Welcome to Pittsburgh Community Church this morning. My name is Chris Arcady. I'm the lead pastor here at PCC and I'm glad that you are worshiping with us this morning. If you're visiting, welcome. Glad you're here. We are continuing in our series The Promised Land this morning, Chasing the Promised Land. Please turn your Bibles if you brought them to Genesis chapter 37. We are going to be hanging out there this morning. Genesis is the first book in the Bible, and chapter 37. So this is our third week in the Chasing the Promised Land series, and you know how when you're immersed in a certain concept, it just comes up everywhere in life, right? You're just kind of going through life, and you're like, oh, oh, there it is again. Ah, there it is again, right? You know, especially if the Lord's trying to teach you something in that, right? So that happened to me this week. So on Thursday night, I love football. I'm watching football. It's the Jets versus the Patriots, right? And at one point, one of the commentators was talking about Aaron Rodgers, who was having a really good game on Thursday night. And he was looking at him through the lens of his career and where he has come from, what he has accomplished, and Aaron Rodgers is the quarterback for the Jets, in case you don't know. But he turns to his partner in the midst of that, and he asks this question, I quote, Can Aaron take the Jets to the promised land? Now, the answer to that is obviously, No, because it's the Jets. Right? But there it was. Right? The promised land. Now, remember how we define the promised land. Right? It's a metaphor. It's a chasing after. A longing for. A realization of a hope or a dream. Something that will bring fulfillment and satisfaction. In this case, to every Jets fan. Right? If you make it to the promised land, you win the Super Bowl. Right? Likewise, this week I was listening to sports radio and Shohei Otani, who's a baseball player, a pitcher for the Dodgers, he did something this week that no one has done in the history of the MLB. He has hit 50 home runs and he stole 50 bases in a single season. Nobody has ever done that before. And so they are talking about this, and I was listening to these radio commentators just talking about what an amazing feat this was, that nobody had ever accomplished this, and then one of them said this. He said, but when it comes to October, when it comes to playoff baseball, will Shohei be able to deliver on the promise? Doesn't matter what he just did. Wasn't good enough. There's always something beyond it. This chasing of the promised land. And the question that we must ask ourselves this morning is what are we chasing? Is it a job? Is it a marriage? Is it children? Is it retirement? Is it a certain way of life or comfort or ease? Whatever it is, what is it that we look at? And our heart says, man, if only I had that. then I'd be satisfied. And so we chase and we chase. We chase without ever understanding that the promise of the promised land is a lie. See, that could never bring the life, the satisfaction, the fulfillment that we were looking for. And you know what? God knows that. He knows that we need a source of life that is better than our promised land. And so he chases us even as we chase our promised land. But in that chase, we often struggle. We struggle because we find that God's will is often not our will for our lives. we find that his plan is often not our plan. And not only is it not our plan, but we would never choose his plan. And so what do we do with that? And in this series, we've been looking at some of the big questions that we ask when our life or our walk of faith becomes difficult or disappointing as God messes with our pursuit of our promised land. And so the first question, week one that we asked, what if I never get to my promised land? We looked at the story of Moses. What if God in his sovereignty just says, no, you're not getting it. And then second week, week two, we asked, well, what if God takes away my promised land? Because sometimes life is great, right? And we have it all. We're actually in a pretty good spot. And then the Lord gives, the Lord takes away. And all of a sudden he says in his sovereignty, I'm taking something from you. What do we do then? Today we're going to be asking our third question. What if God's promised land is different? than the one that he thought that we were leading us to. He was leading us to. What if it's different than my promised land? What if it's just a different place? What if God actually wants to lead me to a place of blessing and fulfillment and use, but I think it's over here, and I think it looks like this? When he says, no, no, no, the one that I wanna give you is better, but it's way over here, and it looks completely different than you think it looks. What do we do then? How do we walk with the Lord in the midst of that journey? And so to answer this question, let's once just take a moment to pray and to ask God to lead us in his truth this morning. Will you pray with me? Father, I thank you that we are gathered in this place. God is your people and you have given us your word to lead us in truth. And so I pray God that as we mine the truth in your word, that your spirit would take that and use that in our lives and in our hearts in a way that moves us off of our plan and onto your plan. And so take this this morning as an act of worship, we pray in Jesus name, amen. Have you ever had a dream? Anybody here ever have a dream? I'm not talking about the dreams at night. We all have dreams at night. We wake up and we're like, wow, that was weird. I don't know where that came from. No, I'm talking about the dream. I'm talking about the inner city kid who has a single mom. They're poor. They got nothing. And he looks at that and he says, one day, I'm going to buy my mom a house. I'm talking about the little girl who watches Disney princesses and says, one day, I'm going to find my Prince Charming. I'm talking about the boy who loves to play sports who says, one day, I'm going to make it to the NFL. Dreams. Vincent van Gogh once said, I dream of painting, and then I paint my dream. Right? What a cool quote. Right? And in a sense, that is true of all of us. In our chase of our promised land, we are all trying to paint our dreams. And this morning, we're gonna look at the story of Joseph. It's a story about dreams. And Joseph's story begins in Genesis 37. So if you brought your Bible this morning, go ahead and turn there. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the pew in front of you. Open up to Genesis chapter 37. And we need to understand that the story of Joseph, it covers the last 14 chapters of Genesis. And so there's no way we can get to all of that this morning, but I want to encourage you to read it this week. What I did want to do, though, is I wanted to begin at the beginning of the story. And I wanted to read the first 11 verses of Genesis chapter 37. So would you follow along while I read that this morning? Genesis 37 verse 1. Jacob lived in the land of his father's sojournings in the land of Canaan. These are the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being 17 years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilphah, his father's wives. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. Now Israel, that's Jacob, loved Joseph more than any other of his sons because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colors. But when his brothers saw that his father loved him more than all of his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him. Now Joseph had a dream. And when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. And he said to them, hear this dream that I've dreamed. Behold, we are binding sheaves in the field and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf. And the brother said to him, are you indeed to reign over us? Or are you indeed to rule over us? So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words. Then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said, behold, I've dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun and the moon and the 11 stars were bowing down to me. But then he told it to his father and to his brothers and his father rebuked him and said to him, what is this dream that you've dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come and bow ourselves to the ground before you? And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the saying in mind. Interesting story, right? So God gives Joseph a dream that one day his family would come and bow before him, all right? Now put this in context, Joseph was one of 12 brothers, all right? These are the 12 tribes of the nation of Israel. He wasn't the oldest brother, not by a long shot, right? But he was the favorite and everybody knew it. Now you're not supposed to have favorites by the way, right? But that's the way it was. And because of that, his brothers hated him. And you know how younger kids are, spoiled little punks, always getting what they want, lack of discipline, always tattling on their older siblings, right? We don't get that. So they hated him for it. And then to make matters worse, Joseph's father gives him a gift, right? This robe of many colors. See, Joseph's father, he's not even discreet in his favoritism. He's like, ah, it's Joseph. Not you, him, right? None of the other brothers got it. And so his brothers are looking at all this and they hated him for it. So much so, it says in verse four, they couldn't speak peacefully to him. All right, now just think about that. Like family dynamics, this was his reality. And some of you, you know, you kind of deal with it. You know exactly what I'm talking about, right? Where you just have this like, I can't speak peacefully to this person, right? There's just this, right? That's Joseph's reality. And then he has these dreams, right? And so he tells his family about it because why wouldn't he, right? What a little punk, right? And so like, he's like, hey, hey, hey, One day, y'all are gonna bow down to me. Uh-oh. And it says at the end of verse eight, so they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words. To the extent where even his father was like, hey kid, I gave you an awesome coat, okay? But you wonder why you're not popular with your brothers? Lay off the dreams. And his father rebukes him for it. But here's the thing. God gave him those dreams, right? It was God who was giving him those dreams. And now maybe he was too young to handle that well. And maybe he was a little brash with his family, but he wasn't wrong about the dreams. All right, now I want to pause here for a minute. Pretend you don't know Joseph's story. If you know Joseph's story, you kind of know how it goes or whatever, but just pretend for a second that you don't. How many people think that this 17 year old boy would have guessed how God was going to orchestrate the fulfillment of his dreams? How many people think that he could have guessed that? Yeah, like not a chance, right? And so here's our first kind of truth this morning. See, when God's promised land is different than our promised land, what we think it's gonna look like, we need to anchor ourselves to the promise keeper. Because we're gonna see that Joseph's life was a bunch of this, right? And it's easy to trust God up here. It's not so easy when we're down here. All right, and so we'll see throughout Joseph's story that no matter what turn his life took, whether that was good or bad, he chose time and again to anchor his trust in the Lord. Now, back to the story, remember we have the storm brewing. Dana mentioned last week that when a verse or when a word or a phrase is being repeated, that's significant. And so that's what we see here. Verse four, they hated him. Verse five, they hated him even more. Verse eight, they hated him even more. Verse 11, they were jealous of him. We get the sense that a storm's coming, a great big boulder is about to be dropped on Joseph's life. And sure enough, it's coming, here it is. Verse 11 ends. Now before verse 12, there's a header in all of our Bibles. Somebody want to just shout out what that says? What does it say? Joseph sold by his brothers. Yikes. Right? Like talk about life taking a turn. You think he thought that morning when he woke up, like, man, I hope I get betrayed by my family today. Man, I hope I get sold into slavery today. No, he wasn't thinking about that at all. But it happened. Actually, his brothers were originally going to kill him. So you can see God's hand on Joseph's life that they actually sold him instead. But still, it happened. It was a reality he had to deal with. One day, his whole life in a moment just changed. It just changed. This younger brother with brothers five, 10, 15 or more years older than him, who hated him, decided that they were going to sell him into slavery and he was shipped off to a different country. Anybody wanna say, ouch? Right? Like talk about your dreams being shattered. Now we just read it like it's nothing. Right? Oh, you sold me to slavery. Well, that's nice. But it's not nothing. What do you do when your whole life, when your reality as you know it gets turned upside down and ripped away? What do you do? Right? When your marriage falls apart. When a boss lets you go. When you get news that you have this health issue that is life-altering. And now you've got to live with it. Now you've got to go to sleep every night acknowledging, this is my reality. Talk about a dream killer. How's the promised land looking? Right? Now, everybody look up here for one second. All eyes up here for one second. Does this mean that God had forsaken Joseph? Right? The answer is no, right? God had not forsaken Joseph, right? Not a chance that that would happen. God is a faithful God, but it does cause us to ask the question, where is God in the midst of this? And I wanna pause here quickly and take you to a verse in the New Testament, a little secret verse in scripture. Actually, it's not secret, it's really well known. It's Romans 8.28, right? Do you know it? Do you know it? Romans 8.28, often quoted, often misunderstood, misquoted and misapplied. All right, but here it is. Romans 8.28, for we know that for all who love God, all things work together for good according to his purpose for those who are called. What a verse. All things work together for good, according to his purpose for those who are called. You know what that means? It means that nothing is wasted, right? Nothing is without purpose. God is always at work doing something in you, in me, moving us somewhere. But look at what it says. It says, according to his purpose. In Jeremiah 29, 11, we love to have that as a life verse that we quote for ourselves. God says, I know the plans I have for you. Now, yes, they are plans to prosper you and not to harm, to give you a hope and a future, right? But they're my plans. Proverbs 3, 5, trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding. Why? Because our understanding is limited and it fails us. And so we need to trust Him, right? Why is this important? Because here's the truth. Oftentimes, God's promised land, the place that He wants to bring you is very different than ours. And the truth is that we might never get the dream as we envision it, but we need to know that nothing happens by accident. Nothing takes God by surprise. Nothing happens beyond His purpose and power to renew. And sometimes God brings us to a place in life where we don't want to be and we would never choose for ourselves. But even in that place, God says, I'm working. I am in control. And it's in faith that He calls us then to trust Him. as he moves us off of our plans and onto his plan. Question is, will you do that this morning? Will you trust the Lord? God is moving Joseph onto his plan. If we turn over two chapters to Genesis chapter 39 in verse two and verse three and verse four and verse five, it repeats this phrase, the Lord was with Joseph. The Lord was with him. All right, beloved, don't miss this. Because even in the midst of broken dreams, the Lord never abandoned Joseph. And sometime, someone, someone here needs to hear this this morning. Because no matter where you are, no matter what has happened in your life, the circumstances that you're going through, you need to know the Lord has not forsaken you. Let that be an anchor to you this morning. Joseph had been brought down to Egypt, sold by his brothers. He sold again, this time to a man named Potiphar. Potiphar is the captain of Pharaoh's guard. And so Joseph starts working in his house. And you know what? Everything starts going great. You know, the Lord's blessing Joseph, the Lord's blessing Potiphar through Joseph. Seems like Joseph's able to kind of right the ship in his life. And in fact, he's thriving and he's put in charge of all of Potiphar's house. Right? Everything is locked down. And then comes boulder number two. Potiphar's wife starts getting the hots for Joseph. Right? And not subtly. Right? It says here, it says, day after day, she cast her eyes on Joseph saying, lie with me. Right? Now, this is not tell lies with me. Right? This is... Right? Right? And so, think about Joseph's life. Right? Think about you in this situation, right? Joseph had come out of this situation where he was hated by his brothers. He had been betrayed by his family. He had been sold into slavery. And now it's been a few years, right? And he says, I have worked hard. I've done all of the right things. I am realizing all of these blessings in my life. Now it's me time. I've had a hard life and I'm gonna take what I deserve. And I'm gonna focus on my wants and my desires for a while. Does he do that? He doesn't do that. He doesn't use his hard story as an excuse to release the Lord and start feeding himself. Instead, he says in verse nine, he says, how can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? In spite of all that had happened to him, Joseph was holding on to the dream giver. And he says, I'm not sure where all this ends. I'm not even sure what I'm doing here. But while I'm in it, I'm holding on to you in all things. Listen, he makes the right choice. He does the honorable thing. He honors the Lord. He holds on to the Lord. And what happens to him? The wife cries foul. And his employer then rejects him. And he ends up in prison. for doing the right thing? How's your promised land looking, Joseph? How's the path working out for you? Probably not like you thought, right? And scripture is telling here because at the beginning of chapter 40, it says, sometime after. See, we're not talking about like, oh, there was a misunderstanding and I ended up in prison for 24 hours and then everybody said, oh, my mistake. You're out, right? No, no, no. He's in there for years, for doing nothing wrong, for making good choices, for honoring the Lord. This is what he gets. Remember, he was 17 when all this started, 17. It's likely in his 20s that he's thrown into prison. Yeah, and you can just imagine Joseph sitting there in prison, just recounting kind of his reality. You know what? He doesn't have the house with the white picket fence. He doesn't have the wife. He can't watch his kids grow up. That's not where he's at. And I'm sure that there were times in his life, like there are in ours, when Joseph might have doubted the dream. when Joseph might have doubted the Lord's presence with him. Now, it doesn't say any of that in scripture, but I'm just looking at it through a real lens. There are times when we struggle with that, right? And he would have probably doubted, oh, maybe the dream wasn't from the Lord. Maybe I just made that up. Maybe I just wanted that to be true. Maybe I was, you know, whatever. But would you blame him if he asked that question? He didn't know where the end would be. He didn't know when he was gonna get out. He didn't really have a sentence. This was just his reality. Genesis 39 verse 20, there he was in prison. And in that place, I think it would have been easy to let go of the Lord. I think it would have been easy for him to say, okay, all right, time out, God. You gave me this dream, and I believed it was you, and I had a good life, like with my family, right? Sure, my brothers hated me, but it was better than here, right? And I was following you, and then you sold me, and then I still held on to you, right? And Potiphar's house was great, like thanks for that, Right? I was killing it there. I thought that was pretty good for me. And then I tried to do the right thing. And I tried to honor you. And what did that get me? Prison? Oh yeah, you're crushing it, God. Love that for me. How easy would it have been for him to say, got him out. I'm just out. Right? I think that's where this walk of faith comes in. because he didn't do it. Now, maybe it was the dream that God gave him that kept him going. Maybe it was the dream that anchored him to the Lord. Maybe it was just what he knew about the Lord to be true, right? We don't really know, but he did hold on. And in the midst of all of it, because he held on, the Lord continued to prosper his path. Don't miss this. Guys, we don't need to be out of prison to prosper. Some of you need to hear that this morning. We don't need to be out of prison to prosper. And the truth is that we don't need to be in prison to sometimes feel like we're in prison. True or false? Right? That's where we need to trust in the promises of the promise keeper. Because we're on a journey. And on that journey, as Joseph remained with the Lord, what he found is that the Lord remained with him. And because of that, he prospered. And you know what? You can too. Never have my wife and I encountered the Lord so powerfully as in the midst of our journey with cancer. How he showed up, how he was faithful. We might even say that we prospered in that journey. We would never go back to the people that we were before that. God was moving us somewhere, just as he's moving Joseph, and just as he moves you. Now, fast forward again, time passes and we'll end here, but eventually, Pharaoh's baker and Pharaoh's cup bearer end up in prison with Joseph. And they both had these dreams that they didn't understand. And God gave Joseph the ability to interpret those dreams for them. Now, it wasn't good for the baker, right? Three days, you're gonna be executed, I'm sorry. But for the cupbearer, it was different. Three days, he was gonna be restored to his position in Pharaoh's court. And sure enough, it happened just as Joseph said it would. And in that, Joseph asked the cupbearer just one little favor, just one favor. Can you do me one thing? Can you mention me to Pharaoh? Like when you're restored, when that actually happens, can you just remember me? Can you put in a good word for me? The cupbearer forgets. Like, how do you do that? But he did. Right? Now, put yourself again in Joseph's shoes. This all happens. Right? God gives him the ability. He must have thought, like, this is great, Lord. I see what you're doing now. Right? Cupbearer comes down here. He finds out about me. I help him. He tells Pharaoh. Pharaoh frees me. I have this great testimony of how you showed up in my life and everything that you did. Right? Wow. What a promised land. What a journey that you brought me on. Then he forgets. And so now Joseph has been betrayed by his family. He's been betrayed by his employer. He's been betrayed by his friends. Who here would be a little bitter at this point? Right? Just sitting in there. For two more years, Joseph sat in prison. Right? We just read that. We're like, oh, two years. No, it happened. Just to put us in that reality, I'm gonna wait two years before I say something else. It's a long time. Two years he sits in prison. Why? Why, Lord, would you allow that to happen? There can really only be one answer. Because that wasn't God's plan for him. God still had a better promised land that Joseph knew nothing about. It was hard for Joseph, but we find that he's still in the midst of that, holds on to the Lord. I don't understand, don't get it. Now to end this story, the cupbearer does eventually remember Joseph. When Pharaoh has a dream, he's like, oh, wait a minute, there's this guy. Right? Like there's this dream interpreter. Right? And he can come and he can help you. Right? So he remembers Joseph and brings Joseph before Pharaoh. And that launches Joseph on a journey where he becomes the second in command in all of the land of Egypt. And in that place, you know what? The Lord does fulfill the dream that he gave to Joseph. but I'll let you read that on your own this week. Here's the application. God was faithful to the dream, but he fulfilled it in a way that Joseph could have never imagined. God is the giver of good gifts, but sometimes the packaging is all wrong. And in our pursuit of the promised land, he calls us to trust. We might not know where we're going. We might not know what the end of it is. We might not know why we're in there. But he calls us to trust that the promise keeper is able to deliver on his promises. Whether it's in this life, sometimes it's in the life to come. And in that, the greatest promise that God ever made was the promise of salvation through his son, Jesus Christ. And if you've never chosen to follow Christ, know that all of God's promises start right there. They start right there. Jesus says, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. So would you put your trust in Jesus this morning? And then would you follow the promise keeper no matter where that might lead?