he could say, this is mine. I mean, that's in the heart of every person that breathes. God made us to want to have a place and start a family and have something that we have. I bet he thought, it'll never happen to me, and he was hanging on to his prayer life as the only thing that he ever could have. And you know what? When they take everything else away from you, they cannot take away your relationship with Jesus Christ. And she brought forth two children. The Lord had dealt with us in a similar situation when we were sold in slavery and lost in sin. We had the punishment of hell for eternity that it was inevitable, but in salvation we're delivered from sin's guilt and restored to the status of not just free from sin, but a child of God. Think about what the Lord did for us. It says we sit in Ephesians 2, 6, we sit with Him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. We are given an incredible position as ambassadors of the Lord Jesus Christ to a very dark world. What a joy that God has given us a purpose to go and take and reap from the darkness of this world, people that hear the gospel and get to go to heaven with us because of God's great mercy. Go back to our text, if you'll look at those verses, chapter 41 and verse 50, I want to bring you three different points from here, and I want to look at the firstborn Manasseh. Manasseh, in verse 51, and Joseph called his name of his firstborn Manasseh. For God, saith he, hath made me forget all of my toil and all of my father's house. My first point today is that you need to have, in dealing with hardships, you need to have a forgetting a forgetting. He said, the Lord has made me to forget. There's a difference between compartmentalizing your thoughts and a real forgetfulness that the Lord is dealing with here. We're certainly not talking about a tricking your mind into not remembering the hardships. He remembered the dungeon. He was probably bearing in his body the aches and pains of so long on a stone slab or on the floor in that muddy dungeon in Egypt in its prison cell. He probably knew very much what it was like with the infantation of the vermin and the rats. He remembered all of those things. We're not talking about a forgetting of your memory as if you cannot remember, but there's a forgetting of the hardship itself. And it doesn't happen because you trick your mind. How do you deal with hardship? Well, I just put it somewhere in my mind and forget about it. The next son is going to be fruitful, but you'll never be fruitful if you can't get this first step right. There has to be a putting away, a dealing with the hardships of life. I know sometimes you come in and you think a pastor has never been through hardships, and I'm not at liberty to talk about everything that happened in the past of my life, but I can tell you this, that I have been through things that people would call debilitating effects that follow you the rest of your life. And I can be very clear to you that though I have a memory of things that have been done in my life, I definitely have forgotten the problems and the hardship and the anguish. And as a result, I've gone on to the next step to become fruitful. But you have to first deal with it. Forgetting about it isn't going to work. Compartmentalizing, tricking your mind Paul said this in the New Testament. He said, Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before. He says, I press toward the mark of the prize, but you cannot press forward until you have dealt with the past. There has to be a forgetting. You have to deal with these issues. In order to forget, there needs to be a redemption. there needs to be a redemption. Forgetting is not a trick of your mind. It is a result of God's plan that includes forgiveness. We are sinners. And the Lord gave you a blessing. You know what that blessing is? Guilt. Today, they tell you the answer if you go down to find professional help out in this world to the hardships and the guilty feelings that you have. They tell you, well, we have an enemy. suppress that guilt and get rid of that guilt and hide that guilt. And to the extent that you're successful in hiding that guilt, you'll be successful in overcoming or getting on with life. And I'm saying that's not right. Guilt is not a bad thing. It's created by God for you. It is a blessing for you. It's supposed to drive you to God for forgiveness. Jesus died to carry the punishment of your sins. Do you believe that? I believe it. But what does that mean practically? See, I think we still, as Christians, have a feeling in our hearts that we have to become worthy, as if I'm ever going to be worthy of God's blessings. We look at salvation and say, yeah, I couldn't do that, but I can be worthy of God's. But you'll never be worthy of God's blessings. We're still sinners. We're still in this flesh that just is against God and has the tendency and the characteristic of following its own way. Rebellion. And as long as we are here, we'll never be holy in the sense that we are perfect and without sin. But God wants the relationship where He knows that and you know that, and forgiveness is given to you. It's not, forgiveness is always given at the expense of the one forgiving. Okay, like Kyle here, let's say you had $10. I loaned you. And you said to me one day, pastor, I just, I'm never gonna pay you. And I said to you, it's okay, I forgive you. By me forgiving him cost me though, $10. Right? Jesus, It cost Him everything. And when He shed His blood on Calvary, He was there because I'm a sinner. Because you're a sinner. And that's talking about your sins before you got saved, and it's talking about your sins in this life that the Lord says that His blood is able to wash away every sin. People in this world talk about forgiving yourself. Now get this, that's a misunderstanding. What I think they really mean is that you need to accept the forgiveness that God gives. Because you and I cannot forgive ourselves because we've paid no price worthy to forgive ourselves. I did not die and could not die for my own sins and then resurrect from the dead. But Jesus did. And His great love says, hey, I've died for you, I rose again, and I have forgiven you. And when people say forgive yourself, I take it what they really mean is that God wants you to believe in forgiveness. That He has washed it away. He tells us he takes it and he puts it in as far as the east is from the west. You know, you can go north far enough that you're gonna be over the North Pole and you're gonna go around to the, pretty soon you'll be going south. North and south are not eternally separated. You can go south far enough, go on Antarctica and go across and you, up, you're going north again. But if you go east, you just keep going east, you'll be forever going east. You go west, and the same happens. And the Lord says, on forgiveness, He has taken your sin, and they are as far as the east. So what is He saying? It's gone. So God says, hey, you need to believe in that. It's faith to believe that everything is washed under the blood, everything is gone. I'm not saying that all of the earthly effects of our sins Like, I know if you get drunk and you're in a car accident and you lose your right hand or right arm and you get saved, it's not going to grow back. But the guilty feelings between you and God are free and clear. And that's the forgetting you need. Hardships of life come because we bring them on ourselves. And the answer is God will forgive us. Sure, sometimes we have to deal with, like if we go into debt, and it's all our fault, and we waste our money, and we say, Lord, please forgive me. You know, money doesn't fall from the sky to pay your debt. It's sometimes a little hard road in front of you to get out of debt. I believe in it. Be out of debt. Don't be in debt. Live out of debt. It can be done. You can get victory over it. But I'm saying, the guilt of it can be gone because we believe what God says. But pastor, the problems that Joseph went through are not really problems he did to himself. That's true. He was there because of the sin of somebody else. But you know, that's the nature of hardship, is that not only are there hardships that I bring on myself, but there are also plenty of hardships that people have, that are a result of what other people have done to me. Sometimes we're caught in the crosshairs. I one time got in a battle between two men that were fighting over the authority of a church, and my family lost over the issue. We were in between two different good men that I found out one wasn't good. And it cost our life. We were rejected by an entire church and left and abandoned. You say, well, that wasn't good. Yeah, I know. What do you do? It wasn't our fault. We didn't do anything. We just tried to do the right thing and I'm going to tell you something, God has delivered us. And this day I can report to you that the animosity of it is out of my heart. That you can be forgiven and then you can deal with these things to forget what other people have done to you. So God wants you to live in a life where you really understand the truth we find in Romans. And you know this verse, in chapter eight, verse number 28. And we know. Do you know? It starts out with those words, and you know. And we know. Do you really know? So you don't really believe or put to faith in your heart what the Lord is about to say, then it doesn't do you any good. There's no forgetting until you know. And we know that all things work together for good. Not some things. Not just the good things. But that God had a plan for the bad things. Right? So later, Jacob comes down to Egypt and they all dwell there. Remember? The chapter 50, go to chapter 50, the last chapter in Genesis, and look at verse 20. So Jacob dies, and then all the brothers are gathered together. They're like, hey, Joseph is gonna kill us now. The only reason he was nice to us is because Jacob, our father, was still alive. And they come to him and said, please don't kill us for what we did to you. And what does Joseph say in response in chapter 50 verse 20? But as for you, you thought it evil against me, but God meant it unto good to bring to pass as it is this day to save much people alive. And we know that all things and the bad things and the good things work together for good to them that love God. that God had a plan. He didn't let you go there without His knowledge. God knew Joseph was in the prison. The Lord was with him. He knew he was a slave. The Lord was with him. There's not a hardship that you can go through where the Savior isn't there with you because of His great promises. There is not a trouble that you either bring on yourself or is that caused by the feelings and works of other people that God doesn't know what you're going through and have a solution and more than that, he had a plan for it. They thought it evil for me, but God meant it unto good. And sometimes we can look back, most of the time when you're going through it, it's confusing and you don't know why. You're just holding on to God and God gets you through those hard times. But sometimes we get to look back on it and we say, ha ha, ha ha. We start to say, man, I see what God was doing. He was trying to bring it to pass this day to see much people saved. God had to do what he did or allowed it to happen. God is never the cause of sin in our lives. He is never the cause of other people doing sin, but he knew they would. And He promises to protect us. They can't take any steps without God. Even the devil could not come after Job without the permission of God, and without God saying, there's a limit to what I'm going to allow you to do against My servant. God has protected you. He said, well, God didn't protect me, I had to go through this big problem in my life. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Wait a minute, you're not listening. And we know that all things, it's the pastor, God was in the drug addiction. Hey, I know God doesn't want you to be addicted to drugs, but I'll tell you this, he surely can use it in his field if we have a time when we are forgiven of God and we accept the forgiveness and we walk away from those sins and God could use you like nobody else. to win others that are addicted. You can see where the message is going. But the next point is going to be about being fruitful. God can make you fruitful as a Christian. And He allowed these problems to come into your life, and the hardships that you're going through now, or the things about life you just don't like, the decisions that God is making. The limitations as we get older, for all of us older people, you know, you get limited because you can't do what you used to do. I can't even remember what I go to remember. I go to say a verse now and I'm like, where's that verse? You get older and you're limited. We get tired, we say, God, why does this have to be this way? And we can say, I know why God did it. And sometimes we don't know. But I can say that in all things, God is still good. and all things God is still right. Because somewhere He's going to manage to turn this for His glory. Second point today, there has to be a forgetting, and you will not become fruitful until you have a forgetting. Because here, if you have not come to the place where you have dealt with a sin, or in your own life or the sins of others that they've done to you, where you have lost the animosity against them at the foot of the cross. If you do not do this and you seek to be fruitful, the Bible says in Hebrews 12, you're in danger of the root of bitterness springing up so that the slightest problem touches your life. And it all goes back to what somebody did to you back here. Why do present problems bring up past hurts? Because those past hurts were not properly dealt with. Until there is a forgetting in the blood of Christ and in the forgiveness that you should have for other people under the power of God, if it is not dealt with, you can never be fruitful without bitterness setting in. There needs to be a forgetting. And then secondly, he said, Ephraim, for God hath made me to be fruitful. You need to be fruitful. The Christian life isn't all about taking in, take, take, take, take. Pastor, I love to come and I learn. Man, I'm learning so much. Amen. But that's not the end of it. You're learning for a purpose. He tells us in 2 Timothy 2, verse 2, and the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also. Place of service is the completion of our Christian faith. Now listen, if you're not accustomed to having a part in the Great Commission, for instance, the work that God wants us to do, then you're like the Dead Sea, that all of it comes in and none of it goes out, and it becomes unfruitful. But if you come to the place where you take in the truths of God, and you're sharing that with the lost world, then the Lord turns our broken lives broken in some way, hampered, hindered, and with all the hardships and the problems, with all the difficulties, and God turns that with the forgetfulness into a victorious, fruitful life. The fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance. Everywhere you go, 24 hours a day, because it's God springing up in you this new nature, You say, why doesn't pastor, have you ever seen me get angry and yell at everybody? Well, I yell when I preach, but I'm talking about anger, right? You say, I've never seen pastor lose his temper. Praise God, I used to have an uncontrollable temper. You say, what happened? Jesus in me. Because the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith in me. Well, what about when you disagree with somebody? You should just let them have it. Really? Do you find that in Galatians 5? Actually, you do, because the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these, and among those are anger, strife, wrath, sedition. Well, I'm just angry. I'm going to just leave the church. Oh. Well, there's no spirit filling. Because the spirit filling takes the contention, and we deal with it, according to the Bible, as a hardship. We process it so there can be forgiveness one way or the other, whatever is right, so that my heart is not retaining the hurt. If you walk around your life with hurt, you're going to repeat the hurt over and over and over and over, no matter what church you go to, no matter where you go. Well, I was in a church and they're always bringing it up. Why don't you live your life free of that and just say, I've been through some things. Can I tell you what I don't feel I have liberty to do? So don't tell my parents I was molested as a child. Some of you are here and saying, pastor, you know, your life looks good. You've never had a problem. Yeah, deal with that. Some of you have had the same things and you're thinking, well, because of that, I can't do this. I can't do that. I just, man, it's a hindrance. I'm emotionally scarred. Hey, God has a forgetfulness that can lead to a fruitfulness. Why should the things that others have done to you hinder you from doing what God wants you to do? But if you live your life with this resentment inside of your heart over what happened to you, and it's crippling the things that you have in your own present life, and you're like, I can't do, I can't do, I can't do, I can't do, and you will fail in this life to fulfill the will of God. But if you come God's way to a Manasseh experience, God has dealt with my hardships. and has solved my problems. And He has changed my life. And then He will make you fruitful in an evil world. He's in a foreign land. God hath made me fruitful. He can make your life abound. in great riches and great love and great to manifest in your life something that is impossible to dream up. You could not dream up the life that I have lived. You could not even invent the things where God has taken care of us. Now lastly, I want you to go to chapter 48. You might still be in 50. Go back to 48. Verse number nine. Joseph gathers his two boys to his dad to be blessed before Jacob dies. And Joseph said unto his father, he'd asked, who are these? And he said, they are my sons, whom God hath given me in this place. And he said, bring them, I pray thee, unto me, and I'll bless them. Now the eyes of Israel, that's Jacob, were dim for age, so that he could not see. And he brought them near unto him, and he kissed them and embraced them. And Israel said unto Joseph, I had not thought to see thy face, and, lo, God hath showed me also thy seed. And Joseph brought them out. Aren't grandkids really wonderful? That's what he's saying right there. And he brought them out from between his knees, and he bowed himself with his face to the earth. And Joseph took them both, Ephraim in his right hand, and Manasseh toward Israel's left hand, and Manasseh in his left hand toward Israel's right hand, and brought them near unto him. And Israel stretched out his hand. and his right hand, and laid it upon Ephraim's head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh's head, and guiding his hands wittily, for Manasseh was the firstborn. And he blessed Joseph and said, God, before whom my father Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God which fed me all the day of my life unto this day. So go to verse 17. And when Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand upon the head of Ephraim, it displeased him, And he held up his father's hand to remove it from Ephraim's head unto Manasseh's head. So Joseph then hears from Jacob that he said, he said, don't do this. You've got the order out. You've got it out of order. Jacob says, I know. And he blessed and he said, the younger will be greater than the elder. I'm way past my time. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't have put it in two sermons. But I'm going to tell you this and kind of wrap it up and let you go. When they got to the end of time for Jacob to die, he brought the children. Joseph is pushing them, coordinating them so that Jacob could then take his right hand and put it on the oldest Manasseh, put his left hand on the younger, and Jacob does a switch. You see, if you'll follow God's pattern of dealing with the hardships God's way, processing them in the Bible's way, in the forgetfulness. God will make you fruitful. And my last point we call the forefront, is that at the end of it all, the fruitfulness will certainly outweigh the forgetfulness. So that you'll even, get this, it's in my notes, you'll even forget that you forgot. You'll even forget that you forgot. Opposite is, we carry these troubles with us everywhere we go. Like we're holding on to them. We're addicted to the attention it brings our flesh, even though it's negative attention. We actually, and we can't live without it. We're like, I've got to be a victim, I'm a victim, I'm a victim, I'm a victim, I'm a victim. When we come to the place where we say, process them according to God's plan, and let go of them at the feet of the cross, where His blood washes away the sins that you've committed, and washes away the sins of other people towards you, knowing that all things work together for good to them that love God. And when you process them, God then makes you fruitful, and the fruitfulness becomes the forefront because you start to forget about what happened to you and you start to thank God for what people have been saved. And I think today about a church in Belize and all the souls that were saved there and what God has done here. And I have forgotten that I had things to forget. Sorry, I'm too loud, Jim. I do consciously try. But I get a little wound up about this. The forefront. I'm not gonna spend my life being hindered by what somebody else did. I'm no longer gonna be held back by some things that the Lord forgave me of that I know are under the blood. I am not going to stop there. I'm going to become fruitful, and the fruitfulness is going to bear so big that I will forget that I had to forget. What about your hardships today? Will you let God deal with it? Will you let God have your heart? Let's all stand together in prayer. The hardships are real. The anguish is real. The difficulties are real. The problems are real. The mental, emotional strain, the difficulties that have come because of addictions, and all of it is very real. But the Lord says, I don't want you to be hindered by that. I want you to be solved. I want the problem to be solved. There needs to be a forgetting in your life. I'm here if you need more counsel beyond talking to the Lord today. I'm glad to spend time with you in the office and counsel you and help you according to the Word of God. But friend, will you begin this time where you say, God, I want to come and have a time of forgetting that the blood that washed away my sins, I can accept and I can walk away as you solve the problems of my past so that I can become fruitful. And those that are there, maybe you need to long for fruit bearing, so that the fruit bearing becomes the forefront. In the rest of the scriptures, you never hear Manassas and Ephraim. You always hear the order Ephraim and Manassas. As the piano plays, the invitation is open. As always, if you're not sure if you're saved, come down and get my attention. You can be saved today. I said, Pastor, I want a forgetting. I want to deal with the problem. Give me what I need from God. You go to God for that. Watch him do something amazing.