Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / August 10, 2025 | Onward - Houston!

Transcript

August 10, 2025 | Onward - Houston! · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, kids.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: How you doing?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Wasn't this one of those mornings where you you know you're listening to thunder and hearing the rain, you're going, I can sleep all day.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to just stay here, but you didn't.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: You got up.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're late, but second service, back row in heaven.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: So just kidding, you you made it.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh by the way, about the interns every year.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I say the same thing.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Best set of interns we ever had.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: True again this year.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Just amazing.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: So let's be generous to them.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I will be.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: But we're so blessed to have those six interns at TBC to help out Jeremy and Caroline during the summer.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: So we're in a series, if you're visiting, called On Word.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's a rocking, and it's about just basic Christian life.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the first week was on the 20th of July, Connor preached blast off, and that's about the gospel, it's about evangelism, it's about how to enter the family of God.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then the week after that was looking back.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Once you're now a Christian, your identity.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Who you are.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing who you are is just super significant until the, you know, um, until you know that, you you uh you you can you live like uh who you think you are.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh last week, navigation.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And in the end, Connor challenged us to, you know, go to the GPS of the Bible, navigate, uh, read the word every day.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I have uh this week, Houston, we have a problem, right?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, unless you're uh over 60 who uh weren't uh alive to be one of the 40 million people they say were watching their TVs in 1970, uh starting the third day of uh the uh the third day of the Apollo 13 uh trip, the third lunar landing, it was supposed to be.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's Jim Lovell, there was Jack Schweigert, there was Fred Hayes, and they took off on April the 11th.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh things almost uh after a couple days went south.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, it's really relevant.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Decided to preach this, and then uh Jim Lovell two days ago died at age 97.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was the commander of the crew on that trip.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderful man, and had a big hand in the movie 1995 called Apollo 13.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: You have to be probably 45 years old to have seen that live.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: But all of you, I think, uh have been in school and you were supposed to, sixth grade, seventh grade, you were supposed to learn about this.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, and right?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you and I'm sure you've heard the story.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: But the story is a cool story.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So you have uh you have these guys in 1970 who uh Jim Lovell had more experience at the time than any other astronaut in space.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was played in 1995 by Bill Paxton.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Tom Hanks was uh played Jim Lovell, the commander, and Kevin Bacon.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it was an award-winning movie.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: None of them, not Tom Hanks, so a lot of predict people predicted he would win uh a best actor, but it was actually Ed Harris back in mission control in Houston in that movie who won it.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the story is, of course, that what happened a couple of days in on the 13th was all of a sudden when um when Apollo 13, which Apollo 13 is consists of two ships, and since there was the big orbiter, uh, which was called Odysse Odysseus, I think, and it was connected through a little tunnel to a lander, which they two of them were gonna get in and go to the surface of the moon and walk on the moon, and that was called Aquarius.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so these two things are hooked together and they're within 50,000 miles of the moon.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: They've gone 200,000 miles, and all of a sudden there's this huge bang.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: What they didn't know, what took them a while to find out, is that one of the big liquid oxygen tanks had a fire had broken out and it suddenly exploded, shook the whole ship, and you can see at the top there all of the you know these uh lights came on and everything.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Jim Lovell had a big hand in in the movie, and so all of those things are exactly accurate, labeled right.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: I thought you'd want to know that.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the movie it was super accurate, except for you know a couple minor things.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: For instance, uh it wasn't Jim Lovell, Tom Hanks, who called back to Houston and said, Houston, we have a problem.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually Jack Swigard.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he didn't say, Houston, we have a problem.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Houston, we've had a problem, but that's not nearly as exciting.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, but other than that, other than that, perfectly accurate, and they're wondering what it is.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Turns out it's an oxygen tank, and it's damaged another oxygen tank, and this liquid oxygen actually powered all the fuel cells, the lights, the heat, everything else.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: It powered uh, you know, the uh uh the uh the Odyssey, that's what it was, the Odyssey.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, man, they're having a terrible time in Houston, you know, deciding what to do.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they're going, you know, all of a sudden, can they even get to the moon?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if so, they probably certainly can't get back.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is April 13th, photograph at NASA in Houston, and they are freaking out, trying to find out what the problem is.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: In the movie, it's Ed Harris, who stands up, who's the who's the commander there in Houston, and he says, from this moment on, we are improvising a new mission.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: How do we get our people home?
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and it was tough.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Fortunately, they had a really brilliant guy down there in Houston, this is true to life, who's who convinced everybody that the only way to really get home and have everybody survive with safety was to keep going slingshot around the moon and come back, not land, and in fact, because they were super going to be super low and run out of power if they kept trying to power the orbiter, the uh the main spaceship, they had to leave the orbiter.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: The three of them needed to go in, crawl through, and stay in the lander for the rest of the trip.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: The small lander, which was built for two claustrophobists, you know, all of us freaking out at the moment.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And and they had to and they had to turn off all essential power, so they didn't have enough power to get back to Earth.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's so that's what they did.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: They they clambered in there, turned off all non-essential power so that so that basically, you know, the main orbiter, the main spacecraft now is dark and it's getting close to freezing, as is for three days, four days they're in there with hardly any food because it's frozen, you know, going easy, not having water rations.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: They all lost weight.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: One of them developed a kidney infection, and they're piled on top of one another, and then with when they're, you know, um an hour away from Earth, then they have to crawl back in, turn everything on on the Odyssey because the lander burns up upon re-entry.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't want to be in the lander for that.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, and amazingly, what's really great, as 40 million people, this is uh Jim Lovell's wife, Marilyn, and her family, staring like the rest of us.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you're as old as I am, you were staring, you were glued to the TV as well, wondering what's going to happen.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And once when finally they landed near Samoa on April 17, 1970, and it was announced it was a successful failure because they came back alive.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody cheered, and they won a lot of international awards.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh this phrase, however, then entered the lore after 25 years later, after the movie.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this entered, you know, uh it became really, of course, uh famous, famous line.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's rated number 50 in the hundred most famous movie lines of all time.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you know how famous it is because number 51 below it is dirty hair in dirty hair, Clint Eastwood, saying, saying, you gotta ask yourself one question.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Do I feel lucky?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, do you, punk?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And and behind that, number 52 is Ronell Zegwell uh uh uh Zellwegger and Jerry McGuire, you had me at.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, right.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you know Houston had a pro we uh you have a problem.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in fact, we so as a result, we use that line.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine you do too.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: We use that line in, shall we say, situations of sudden inconvenience.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like you pull out the one credit card you bought that you brought, you have no cash, one credit card you brought to Walgreens, personal experience, admitted, and while and you keep swiping and it keeps saying rejected, rejected, rejected, and under your breath you're muttering as you shake your head, Houston, we have a problem.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Or you're in Chicago, personal experience, you know, driving to a very important appointment up north of Chicago in Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and you're traveling and traffic is just crazy.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: You have 18-wheeler behind you, now you're going across a bridge or the road below, and suddenly your your driver's side tire explodes and the car pulls, and and and actually I didn't say Houston, I said God.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: We've got we've got a problem.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, it's entered, it's entered our uh how many of you have said Houston, we have a problem.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Just come out with that.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we use that line, but the Apollo crew would remind us that their problem was a lot more than a minor inconvenience or a major inconvenience.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was a matter of life or death.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was a high stakes matter.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm using it in a high-stakes matter, high stakes way today.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because according to God, that spiritual journey that you're on, that journey of faith that every believer is on, onward and upward, is a high stakes matter.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's not only high stakes to you, it's high stakes to the person that you're married to, it's high stakes to your parents, to your family, to your children, to those who have to live with you, to those that you work with.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is that in that journey of faith, you will sooner or later, I bet all of you have already, you will be confronted by a mid-faith crisis.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: In the middle of that journey of faith, you will be confronted by a crisis that blindsides you did not expect, and it will test your faith to its life or death breaking point.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you will wonder, can I make it?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Can I go on?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Will my faith even endure this test?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: And some of you have already faced that sudden oxygen tank blowout.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: When the doctor said to you, I am sorry to have to tell you this, but you have a malignant tumor.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: One Christian man said, I went home and I sat in a chair, I dropped my head in my hands, I couldn't move.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Physically, mentally, I was in pain.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: I just put my hands in my head and my hands and I wept and I said, Help me God, help me God, help me God, please help me.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Or perhaps you're like this student who had a faith blowout who writes, It was at Cal Berkeley.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: He said, When everything that I trusted was suddenly taken away, the auditorium was packed.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: The speaker was an atheist, a scientist, a biologist named Richard Dawkins.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And even though he was a biologist, his talk wasn't about science.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was more like a stand-up comedian.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: He equated believing in God to believing in the spaghetti monster.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the audience roared with laughter, and I felt like they were all laughing at me, not believing that anyone in our modern scientific rational world could believe in an unseen God up in the clouds.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of his talk, I wondered, am I all wrong?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Is my faith completely irrational?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: When I tell people about God, am I telling them a lie?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I've listed the first seven that came to my mind.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Family wounds, loss of income, loss of health, desertion, addiction, mistreatment, loneliness.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: You've had more than one of those, haven't you?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let me read those again.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Family wounds, loss of income, loss of health, desertion, addiction, mistreatment, lonely.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: How many of you have had at least two of these?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Raise your hand.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: We've had those and they've come to us like an explosion in our in our onward Christian rocket, you know?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: So if it's true that these things that come to us are allowed by God and even sometimes sent by God, right?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: How can we, like the Apollo 13 crew, both the ones up in space and the ones at mission control, they received international honors like crazy after uh for the way that they handled their life and death crisis?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: How can we how can we do the same?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because God's the one who allows and sends them, he's definitely put stories in his word about how to do this and given us examples.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm going to share you one of these.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, I want to tell you the story about a guy named Joe, comes out of the Bible.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: His spiritual life started out like a rocket with a straight up trajectory, but before long he started in enduring multiple oxygen tank blowouts in his life.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Had three major ones.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let me read the story to you.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis 37 through 39.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to summarize this.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: At 17 years of age, Joseph tended sheep with his brothers.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that's not like a rocket liftoff yet, I guess.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: But his father loved Joseph.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph was, by the way, the next to last of a dozen children, which is not a perfect birth order.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: But his dad loved him.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, gave him a special coat and so forth.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Joseph was close to God.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: It says he had a dream that promised him future success.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than them, they hated him.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And they couldn't speak peaceably to him.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Family wounds.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And when Joseph came to them, they seized him and threw him into a pit that didn't have any water.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And when a caravan of Ishmaelite traders going down to Egypt passed by, his brothers pulled him out of the pit and sold him as a slave.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And when the traders got down to Egypt, they sold Joseph as a slave to Potiphar, an office of Pharaoh, in fact, the captain of his guard.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: But then, a couple years later, when his master, Potiphar, heard a false story that his wife told him that Joseph had sexually abused her, these are the things your slaves did to me.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: She lied.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: He was furious and had Joseph thrown into a prison.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So Joseph is there in prison.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Family wounds.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Mistreatment.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: A mid-faith crisis.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the next line, Genesis 40, is after this, and you start looking at the dates because it tells it tells how old they are.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: After this is 11 years later.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: 11 years after his brothers sold him.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph has now been in a third world prison for 10 years.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: The king of Egypt's cupbearer and Baker, his butler and baker made him angry.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: So Pharaoh, apparently Pharaoh isn't gonna kill him or anything.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: He just wants to remind him who's boss.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna dump them in a jail for a couple of weeks just to tame their attitudes.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so he put them in the prison where Joseph was confined.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, the word confined could also be translated shackled, and that would probably be better because David, the hundreds of years later in Psalm 105, writes, they bruised Joseph's feet with shackles.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: His neck was an iron.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine year after year, day after day, your ankles being shackled, even having an iron ring around your neck for ten years?
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you're supposed to be watched over and loved by God.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, and then it goes even further.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: The captain of the guards assigned Joseph as their personal attendant.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, so it says, it says, uh it says Joseph a little bit later, can say, Joseph's in a dungeon.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine being Joseph.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you're shackled, but because the Egyptians are the most famous racists in the world and hated everybody who's not Egyptian, because you're a Semite, you know, who comes from up northeast the land of Israel, they hate you, just the look of you, and they treat you as the worst of the worst in the prison, even though you're entirely innocent, and it says they dropped him into a dungeon.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: So he was in a dungeon in a filthy prison, and now you get pulled out and you go, What gives?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And they say, Well, we're gonna make you a personal assistant slave to these two white-collar guys that have come from the palace, the butler and the baker of Pharaoh himself, and we've got to treat them right because they're cool.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so now you're doing the slave thing while you're in prison.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, and Joseph finally says to them when he's when he's chatting with them, When all goes well for you, remember that I was with you.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Please show kindness to me by mentioning me to Pharaoh and get me out of this prison.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: For I was kidnapped from the land of the Hebrews, and even here I've done nothing that they should put me in the dungeon.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: And on Pharaoh's birthday, the chapter ends, he restored the chief uh butler, cupbearer, to his position, and he hanged the chief baker, just as Joseph had predicted, yet the cupbearer did not remember Joseph, he forgot him.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let's add to it mistreatment, desertion, loneliness.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, he's been sold by his brothers.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the second, you know, oxygen tank blowout is he gets falsely accused when he's a slave in Potiphar's house.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And now, third, he's in the dungeon in a prison and being mistreated there.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: No wonder he has, we assume, a mid-faith crisis.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it just keeps hanging.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't it the worst when it just keeps hanging on and hanging on?
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the things that happen and then they're gone the next day, like the flat tire, that's one thing.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: But when you have a problem, the family wound or whatever, that just hangs on year after year.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Mama said there'd be days like this, there'd be days like this.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Mama said she failed to mention that they could go on for months at a time.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or even years at a time.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard, hardest when it lasts and lasts.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the story of a woman, of a Christian woman named uh Marianna who cried out, Hello, God, are you even there?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Marianna's story is that she was a fervent Christian, that she was in women's groups at Sunday school.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: She's in church, she served in VBS, she was involved in the choir when they had the choir.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: She did everything to church.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: For years she was super faithful to God, but she starts her personal testimony by saying, A few years ago I almost lost my faith.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: My mother died.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: My father became ill.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: My husband lost his job.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: I shattered my shoulder, couldn't work for months.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: I called out to God for help and got nothing but silence.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: I demanded, deeply hurt at first by my loss, but later, bitter and angry, that God would take so much away.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: And she doesn't say, but from somebody like me who is such a faithful servant for so long.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then she says, as our trials dragged on, year after year.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph's story, isn't it?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Stress and grief consumed me.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: I decided that God didn't care for me.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: I started wondering if he was even real, sad and sick at heart, I couldn't see any hope.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: I finally turned my back.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: My goodness.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: But you understand.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's what happens when you get mistreated when you have this blowout and you and you're far like both Joseph and the Apollo 13 crew.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: You're super far from family and friends and protection.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you wonder.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: And your onward Christian rocket is shuddering under the explosion of mistreatment or loss of mother, loss of father, loss of children, loss of reputation, loss of income, loss of job, loss of all of those things just shake you to your core.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: So what solutions does God offer to bring us out of this midlife crisis to bring us home successfully, to help us survive this crisis?
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is, and I'll just lay them out for you right up front, real quick, from this story of Joseph, the three things that Joe teaches us about surviving a mid-faith crisis.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, seize opportunities to live your faith with people.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Two, hang on with a defiant faith despite mistreatment.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Third, expect God to reward the endurance of your faith.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's so interesting in this chapter to realize that God sent Joseph and sends us opportunities, even when we're crying out, Houston, we have a problem.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: The opportunity for Job came when two new prisoners came to the prison.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And they both had dreams in one night.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're two special guys.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're white collar prisoners.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: They've been, you know, eating rich food in the palace, you know.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're soft.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're uh hoity-toity guys, but Pharaoh's lost his temper at them, and now they're in prison.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: And Joseph's pulled out of the dungeon, I said.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And Joseph treats this as an opportunity, sees it as an opportunity from God.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't whine, he doesn't complain.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when he wakes up in the morning, notice, second line, when Joseph came to them in the morning, he saw that they looked distraught.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: If I've got ten years worth of dirt, pain, and scabs on me, I'm not sure I care that two white-collar rich boys look a little distraught.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the two who think of me as a lesser person because I'm not racially up to their level.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: But you know what?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Why do you look so sad today?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they say, Well, we had dreams.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: But there's no one to interpret them.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, by the way, it says uh in Hebrew, Joseph looked upon them and behold, they were sad.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: If I had been Joseph and I looked upon them and behold, they were sad, I would have been secretly happy.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: I would have gone, these stuffed shirts who are used to living in luxury, deserve a little bit of unpleasantness for a change, but instead of gloating, he goes, What makes you so sad?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, Well, we had dreams, and the problem is we're not in the palace.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, we could go to the dream interpreters and those wizards, but there's no one like that here in prison.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: And Joseph, standing there, has a decision to make.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Does he take this opportunity?
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, he remembers back to when he was young.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: When part of this wonderful rocket liftoff of his life, love of his father and love with God, is that God was giving him dreams.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: And God was teaching him how to interpret his dreams, and he interpreted them.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he probably shouldn't have told his brothers that he had these dreams where he was, as an adult, going to be super successful and even their authority.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: That didn't work out too well.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: But but he was having these dreams and it was part of his faith thing.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was part of part of who he was, part of his identity and so forth, and remembers that.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: But should he tell these strangers that?
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: Should he risk himself?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Are they worth that risk?
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Something so personal to him, something so central to his faith in God?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's an opportunity.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Does he take that opportunity?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: I might have just kept my mouth shut, but he sees the opportunity.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Don't interpretations belong to God?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me your dreams.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give it a shot.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Try me.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to say, listen, for a second.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you are going to, you know, you're in a hellhole.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're going through something really bad.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: But even when you're sick in pain and hurting, the the really blunt news is that God says in Romans 14, none of us, that Paul says in Romans 14, none of us lives for ourselves alone.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Not even when you're hurting.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: None of us dies for ourselves alone.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: If we live, we live for the Lord.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if we die, we die for the Lord.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: So whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so Paul, he left it out, but the next line was so get your butt out of the chair and seize the opportunity.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: No, he's something like that.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: But in mid-faith crises, God gives you opportunities and in those very moments, seize the opportunities to live your faith with others.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: For example, in the last year or two, because of the cancer that Melody went through, we're, you know, Melody and I have been presented with when people come up to us and can and tell us, sometimes in whispers, that they've just received a diagnosis and they are really hurting.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they know that Melody can identify with them really well.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we gulp a little bit, but we always say to them, listen, have you ever heard of Caring Bridge?
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a website.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you don't feel like it right now.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: You can hardly get out of your fetal position.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can hardly even come to church.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're hurting so bad.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Go online, look at Caring Bridge.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: God may really want you to log in and start your own story because people will read that and you can share your faith.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can share how you're going through it.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we say, you know, Melody has never been so deluged with thousands of comments from across the nation, from people who read her Carrying Bridge and saw her faith and were encouraged.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: God gives us opportunities even when we're going through great darkness to live our faith with others, seize that opportunity.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's Chuck Swindle who said, we are all faced with a series of great opportunities, brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: So Joseph says, Tell me your dreams and I'll interpret them.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you can tell right away that somehow Joseph has decided, he understands that God, that he's hanging on to God with such a defiant faith that he has concluded that God is simply testing him year after year and making him a better person.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because we read in the next seven, eight verses, this is the interpretation of your dream, Joseph says to the butler.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: When the chief baker saw the interpretation, was positive, he said to Joseph, Hey, I also had a dream.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Three baskets of white bread on my head, top basket, all sorts of big goods for Pharaoh.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Birds were eating him out of the basket.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Joseph, I think he took a deep breath and he goes, Oh, crud.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Do I really have to explain this one?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is its interpretation, Joseph.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: The three baskets of three days in just three days, fellow Pharaoh will lift up your head, too.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: From off you.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And hang you on a tree.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Then the birds will leave the plush or in body.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: But basically the same interpretation.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's just one of you gets your head lifted up a little farther than you'd rather.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now I know that sounds like beheading, but until Islamic radicals and French Revolution, uh, they didn't have guillotines.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: So as he says here, he was hanged on a tree.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's a figure of speech.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, isn't that amazing that Joseph somehow was hung on to his defiant faith to such an extent that he thought, you know what?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's still true, but I think God is the same God.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he's a God who gives dreams and interpret and allows me to interpret them.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm in a I'm just gonna go forward with it.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's it's astounding.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a sign of his faith, and it's a sign of his wisdom that he has decided that God is testing him, which turns out to be exactly right.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: When tragedy strikes, we enter a crisis of faith.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: We either move toward God or away from God.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if you just hang on with a defiant faith, you move toward God.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you jettison your faith, if you quit the family of God, if you stay away, as Hebrews 10, don't forsake the assembling together, then you know what?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then you move away from God.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting thing is, you know, it almost doesn't matter who you were before the crisis hits, that crisis defines you better than anything else.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's a king, king of ancient Israel named Ahaz.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to look it up, 2 Chronicles 28.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: King Ahaz lives sort of a mediocre life.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: He's under 50% as a king.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: He's not a 70%er or a 90%er.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: He's not a great and godly man.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, he's not erecting false idols everywhere, and he's not attacking the faith, he's not killing the prophets and so forth.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: But Isaiah is struggling with trying to get him over 50%, and it's not working too well.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then Ahaz, late in life, has a real crisis.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a serious foot problem or something.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: He has a serious, you know, he has he has one of those moments where there's a blowout on his body.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have this amazing line in 2 Chronicles 28.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Even in his problem, Ahaz did not turn to God, but turned away from God.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: And there's not much story left after that because Ahaz goes straight downhill.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: A couple chapters later, you have Ahaz's grandson, his name is Manasseh, who is Barnon, the worst king Israel ever had.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, he lives the longest.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: 55 years, he's on the throne.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: And Manasseh, it tells us clearly, was the worst king Israel ever had.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Shutters down the temple, builds false idols everywhere, is just it's just a horrible mess.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: But you have at the end of Manasseh's story this strange statement.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Manasseh basically just did something wrong with his gut.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: His whole body started falling apart.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: And in his tragedy, Manasseh turned and sought the Lord.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: He repented of his sin and the Lord forgave him.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like in the last six months of his life.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you have this horrible person who all of a sudden, when the oxygen tank explodes and everything, you know, goes to hell, he turns toward God.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, I don't know, you know, we don't know what each other's lives have been like in the past.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you're like me, you have a whole lot of things you regret, but there's coming a moment in your life that's absolutely critical.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, you know, the ninth inning is the most important inning.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh overtime or the fourth quarter is the most important quarter.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's what you do at the end of the game that really matters.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's what you do when the chips are down.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it's not the end of the game for you.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're 23 years old and you got the verdict of cancer as a woman did here not long ago.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: How are you going to respond at that moment?
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Will you turn toward God or will you turn away from God?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the crisis of faith.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a mid-faith journey crisis.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Your response, a defiant faith that endures, is the one you want, and as a result, you can expect God.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I used to have this picture in my mind.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is how this is how bad I am.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: Don't look up to me because here's the picture that came to my I didn't tell this for service because my mind was probably working in a more spiritual way.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: I just had this picture, true story.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Had this picture of the mall and the boy who was standing next to the uh escalator, you know, not in the way.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: People were getting on, but he's just standing next to it.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's gazing at the steps coming out of the floor and at the at the hand, you know, the hand thing that goes on, and he's just staring there, and the sales lady's looking at him, and he's just there.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: Five minutes, ten minutes, finally comes on.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: Are you scared to get on?
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: He goes, No.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, are is there something wrong?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: You lost?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, what are you doing?
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I'm just waiting for my chewing gum to come around.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a terrible illustration.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's just terrible.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: But the issue is, you know, he's standing there firm and he's waiting.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only connection it has with this story that you should stand firm, wait, that you should endure.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: Forgive me.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's very little about that story that you should model in your own life.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it's gonna happen because the reward of your faith has come.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if the chewing gum ever came.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but God promises that he will reward the endurance of your faith in the New and Old Testament.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Genesis 40, 20 to 23, on the third day, which is Pharaoh's birthday, Pharaoh gave a feast for all his servants.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: He elevated the chief cup bearer and the chief baker among them, restored the chief uh butler to his position, placed the cup, but Pharaoh hanged the baker just as Joseph had explained.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine how Joseph felt when he got the word that his his prediction of the dreams had come literally true?
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: He must have gone, Yes! Yes, it still works.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: God really still cares for him and God is still communicating with me.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he's looking the front door, because you know, you know, I mean, some of his, you know, he'd gotten the butler to promise that he's gonna tell Pharaoh if that works out.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And he's waiting, and every time someone knocks on the prisoner or comes in and talks to the warden, Joseph's got his ear.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is it my is it are they gonna come?
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna get me loose?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: No, they're not.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because the next line is the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: He forgot.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: Two more years, two more years of this agony, of this pain?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Turn to chapter 41.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: No chapters in the in the original text, it's just the very next line in the Hebrew is two years later, Pharaoh had a dream.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Two years later, Pharaoh had a dream.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: And before that chapter ends, you have Pharaoh saying to Joseph, I hereby put you in charge of the whole land of Egypt.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Joseph turns 30 years of age.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's been a long time, been 13 years of pain and suffering, but God rewarded the endurance of his faith.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: Years later, four or five hundred years later, King David loves the story of Joseph, his learning from Joseph because he writes about Joseph, and there's a lot of parallels in the lives of David, King David and Joseph, who lived so many hundreds of years before.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: But you have this line in verse 19 of David's Psalm 105, until the time came to fulfill his dreams, God's time, the Lord tested Joseph's character.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, yeah, he fulfilled his dreams.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: But he tested his character until that point, and Joseph understood that's exactly what was happening, and so as a result, he recognized the opportunity that came when he was at his darkest point, and he seized that opportunity.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because he recognized that he was being tested.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: What he did is his faith was defiant and it hung on.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, he was there at the end when God rewarded his endurance.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: Remind yourself, dear friends, I am not in a cave.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like a cave that you're in.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Seems like it has no end.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not in a cave.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in a tunnel.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Go onward.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I I have no idea.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I do.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: I have an idea of what I'd have done if I was on the crew of the Apollo 13.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I would have I would have had a lot of trouble.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think I don't know, but I'd probably do know if I was Joseph, and it'd have been year after year of mistreatment, of racism and abuse, family desertion.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure I would have handled that very well.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: I have a hard enough time with an expired credit card or a flat tire.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess all I can say is why don't we together remind ourselves when there's a blowout in our lives and something goes terribly wrong, and it's really important, remind ourselves that God will give us an opportunity even now to live our faith out with others.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh gonna lead right into, by the way, next week's talk, I think, by Connor.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: And not only should we seize those opportunities, we should at those times especially maintain a defiant faith that said, I don't care what you do, devil.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna hang on and expect God's reward.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: Look down, look down that tunnel and say, This looks like a cave right now, but I know there's a light at the end of it.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let's together go onward in our faith journey.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Father, thank you for this story and thank you for the example in real life of uh Jim Lovell and the others, and the example of Christians.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for sending friends to pull Mary Ann out of her slump and bring her back to church and faith.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: And those that we love, Lord, who wandered away because of some of these blowouts.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: We pray for them.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: We ask that you'll give us an opportunity, an opportunity that we will seize.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, uh make us enduring people, make us the kind of people that just hang on with grit and never let go all the way to the end, all the way to the light.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Bless you.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: Have a good week.