Raising joyful children in an angry world, a podcast dedicated to faithful parents navigating their families through a stormy culture
The longest story in the Bible is the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors. We're going to look at a dysfunctional family, its fall and its rise, and the amazing grace in which God delivers them. I want to borrow from what I would call a classic Christian means of teaching this story to your kids. We might call it the Catechism Bible. I spent the last few weeks reviewing many children's Bibles, and most of them are just the Bible itself, with some graphics and some to explain what a cistern looks like, and then they show you a well. Others try to simplify the story, so there's one that was something like this is the story of Joseph and his mean brothers. It's one of my least favorites. What I want to suggest to you, that if you remember our emphasis way back when we talked about the catechisms, the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles Creed, and having kids memorize this, the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles Creed, and the 23rd Psalm can help explain this story. These things that are memorized, or at least they're familiar with, can deliver understanding of Bible stories. And so I want to try and demonstrate how to tell this story using these four pieces of the historic faith. We might call it a young person's systematic theology. See, giving your children a Bible and telling them stories is great. I'm so impressed with Superbook on Amazon and how familiar you are. Those Bible stories have made my grandkids who have watched it. But we've got to give them also the tools to understand the story, to unlock the clues, to see what is unseen in the story, to better understand themselves and their relationship to the Lord. So one of the reasons I want to do this, one of the reasons you want to do this as a parent, especially today, is we are living in a digital world of instant answers to everything. And that methodology is going to fail them to build the spiritual muscle that the heart needs, that the soul needs to take in God's gifts of faith, hope, and love. Our walk through the kingdom of God, faith, hope, and love is not going to fit in the search engine methodology. The big things in life are journeys. I mean, we might say it's something like learning to make homemade pasta, homemade sauce, and homemade meatballs. You can't grasp that by mastering the Uber Eats app. That's why it is important to learn these stories. And we're going to start with this long Bible story. We'll break it down. over a series of weeks. So what I want to do is I want to say to my kids, now listen, we're going to look for some clues from the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Apostles Creed, and the 23rd Psalm to help explain our story. Because the secret to a story is seeing what's unseen. Finding out where's God hiding and how God works in our lives and his relationship to us. In this first section, I'm going to take a look at, Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive others their sins. That's from the Lord's Prayer. Honor your father and mother from the Ten Commandments. Lead us not into temptation. Deliver us from evil. Those are just a few pieces that I think are helpful. I want to make sure of this though, is we're not looking at this to find faults and sins in this family and saying, See, they're bad people. Those are mean brothers. What we want to do is to learn, we're prone to dishonor parents. We tend to be unforgiving. We're vulnerable to take matters into our own hands and to be tempted into deadly sin. We tend to be unthankful for what we have. We want to take what's not ours. We're jealous if we think somebody's taking what belongs to us. So we're not going to see why we're in need of the prayers that we pray Unless we see that we are vulnerable to the very things that are in this story. So the opening verses in chapter 37 of Genesis. Let me read them and then we'll come back and we'll see how the commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and these tools help. Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan. And this is the account of Jacob's family line. Joseph, a man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilah and the sons of Zilpah, his father's wives. And he brought their father a bad report about them. Now Israel, who is also known as Jacob, that's the two names that they have for him, he loved Joseph more than any of his brothers because he had been born to him in his old age, and he made an ornate robe for him. And when his brothers saw that the father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him. Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told his brothers, oh, they hated him all the more. He said to them, listen. To this dream I had, we were binding sheaves of grain out of the field, when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright. While your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it. His brothers said, do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us? And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he said. Then he had another dream and he told his brothers, listen, I had another dream. And this time the sun and the moon and 11 stars were bowing down to me. When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him. What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you? His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind. Well, I want to go back now and start to kind of tell the story and get some of the clues. So the first thing we see here is that Joseph is the son of Rachel, Jacob's first love. And if you remember the story, he goes to marry Rachel and then his father in law slips his Rachel's sister into the wedding tent. And he ends up with two wives after he works another seven years for the father in law. But now he's got many wives, one dad and many mamas. And this is why we have the commandments. We would simply say to our kids, look, Adam and Eve, we can, you know, there's one wife, it's a husband and a wife. And His grandfather, Abraham and Sarah, his father, Isaac and Rebecca, but somehow Jacob, who's called Israel, has drifted into what the other nations, who aren't following God's model. And this is why God gives us rules, because when we don't have them, they actually cause problems. Instead of keeping freedom, They actually cause us to get into snares. So that's sort of a general concept, why we have the commandments. Even though we know we don't fully obey them so now Israel loved Joseph more than his sons because he'd been born to him in his old age. Maybe Joseph favored his mother, and that's why, that's his first love. Maybe it's because he's old and he kind of feels like, oh man, I still got it. But here's where we want to say to our kids, look, as parents, as moms and dads, we make mistakes, we have flaws. We are not, we are not gods. We try our best, but we're not when we make some mistakes. And sometimes we even treat each of you a little differently. But what the commandment says is that you're to honor your father and mother. And then in that respect, that means you don't focus on our flaws, but focus on what you've been blessed with. All of the brothers were in the herding business, all of them were given things, but they focused on the ornate robe instead of honoring their parents and overlooking the mistake that Israel had made. So Joseph has a dream, and he shares the dream. And if you know our Apostles Creed, we say, I believe in God the Father Almighty. And what's happening here is that Joseph is taking his dream, and he's making himself, oh, maybe I'm going to be the big dog. Maybe I'm going to be the one in charge. And of course, his brothers react to this in anger, because they want to be the Almighty. Do you intend to reign over us? You see how the line of questioning goes. No one is taking this dream to God and saying, God, what does this mean? In fact, they end up getting the second dream and, and man, he's boasting, right? And the scriptures tell us, let anyone who boasts, boast in the Lord. We also see the failure to forgive us our sins. And, and instead of forgiving and coming to reconciliation, they got so hostile they couldn't even see a way to give a kind word. So when we, we ask God, see we're prone not to forgive. So when we pray, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us. It's our ability to then give a kind word, to put something behind us. And when we don't do that because it's hard, and we can't do it unless God delivers us to do it. Well, what ends up happening is, our anger intensifies. In fact, what then happens is, is that Dad has this favoritism issue. And as we just said, the commandment of honoring your father and mother gets ignored, and then when you ignore that, you can't recognize, give us this day our daily bread from the Lord's Prayer. You're not focused on, hey, we've got these herds of these sheep, we've got this business, we've got substance, God's giving us substance every day. No, no, no, you're focused on the coat. That's why we say, give us this day our daily bread. Help us to be grateful. Instead, the brothers are filled, in verse four, with, with jealousy. Jealousy means you think you have something, or maybe you do have something, and you're fearful and angry that someone's trying to take it from you. Because these brothers were older, they thought they were entitled to be the boss, and the younger brother's trying to be the boss, and this is what causes it. Jealousy. We're going to see how jealousy can turn into the deadly sin of envy in our next section. But it's a failure to forgive and a failure to be grateful. That's why we pray that. Now it's all escalated in verses 5 through 8. They're, they're now all battling over my kingdom come instead of thy kingdom come. That's why we pray the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. This is not being prayed. This is not being even thought of. And so the failure in us, in us human beings, and our failure to recognize the need to forgive, the need to resist the temptations, it causes us to be vulnerable to to just do more and more sin. And so we're going to see, as we sort of wrap this up, is the temptation is to now become evil. This is why we pray. Deliver us from evil. We pray that because we're vulnerable, we're easily falling into it. So, this is where I want to stop in this, this issue. Because they're all in this belief of everybody wants to be almighty. And we're seeing this pattern of this story. If you go back, and this is how this all happens, right? we go into Isaac and Rebekah and Rebekah and Jacob trick Esau into stealing his inheritance as the older son. And now we see, uh, the sons of Jacob conspiring against Joseph, and you see their jealousy and their anger. It tells us that sin is handed down from generation to generation, and that's why we have to trust in God's promises and not ourselves. Well we're going to look for, in the next few verses now, is where God is hiding. But I want to close up to say this, we're supposed to live by faith, not by sight. And so when these brothers As well as the family are all focusing on each other's shortcomings in giving bad reports, in being jealous, in caught up in favoritism. we block our vision to see our great God in our life. In the next section, we'll see where this leads the family. We'll see the other portions of the creeds and the commandments and the Lord's Prayer kind of explaining what's happening and why we pray these things. And then we'll see eventually where God hides and how God rescues us because we all are in need of being rescued. If that's the main thing that this story is going to teach us. The ultimate battle for the heart and soul is a fight for identity. Our king invites our kids to know who they are, what to believe, and where they belong. Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.