41. When God Buries the Vision

What do you do when the thing God gave you goes into the ground?

Not stalls. Not pauses. Collapses. When the vision you carried for years ends in a way you did not choose and cannot fully explain, and you are left holding the pieces trying to determine whether what you are standing at is a burial or a death.

In this episode of FaithFormed, we walk through the full arc of Joseph's journey from the pit to the prison to Pharaoh's court, not as an inspirational overview, but as a serious theological and pastoral examination of what God is actually doing in the seasons where everything appears to be falling apart.

This is not a pull-yourself-up episode. This is an episode for the person who did the right thing and still ended up in chains. For the person who has been faithful in the silence and is not sure what faithfulness is supposed to feel like this deep into the wait. For the person whose two years after the cupbearer forgot them has stretched into something much longer.

In this episode:

Why the pit is often the enemy's response to a calling, not God's correction of a mistake.

What Joseph's posture in Potiphar's house teaches us about seasons we are tempted to treat as waiting rooms.

The devastating pastoral truth that obedience sometimes produces the second pit, not protection.

What Psalm 105:17-19 means when it says the word of the Lord tested Joseph, and why that reframes everything.

Why Joseph asking two prisoners how they are doing is one of the most theologically significant moments in the entire narrative.

What it means that God meant it for good when the brothers clearly meant it for evil, and why that is not a comfortable answer but an honest one.

Theologians Referenced:

Walter Brueggemann (Genesis: Interpretation Commentary), James H. Cone (God of the Oppressed), Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest)

Scripture:

Genesis 37, 39, 40, 41, 45, 50 | Psalm 105:17-19

FaithFormed is a biblical discipleship podcast for people building a faith that holds up. Not a faith for the highlight reel. A faith for the long middle.

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Email us any questions or comments to yourpursuitpodcast@gmail.com

Order your copy of my latest book, "The Purpose in the Pause", here

Learn more about me at www.justindbelt.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I want you to think about the last time that something that you believed that God gave you collapsed. Not faded, not shifted, but actually collapsed. The kind of ending where you're standing there with the pieces in your hands and no explanation that is clean enough to give other people. The kind of ending where the gap between what you believed and what happened is so wide that you start to wonder if you ever heard anything at all. And the worst part about this is not even the loss itself. The worst part is that you cannot stop believing it was real. You cannot make yourself stop. You've tried. You have tried to name it ambition, you have tried to call it immaturity, uh, tried to file it under lessons learned and move forward. And then 3 a.m. comes, and there it is again. Still there, like it never left, still feeling less like a dream you manufactured and more like something that was placed in you before you had the language to even describe it. Before you fully understood what it would cost to carry it, I planted a church. And if you've been around Faith Form for any length of time, you know this story. October 2024, we launched Pursuit Church as a home church in Frisco, Texas. I'd been waiting for this moment for y'all 10, 11 years at that point. It was a long, it was a long season, like we talked about in episode 40. Long, like the kind of waiting that reshapes who you are and what you're willing to hold on to. That kind of long. We started, we gathered, we believed, we closed in May of 2025. And I'm not gonna dress that up for you. I'm not gonna give you the triumphant version, you know, where I had a revelation in the quiet time after I read the Bible and prayed, and the Lord whispered something poetic, and I walked out of that prayer time with a framework that helped me walk through it and a sense of resolution. That's not what happened. What happened was that something I'd carried for a long time, something I had given real weight to, it went into the ground. And I've been sitting with a question that I think a lot of you are sitting with: whether your pit looks like a closed church or a collapsed marriage or a career that ended before it should have, or a vision that you carried for years or decades and you watched die on the vine. The question is this is what I am right now a burial or a death? Because those two things are not the same, right? A burial is when something goes into the ground with the expectation of what is coming. A death is when something goes into the ground and stays there. And when you're in the pit, when you're in the moment of collapse and loss, you don't always know which one you're in. You just know that you're in the ground. And I've been walking with a man in scripture who knows exactly what that feels like. His name's Joseph. Ever heard of him? His story is not a cleaned up version like most of us are taught in Sunday school, right? Where the coat is colorful and the ending is triumphant and the middle is kind of like a blur, but you know, it had to happen. But y'all, the middle is not a blur, the middle is kind of the point, and that's where we're going today in this episode. I'm Justin Belt, your host, and welcome to Faith Formed, episode 42. No, episode 41, sorry, episode 41. And this is a podcast about honest faith for people who don't people who don't have it all together. And what we're really trying to build, y'all, is a faith that holds up. Not a faith that is for the highlight reel, not a faith that only functions in comfortable seasons, but it's a faith for the long middle, a faith for the season when God, when what God said and what you're living do not appear to be the same story. We're in the vision arc of the formation trilogy, and this is the last arc of that trilogy. And last week we talked about the vision before the conditions, about what it means to carry a God-given picture of a future when the evidence for it has not arrived yet. And this week we're going one layer deeper. What happens when the vision does not just wait but appears to die? What do you do when the thing God gave you goes into the ground? I've got a lot to talk about. We're in Genesis 37 through 41. And before we get there, do me a favor. If you're enjoying what we're doing with this podcast, do me a favor, drop us a rating and a review, five stars, wherever you listen to podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen. Let us know that you enjoy what we're doing. And also do me a favor, click the share button and share this with a friend, because I promise you know someone who needs every bit of what we're talking about today. All right. So Genesis 37 through 41, are you ready? I'm ready. Let's go. So in Genesis 37, Joseph is 17 years old, which is crazy because that's how old my oldest son is right now. He's already had the dreams, two of them. And if you know anything about how God confirms things in scripture, then you know that two dreams of the same thing is not coincidence. It is an actual holy emphasis. God is underlining, highlighting, italicizing, bold printing. He's doing, he's drawing attention to the thing. And so the sheaves in the field bowing to Joseph's sheaf, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars bowing to him, his brothers and his parents represented in the imagery of the cosmos itself, all bending the knee. And so Joseph tells his family. He tells them the way a 17-year-old tells things, which is to say, without the filter, yeah? Without the filter for how it lands. They just tell it. And without calculating the relational cost of what they have to say, without without wondering whether now is the right time. But brother has seen something, so I can't fault him. He he just he says what he saw. His father then rebukes him, the text says, but then keeps the word in his mind. His brothers, yo, they just outright hate him. Not dislike, not resent, but actually hate. The text actually says that they could not speak peacefully to him. Imagine having that kind of hatred for your own flesh and blood. Now, this is worth slowing down to ponder. See, when a person carries something that God gave them, there will sometimes be people in their immediate circle who cannot be at peace around them. And it's not because of what the person has done, but it's because of what that person carries. See, the vision itself provokes something in people who have made peace with smaller lives. The brothers aren't struggling with Joseph's character, they're struggling with his calling, and they have not yet learned the difference. And people around us also have not learned the difference. There are some of us who have not learned the difference. And so now Jacob sends Joseph out to check on his brothers in the fields of Shechem, right? And Joseph goes like a like an obedient son. And he doesn't find them there. He wanders around, and a man goes in the field and tells him that they have moved on to Dothan. So he goes to Dothan. Okay. Now his brothers see him coming from across the field. He's hard to miss. Brother has the coat on, right? He's hard to miss. It's a target on his back. And they say to one another, here comes the dreamer. Let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits. Then we will say that a fierce lion, a fierce animal, sorry, has devoured him. And we will see what comes of his dreams. Yo, that sentence, there is so much sarcasm there. Do you do you do you hear it? And then we will see what comes of his dreams. Like the dreams are the offense. Like if they can eliminate the dreamer, then they can eliminate the dream. Like if the vision lives only in Joseph, and if Joseph is gone, then the dream is gone too, right? But there's a theological error that people make about calling. They assume the calling is in the person. And if the person can be removed or diminished or discredited, then the calling goes away too. But that's not how God works. The calling is not just in the person, the calling is in God. The person is just the vessel. And you cannot, you, you just can't kill what God has spoken by getting rid of the one he spoke it to. Joseph's brother Reuben talks him out of killing him. He says, Do not shed blood, throw him in the pit. He he Reuben intends to come back later and retrieve Joseph, right? But then Joseph is not there when Judah makes a different proposal. But Reuben, sorry, is not there when Judah makes a different proposal. So a caravan of Ishmaelites comes through. Why conceal the blood? Let us sell him. He's our brother, after all. And how much do they sell Joseph for? 20 pieces of silver. That is the price that they put on the dream that God gave their little brother. 20 pieces of silver. Scholars note that this was the going rate for a young male slave at the time. Nothing special. Not even premium, yo. Not even premium. Like his brothers, their brothers, not even worth a premium bounty. But they sold him for what a slave would be worth. The ordinary market price for someone God had marked for something extraordinary. So Joseph is pulled from the pit, handed to strangers, and joins a caravan that is headed for Egypt. And the brothers take the coat that was a visible image that Joseph was Jacob's favorite. Right? And they kill a goat, they cover the goat, the coat in blood, and the goat's blood, and they bring it to Jacob, and they say, We found this. Is this your son's coat? Look at that. Jacob tears his garments, he puts sackcloth on, he refuses to be comforted. He says, I will go down to Sheol mourning for my son. The father thinks the son is dead. The vision appears to be buried. And now, here is the pastoral reality that I need you to sit with before we move forward. The pit was not the end of the vision. But from inside the pit, it felt exactly like the end. Walter Brugeman. I talk about him seemingly every episode, man, but his stuff is so good. But he writes in his Genesis commentary that the Joseph narrative is fundamentally a story about the hiddenness of God, not God's absence, his hiddenness. God is present and active in every movement of this story, but he never announces himself in it. He doesn't appear in a vision to Joseph in the pit. He doesn't send an angel to explain what's happening and why. He doesn't give Joseph a word of encouragement that says, hold on. And I, you know, he doesn't say, hold on, brother. I know that this feels catastrophic, but here's the plan and here's how it resolves. No. The truth is that God is in this story in the same way that he's often in your story, working underneath, weaving threads that you can't see, present in the chaos without explaining himself to the people most affected by it. And see, Bruggerman makes a point that I think is one of the most important things that you can hear today. And maybe you need to write this down. He says that Genesis 50, verse 20, where Joseph says, You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good, is not something that Joseph could have said in Genesis 37 at the beginning of this thing. It's a declaration that he could only make on the other side of decades of suffering. This theological clarity that Joseph speaks within in Genesis 50 eventually articulates something. Eventually, this clarity did not sustain him through the dark years. He didn't have that clarity then. But he did have something underneath the clarity, something that didn't require him to understand in order to hold on. And that matters for me and you today because most of us want to arrive at Genesis 50 and 20 without going through Genesis 37. We want the declaration without the pit. We want the testimony without the years that built it. We want the capacity to say God meant it for good without actually having to live through the season where it didn't feel like anything good was being produced. Yo, the pit is the price of the testimony. But here's the prophetic word that I want to leave in this first part before we keep moving. Joseph didn't end up in the pit because of something that he did wrong. He ended up there because of what he was given. The brother's hatred wasn't provoked by Joseph's behavior. It was provoked by his calling, by the vision itself. He was not betrayed in spite of what God placed in him. He was betrayed because of it. And there's someone who is listening right now who has been telling themselves that they are in the pit because they made a mistake, because they missed something, because if they had been wiser or more discerning or more patient, they would not be there. And some seasons that is true. And there is a real examination to it, but there are some seasons where the pit is not God's correction. Some seasons the pit, and get this, the pit is the enemy's response to what God declared over your life before the enemy had time to stop it at the origin. The opposition is not evidence that you were wrong about the calling, y'all. It may be evidence that you were exactly right. Get that. Let that settle in your spirit. Maybe it's not that you missed it. Maybe it's that Satan wasn't able to cut it up, cut your calling, cut the vision off at the root. And so now he's coming after you to see if he can take it out now. Does that resonate with anybody? Just man, just let that because I know that's good. And that has to be healing for someone because I I know that I just spoke directly to someone's situation. And I need you to hold on to that. Alright? Let's keep moving. So now we're in Egypt. Joseph is now property, basically a line item on the ledger, right? He's an asset in someone else's ledger. Because he didn't choose his country, he didn't choose his household, he didn't choose this life. He he isn't here because of a calling he followed. He's here because he was sold by his own family, by his own kinfolk. And the text says something that I want to slow all the way down on. He says, the it says, the Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man. Not successful as in the dream was fulfilled, not successful as in the conditions improved to something Joseph would have chosen. Successful as in whatever he put his hands to, in the sphere of his actual current circumstances, God prospered it. Brother was still a slave. He was still in a foreign country. He was still owned by someone else. His family still thought he was dead. The vision was still invisible, and yet God was with him. And it was visible enough that Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard, noticed. The text says that Potiphar saw that the Lord was with him, and that the Lord caused all he did to succeed in his hands. Now, Potiphar is an Egyptian. He doesn't even worship the God of the Israelites, but he can see the favor on Joseph's life. He can see that something is operating in this slave's life that has nothing to do with the slave's circumstances. Hallelujah. And he responds by putting, he responds to it by putting Joseph in charge of everything, his household, his fields, his account, all of it. Now I want you to watch what Joseph does with this. He doesn't spend this season campaigning for his release. He doesn't find a way to position himself for escape. He doesn't use Potiphar's trust to work his way toward the border. He does not treat the assignment as a placeholder, as something beneath him because he knows he's called to something greater. You think Joseph's forgotten about his dreams? No. He doesn't treat this as a stepping stone. He doesn't phone it in while he waits for God to move him to where he's supposed to be. What does Joseph do? He runs the house. And he runs it excellently. He runs it as if this is the assignment, not the assignment before the real assignment, but as if this is the assignment. James Cohn in God of the Oppressed argues something that I think speaks directly to this moment in Joseph's life. He writes that God is known most profoundly in the experience of humiliation and suffering. That the biblical witness is not about God standing above the suffering of the oppressed and issuing declarations from a safe difference. It's that God enters the suffering. Now, Cohn is working through the particular historical context of the black American suffering, right? And that context matters and it shouldn't be erased from this conversation. However, this principle that God works, that God is present in the suffering, as the oppressed are suffering, God is in there, he's in the suffering, he's in the oppression with them. We can see the through line of this throughout the whole of Scripture. God is found in the history of struggle. God is found in the history of pain, and in the life of the person who's faithfully serving inside of a limitation that they did not choose for themselves. God is there. Look at scripture. Right? And so Joseph in Potiphar's house is not a man waiting for God to show up. Rather, he is a man, still a young man, who has discovered, whether consciously or not, that God shows up inside the limitation rather than when the limitation is removed. The favor that rests on Joseph's life in Potiphar's house is not a reward for patience. It's not a preview of the coming attraction. It is God being God where Joseph actually is. Now, this is a word that I want to speak to you for a moment because I think that some of you are sitting in a Potiphar's house season and you are treating it like a waiting room. You are showing up at half capacity because you have decided that this is not where you're really supposed to be. You are emotionally checked out because your eyes are on the assignment you believe is coming. You're doing the minimum because you have told yourself that the minimum is all this assignment, all this season deserves. And in doing that, you're not just wasting time. You are missing the formation. The Potiphar's House season is not a detour, it's a training ground. And you cannot shortcut a training ground without it shortcutting what God is building inside of you. In my utmost, for his highest Oswald Chambers writes that God puts people in the shadow of his hand until they learn to hear him. Not until the circumstances change, until they learn to hear. There is something that something that can only be learned in the shadow that cannot be learned in the open. There is a quality of attention to God that only develops when God is the only reliable thing in the room. See, Potiphar's house is in the shadow of God's hand. I'm sorry. Potiphar's house is the shadow of God's hand on Joseph's life. And within that, in Potiphar's house, acting as the shadow of God's hand, Joseph is learning to hear God. But then there's a rupture. And that rupture's name is Potiphar's wife. See, the text says that Joseph was well built and handsome. And she noticed. And she said to him day after day, come lie with me, day after day. Brother had aura, right? He had aura. This is not a one-time temptation, though. It's sustained pressure. This is someone with power in the household, someone whose word matters more than Joseph's. Despite all of the power that Joseph now holds in the household, this is someone with more power than him. Someone who has leverage over the space that Joseph occupies, and she is applying pressure repeatedly over time, and day by day Joseph refuses. He tells her, My master has trusted me with everything in his house. How then could I do this great wickedness and sin against God? I want you to notice what Joseph calls it. He does not call it a mistake. He does not call it a bad decision. He calls it a great wickedness and a sin against God. He has a theological framework for this kind of refusal. It's not just integrity in the abstract, it is an integrity that is rooted in a relationship with God that Joseph refuses to compromise, regardless of what it cost him. And of course, this is important. Joseph doesn't know what refusing will cost him. He doesn't know what Potiphar's wife is gonna do. He doesn't know that she's gonna make something up. He doesn't have a vision that says, refuse this and you will be in Pharaoh's court in two years. There's no carrot on the end of this for him. He just knows that this is wrong and that his relationship with God matters more than his comfort or his security or his position. And so one day she grabs his garment. He runs. She holds the garment. She calls to the men of the household and tells the story in reverse. This Hebrew slave your master brought among us tried to take me by force. He ran when I screamed. And then she showed them the garment. And so when Potiphar comes home, she tells him the same story. And now his anger burns, and Joseph goes to prison, not because he sinned, but because he refused to sin. And I need to say something here because I think that this is one of the most disorienting experiences a person of faith can have. And it's one that we don't talk about enough. See, sometimes doing the right thing is what put you in the next pit. We have this subtle theology in a lot of American Christianity that says obedience produces protection. That if you make the right choice, God will arrange the circumstances to reward those choices in kind. And that theology is not entirely wrong, but it's not the whole truth. And when Joseph ends up in prison for refusing to sin against God, that partial theology has nothing useful to offer him and nothing useful to offer you. Joseph didn't end up in chains because he was because he was faithless. He ended up in chains because he was faithful. And the formation that happens in that transition from the trust he built in Potiphar's home to the prison he enters for honoring God, that transition is what makes everything that comes after possible. The coat went into the pit in Genesis 37. In Genesis 39, the garment goes into Potiphar's wife's hand. Both times, something that was meant to represent Joseph's position and the favor upon his life and his identity were stripped from him and used as evidence against him. And notice God does not intervene to stop that from happening. God doesn't show up and say, hey, wait, wait, wait. There's been a misunderstanding. Let me clear Joseph's name. God allows the garment to stay in Potiphar's wife's hand. He lets Potiphar believe the accusation. He lets Joseph go to prison. Because the prison is the next room in the formation. So here we are at the second pit. And scholars have noted that the Hebrew word for the sister, Joseph's brothers threw him into in Genesis 39, and the word used for prison in Genesis 39 is the same word, bore, which simply means the hole, the pit. Joseph has been in this place before. He knows what the walls feel like, can't scale them. He knows what it is to be confined by something that he did not choose, but also could not escape. But something is different about this one. See, the first pit, he was thrown in by people who hated what God gave him. The second pit, he was thrown in by people who were threatened by what he had become. And I think this is a progression that matters, so I don't want you to miss it. See, the enemy does not stand down because you have grown. Sometimes the attack intensifies because you have grown. Sometimes faithfulness produces a more sophisticated form of opposition than you faced when you were younger and less formed. The brothers could hate the dreamer, but Potiphar's wife had to fabricate a charge against the man. And here's what I keep coming to every time I read this. Joseph didn't end up in prison because of sin. He ended up in prison because of righteousness. He refused a woman who wanted him. He ran away. He protected his integrity. He protected Potiphar's trust. And he protected his relationship with God. And it cost him everything that he had built in Potiphar's house. The position, the authority, the stability, the access. Brother lost it all because he did what was right. The word of the Lord tested him. Psalms 105, 17 through 19 reflected on this moment in a way that I think is almost unbearable. Because y'all know the Psalms are just honest. Right? Here's what it says. It says, God sent a man before them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave. His feet were hurt with fetters, his neck was put in a collar of iron. Until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him. Get that? Until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him. Not the enemy, not Potiphar's wife, not the broken systems of Egypt, the word of the Lord. The same word God spoke over Joseph in those two dreams was now the same word that was functioning as the instrument of his testing. The promise of God was the pressure from God. And the vision was the crucible. I need you. Oh, we just gotta sit with that. We just gotta sit with that. Oh my gosh. We gotta sit with that. We gotta sit with that. The word that God gave you, the vision that God gave you. It's testing you. Until that word comes to pass, the word of the Lord is gonna test you. The promise is gonna prov is gonna provide pressure to see if who you're being formed into over the course of the pit, over the course of the prison is the person who can be productive with the promise. See, that thing that you have been carrying is not just a destination, it's a testing instrument. God uses the distance between the promise and the fulfillment as a crucible to determine what kind of person will inhabit the promise when it comes that matters. And it's not comfortable, but it's honest theology, y'all. And I would rather give you honest theology than make you feel good and walk away with nothing to show for it after you've listened to this episode. Because comfortable theology does not help you get out of the pit. Comfortable theology does not help you navigate the prison. And Oswald Chambers writes that God puts us in the shadow of his hand until we learn to hear him. And then he says this, something he says this, he says that songbirds are taught to sing in the dark. They are placed in darkness not as punishment, but as pedagogy. The darkness is where the song is formed. And then when the bird is released into the light, it can sing something that a bird taught only in the light could never produce. Y'all, Joseph is being taught to sing God's praise in the dark. You are being taught to sing God's praise in the dark. And I want you to watch what he does in that darkness. See, this is the teaching moment right here. This is the teaching moment. See, the prison warden puts Joseph in charge of the other prisoners over time, not immediately, right? Because the same pattern emerges. The Lord was with Joseph. The Lord showed him steadfast love. The Lord gave him favor in the sight of the prison warden. Same phrase, same God, different location. Favor in the pit, favor in Potiphar's house, favor in the prison. Not favor as in comfortable circumstances, not favor is in freedom from the situation, but favor as in God's presence producing fruit inside the limitation. There is a kind of blessing that is not conditional on your circumstances being resolved. There is a kind of favor that follows you into the pit, but it doesn't have to wait for you to come out. And some of you need to hear that. The favor of God is not waiting on the other side of this season. It is available to you right now, in this season, right now, in the place you're in, right now, in the limitation that you did not choose. The question is not whether God's presence is accessible in the prison. The question is whether you are paying attention to it. And now we get to the moment in the story that I think is the most, ah, it's charged. Theologically and pastorally, it is full. And it is not the moment that most people focus on. Two men are thrown into the prison. Pharaoh's cupbearer and his baker. They've both offended the king. Both are in Joseph's custody. He's over both of them. And one morning Joseph comes in and he looks at their faces, and something in him registered that they are troubled. And so he asks them, Why are your faces downcast today? Now, okay, Joseph is in prison for something he didn't do, for refusing to sin, for choosing righteousness and integrity, for choosing God. He has been in Egypt for years, separated from his family, with no kind of indication that anything is going to change. He is not free. He doesn't have a timeline. He doesn't have a promise that this is going to end soon. He is in the bore, the hole, in the pit again. But he wakes up one morning, looks at these two other men in the same pit, and asks them, How are you doing? Joseph is still paying attention to other people. He hasn't curled inward, he hasn't gone numb. He has not developed, you know, a kind of self-absorption that prolonged suffering can produce, where your own pain becomes so all-consuming that you lose your capacity to see anyone else's. No, he's still present, still observant, still willing to engage with the weight of the people around him. And I want to say something to you, okay? Suffering will try to take your capacity to see other people before it takes anything else. It wants to shrink your vision until you are the only thing that you can see, until your suffering is the only thing that you can see. And that shrinking is not a character flaw. No, it's a natural response to pain. It's a survival instinct. I understand it. I've lived it. Right? But Joseph's posture in the prison is a form of faithfulness that we underestimate when we read this text because we think it's just about endurance. No, it's not just about endurance. It is outward-facing endurance. It's the refusal to let the pit make you only about yourself. And that refusal is not natural, it is formed. It's the product of everything that happened in the cistern and in Potiphar's house, working until working together to produce a man who can be in prison and still have the margin for somebody else's grief. And then what happens? They tell him their dreams. Joseph says, Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell them to me. And now he's not performing confidence here. He's not putting on a face. He genuinely believes that God gave, that what God gave him can be brought to bear in this moment for these men. Dreams are nothing new for him. The gift that got him thrown into the pit by his brothers, it didn't go anywhere. It's still there. Slavery didn't take it. Prison didn't take it. False accusation didn't take it. What God places in you does not require favorable circumstances to function. So the cupbearer's dream is good. In three days he will be restored to his position. Yada yada yada. Joseph delivers the interpretation and then does something that people find really uncomfortable when they read it. He asks for something. And it's simple. When it is well with you, remember me. Mention me to Pharaoh. God, uh get me out of this place because I was stolen from my people, and I have done nothing deserving this prison. Now, despite everything, remember, he's still in prison and he still wants out. Right? Now, he doesn't say that I am at peace with this prison and I am trusting God and I have reached my desire for things to change. No, he says, I shouldn't be here. Can you help me get out? He names what he needs. He asks for it specifically. Let that be a lesson. Ask for it specifically. Now so in the prison, here's what faithfulness looks like. It doesn't look like pretending you're okay. It doesn't look like performing a piece that you don't actually have. And it doesn't look like you denying that you want the thing you want. Joseph is transparent. He doesn't dress it up or hyper-spiritual spiritualize it. He doesn't do a praise dance, no. He's in prison for something he didn't do and he wants out. That's that's honest, right? That is human. And it's also not a failure of faith. Then the baker shares his dream. And his interpretation is not good. Brother, in three days, I'm sorry, bro. Pharaoh's gonna execute you. But Joseph tells him the truth. Not a softened version of it, but he tells him the truth. See, Joseph is willing to deliver a hard word, even when the alternative is to say something encouraging, and let the man just joyfully live out his last few days. But Joseph doesn't want him to have a false comfort. He loves that man enough to tell him the truth. And I think that capacity, the capacity to be honest, even when dishonesty would be easier, is something that was formed in him in the pit and in Pharaoh's household. Because he'd been on the receiving end of dishonesty at so many points in his life, right? Enough false accusation and enough stories told in reverse, and he's not willing to do that to someone else, even when it would cost him nothing to do it. So three days passed, the cupbearer is restored, the baker is executed, exactly as Joseph said. But then the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph. And so he stayed in prison two more years. Two more years. See, the cupbearer part of this story is the hardest part of the story for me. Not the brothers. The brothers had active hatred in their hearts. I I understand that. But the cupbearer had no malice toward Joseph. He wasn't conspiring against him. He wasn't, you know, trying to keep him in prison. He just got his life back, and life kept moving. The routine started routining, and in the proximity to power and the comfortable rhythm of his own days, he forgot. And sometimes the people who leave us in our prisons the longest are not the ones who hated us. They're just the ones who moved on with their lives and did not carry us with them the way that we thought they would. The forgotten promises, the connections that faded. You know, the person who said that they would mention your name and either didn't think of it or thought of it and got busy and just let it go. While you stayed in prison and they were promoted back to the palace, Joseph sat with this for two more years. I don't know what your two more years looks like, but I think a lot of people listening right now are somewhere inside of their two more years. And you're just trying to figure out what faithfulness means when the person who was supposed to help you out forgot about you, and the door that was supposed to open stayed closed, and the season that was supposed to be transitional became a two more year season. Like, what God, what do we do with the two more years? And the text doesn't tell us a lot about what Joseph did in that two years because it needs, doesn't need to. We know his pattern. He served, he paid attention, he ran the prison, he kept doing the thing that God had given him to do with the people who were in front of him in the place where he actually was. Not the place where he was supposed to be, not the place that he wanted to be, but in the place that he was. So now this brings us to Genesis 41. Thank you for staying with us if you're still rocking with us. I know this is long, but this is necessary. This is so necessary. So in Genesis 41, Pharaoh has dreams. Two of them. Seven fat cows devoured by seven thin cows, seven healthy heads of grain, swallowed by seven thin heads of grain, and no one in his court, not the magicians, not the wise men, not the advisors, nobody could figure out what it was. And then the cupbearer, who was standing in the room, remembered Joseph. Now, can we talk about divine timing? I want you to feel this, not just notice it. I want you to feel this. The cupbearer remembers because Pharaoh is troubled. The cupbearer remembers because the Wisest men and the most powerful nation in the world couldn't answer the king's question. The cupbearer remembers because the specific gift that God placed in Joseph is what the moment requires. Ha! Listen, the timing of the remembering is not random. It is the moment when nothing else will work. See, God didn't forget Joseph in those two extra years, but he was waiting for the conditions to require what Joseph carried. And so now Joseph is pulled from the prison. He shaves, he changes his clothes, and he stands before Pharaoh. Pharaoh says, I've heard you can interpret dreams. Joseph says, It's not in me. God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer. Man, that's 13 years. Y'all, Genesis 30, 37, verse 2, Joseph was 17. Genesis 41, 46, he was 30 when he stood before Pharaoh. 13 years from the cistern to the throne room, 13 years of the pit and the potiphar's house and the prison, plus two extra years after the cupbearer for God. And the first thing that comes out of Joseph's mouth is not the in the presence of the most powerful man in the world. It is not in me. Not I have been preparing for this moment, not I knew this day was coming, Pharaoh. I've been waiting on you, my dude. Not I've been faithful through everything, and finally, this is my reward. Insert praise dance here. He doesn't even say, let me tell you what I've been through to get here. He doesn't even give him his life story. He tells Pharaoh that God will give him a favorable answer. That sentence is the result of 13 hard years of formation. And it's not something that you can just say unless you know it to be true. It's not something that you can manufacture from a place of comfort and ease. The pit does not produce the vision. The vision was already before the pit, but the pit produces the man who is ready to carry the vision without being consumed by the vision. And that's the distinction that I want to plant in you and in me today, because I think a lot of people are praying to get out of the pit when the more urgent prayer is to become inside the pit the person that the vision requires. The palace doesn't form that person, the pit does. Potiphar's house does. The prison does. The two extra years of the cupbearer forgetting you does. See, Joseph can govern Egypt because he has governed a prison. He can manage a crisis because he managed a household while he was enslaved. He can hold the weight of a nation's survival because he held his own weight in a pit without anyone to witness it. The palace reveals what the pit produced. And then Genesis 50, 20. Joseph's brothers come to Egypt for grain during the famine, and they don't know it's Joseph. So he tests him. He watches them. He sees something in them that wasn't there 13 years ago. He sees men who have been living with what they did for 20 plus years, and they're not the same men who sat down to eat bread while their brother cried out from the pit. And when he finally reveals himself, he's weeping so loudly that the Egyptians hear it. And he's not performed, this is not performative forgiveness. He's not offering, you know, a handcrafted speech that absolves him. But he's unraveled. He's undone. He's weeping. He's Joseph. And he says, Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here. God sent me before you to preserve life. See, Joseph reframes the entire narrative, not to protect his brother's feelings. Though he is clearly moved, but he has compassion for him, but he reframes it because he actually believes what he says. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. And he's not angry at them. He's just stating plainly that he understands why all the events of his life up to this point had to happen. The same event, two simultaneous meanings. The brothers intended one thing. God intended something else. The pit was not outside of God's intention. The betrayal was not outside of God's intention. The slavery and the prison and the two extra years, none of it was outside of God's intention. But that's not the same as saying God caused the evil. The brothers made a choice. Potiphar's wife made a choice. The cupbearer made a choice. Family, human agency is real. And the text does not collapse that portion, but God's sovereignty is also real. And what Walter Brugeman calls the hiddenness of God in the Joseph narrative is exactly this. Get this. God is working in and through and underneath the choices people make, including the bad choices, including the sinful choices, without overriding human freedom and without requiring a clean story to produce a good outcome. You are in a story that is not clean. And God is in it. He is underneath it. He is weaving in it. The pit is not the end of the story, but it's a necessary chapter in it. And the question is not whether you will get to Genesis 50, verse 20. The question is whether you will stay faithful inside of Genesis 37 and 39 and 40 long enough to be the person who can say it and mean it when you get to Genesis 50 verse 20. So as I close this episode out, y'all stop waiting for the pit to end before you start being faithful in it. Stop treating this season like a waiting room and start treating it like a formation room. Joseph wasn't formed in Pharaoh's court. He was formed in a cistern in Dothan, and in Potiphar's house when no one was watching, and in an Egyptian prison during two extra years that the cupbearer was supposed to shorten, but he didn't. Show up where you are with everything you have. Serve the people in front of you. Pay attention to the faces around you. Stay honest about what you need and ask for it. Refuse to let the pit make you only about yourself. And do not let the collapse of one expression of the vision convince you that God has abandoned the vision itself. The word of the Lord tested Joseph until what he had said came to pass. And it came to pass. Father God, I'm bringing specific people before you right now. I'm praying for the person who is in the second pit, the one who did the right thing and it cost him everything anyway. The person who refused to compromise and still ended up in chains, who is confused in a way that is particularly dangerous because they can't even point to a decision that made that they made that was wrong. They just know they're in the ground. And he does not know when he's coming out. God, meet them in the pit, Lord. Not after it, but in it. Remind them that the prison is not evidence of your absence. It may be the very room where the formation that they need is happening. God, I'm praying for the person who has been carrying a vision for so long that they've stopped telling people about it. I know they're still carrying it. They've never stopped. They just got tired of explaining the gap between what they saw and what they have. God, let them feel today that the gap is not evidenced against the calling. But rather the gap is where you're working. I'm also praying for the person who is somewhere inside their two extra years, who is two years past the moment the cupbearer walked out of the door, who's been faithful in the silence, who hasn't quit, who is honestly not sure what faithfulness is supposed to look like this deep into the weight. God, let them find something of what Joseph found in those years. The capacity to look up from their own suffering and see the faces around them. The stubborn, quiet confidence that the gift is still operating, even if no one is paying attention. And lastly, I'm praying for the person whose vision appears to be buried. The person who is standing at the grave of something they believed you gave them, and are trying to determine whether this is the burial or the death. God, would you speak into that uncertainty with something that doesn't require them to understand in order to hold on? Not an explanation, God, but your presence. The same presence that was with Joseph in the pit and in the prison and in the two extra years. God, meet them there. You meant it for good. So let that be enough for us for today. Family, if this episode has met you somewhere clear, somewhere real today, don't just sit with that alone. Share it with someone who is in the pit season. You probably already know who that person is. Will you just share it? Text it to them, send it through direct message. Send them the link. No explanation, just the link. And if Faithformed has been useful to you, if it's continued to be useful to you, just give me 60 seconds, leave us a five-star rating and review. Apple, Spotify, wherever you're listening. It sounds like a small thing, but to us, to me, it's not small. It's the most practical thing you can do to put this content in front of other people who need it. And if you're not subscribed or following, do that right now. I don't want you to miss episode 42. We're staying in the Joseph narrative, and we're gonna move into one of the most important questions a person with calling has to answer. Who gets to speak into what God placed into you? Who do you let close to the vision? How do you discern the difference between a voice that sharpens and a voice that borrows? How do you handle the person who genuinely loves you and still cannot see what you see? That's the conversation that's coming. And I don't want you to walk into it cold. Y'all thank you for hanging with us for episode 41 of Faithform. I'm your host, Justin, but I love you. I love you. And I I really want and I pray God's best for your life. This is Faithform. God be blessed. Peace.