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Welcome back to our look together through the book of Genesis and Daily Drive
Time Devotions. We're in week 9, day 2, which means chapter 42. We're looking
together at how do you manage a God-given dream.

Once the dream begins to happen in your life, how do you begin to live it out in
your family or in that ministry or in that business? Yesterday we talked about
the fact that you have to develop discipline in order to manage a God-given
dream. You have to choose service in order to manage that dream that's from God.

You have to remember who owns the dream. And Joseph is living out this dream.
The world is beginning to come, as we saw at the end of yesterday, to Egypt to
be fed.

So while this is happening, what's happening with Joseph's family back in
Israel? Listen to chapter 42 verses 1 and then down through verse 7. When Jacob
learned that there was grain in Egypt, he said to his sons, "Why do you just
keep looking at each other?

" He continued, "I have heard that there is grain in Egypt. Go down there and
buy some for us so that we may live and not die. " Then 10 of Joseph's brothers
went down to buy grain from Egypt.

Then in verse 7, "As soon as Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them, but he
pretended to be a stranger and he spoke harshly to them. 'Where do you come
from? ' he asked.

'From the land of Canaan,' they replied, 'to buy food. '" As we read about
Joseph, these next couple of chapters, and his family, we're going to learn
something different, something powerful about the manager of a God-given dream.
The fourth thing we learn from Joseph is dream managers learn to forgive.

You have to learn to forgive, not only to be forgiven by God, but also to
forgive others. In living out a God-given dream, you're going to be hurt along
the way because you're living it in a real world where there are real hurts, so
you have to learn to forgive. If you don't, the bitterness will end up eating up
the dream.

Just like the years of famine ended up eating up the years of plenty in Egypt,
the bitterness in your life will eat up every bit of that dream. Dream managers
learn to forgive. In these next couple of chapters, as we look at Joseph and his
brothers, in chapter 42, we see the picture of a family living with their
solution.

Not God's solution, their solution. Their solution to a brother who irritated
them, to a brother who angered them, to a brother who began to embitter them,
was to sell them into slavery to Egypt. And here they are living with their
solution.

And I can't think of a better explanation of living with your own solution than
what happens in verse 1 of 42. The father says to the sons, "Why do you just
keep looking at each other? " That's living with your solution.

You're just sitting there staring at each other. You don't know what to do. You
don't know where to turn.

You're just sitting there paralyzed by the past, paralyzed by your fear. In
fact, in this chapter, we see exactly what was paralyzing these brothers,
paralyzing this family. Before we see the forgiveness that Joseph has to give in
the following chapters, we see what unforgiveness had brought about in the
family.

We see two powerful things in this chapter that this family has been living with
for 20 years now. We see grief and we see unresolved guilt. We see grief in this
family, unresolved.

In verse 4, the Bible says, "Jacob did not send Benjamin, Joseph's brother, with
the others because he was afraid that harm might come to him. " Jacob was still
grieving Joseph's death 20 years later. That grief was unresolved because he
knew there was something wrong.

He knew there was a lie somehow in it. They'd never told him honestly what had
happened. They'd said he was killed by an animal, but somehow you always know
when there's a lie.

That lie keeps things unresolved. Jacob does not trust the 10 other brothers
with the youngest, Benjamin, to go with them because he'd sent a younger brother
out to meet with them one time and he had been killed. Grief had grown into fear
and mistrust.

That's what happens when grief is unresolved. They hadn't solved their problem
by selling Joseph into slavery. They'd just invited it to move into their house
and live there for 20 long years.

Unresolved grief. And they also were living with unresolved guilt 20 years
later. Listen to what happens in verses 19 down through verse 28.

The brothers have gone down now to meet with Joseph and they've begun to talk to
him about buying some food. And Joseph has said, "I think I'll let you have some
food," but he has some conditions for them. Listen to what happens in verse 19.

Joseph says, "If you are honest men, let one of your brothers stay here in
prison while the rest of you go and take grain back to your starving households.
But you must bring your youngest brother back to me so that your words may be
verified and that you may not die. " This they proceeded to do.

They said to one another, "Surely we are being punished because of our brother.
We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but we would
not listen. That's why this distress has come upon us.

" Reuben replied, "Didn't I tell you not to sin against the boy? But you
wouldn't listen. Now we must give an accounting for his blood.

" They did not realize that Joseph could understand them since he was using an
interpreter. He turned away from them and began to weep. Joseph then turned back
and spoke to them again.

He had Simeon taken from them and bound before their eyes. Joseph gave orders to
fill their bags with grain, to put each man's silver back into his sack and to
give them provisions for their journey. After this was done for them, they
loaded their grain on their donkeys and they left.

At the place where they stopped for the night, one of them opened his sack to
get feed for his donkey, but he saw the silver in the mouth of the sack. "My
silver has been returned," he said to his brothers, "here it is in my sack. "
Their hearts sank and they turned to each other, trembling, and said, "What is
this that God has done to us?

" There it is, a description like none other, I think, of what grief does to you
when you live with it. Even after 20 years, their first reaction to something
going wrong in this conversation with Joseph, they didn't know it was Joseph
yet, but something goes wrong, and their first reaction is, "God's doing this to
us. God's doing it to us because of our guilt, because of what we did to our
brothers so many years ago, because we threw them into a pit, because we sold
them into slavery.

Look at what God has done to us. " And then they have the arguing, they have
Ruben saying, "Didn't I tell you the I-told-you-so person? " That's what guilt
does when you live with it, when you don't resolve it.

What does guilt do to you when you don't resolve it? No better description than
in verse 28. What is this that God has done to us?

You begin to feel, because of your guilt, that God is out to get you. You ever
feel that way? God's out to get me?

Let me tell you this. God is not out to get you. He is out to love you.

That's what the cross is all about. That is what Jesus dying on the cross is all
about. Romans 8 says, "If God is for us, who can be against us?

" God does not condemn us. But if you have the feeling God is out to get me,
every time something goes wrong, every time a conversation goes sideways, every
time your life doesn't work out like you want it to work out, you feel God's out
to get me. That's not God.

That's your guilt. That's what's happening there. And you recognize your guilt
before him.

You ask for forgiveness. You recognize the forgiveness that's in the cross of
Christ, and you resolve that guilt. That is what's happening.

Joseph is testing these brothers in these verses. His test really has one single
question. Have they changed?

So he asks them to leave one of the brothers behind. He wants to see if they're
going to come back and get him. They never came back to get Joseph.

He puts some silver back into their sacks. He gives the money back. He wants to
see, are they going to feel like they deserve this back?

Just like they felt like they deserved the honor and the family, and so they
sent Joseph out of the family? This is a family that's in trouble. It's a family
that needs to break out of that trouble.

It's filled with guilt, and it's filled with grief, and it's been unresolved.
How are they going to break out? There's only one way.

Forgiveness. Forgiveness. Now, you may have heard the word "forgive" a hundred
times, and you know you need to forgive someone, but you wonder how.

How do I forgive? There's a pretty simple process that you can go through in
your heart, your life, your mind right now. You list in your mind what needs to
be forgiven, the offense that was committed against you.

It may have been in a business. It may have been in a relationship. It may have
been in a word.

It may have been in a deed. You bring it to mind, and then you let it go before
the Lord. You put it into His hands and not your hands.

That's forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean that you say what they did was
right. It may be very wrong.

Forgiveness does not mean that you have to immediately restore a relationship
with them in a way that lets them hurt you again. God may allow that to happen
or not allow that to happen. We'll talk about that in days to come.

Forgiveness does mean that you let it go before the Lord. Instead of holding on
to the bitterness in your heart, you let it go. If you're living with guilt, if
you're living with grief, it may very well be because there's an unforgiveness
in your life.

What do you do? You bring it to mind and you let it go. What happens if it comes
to mind again?

It will, by the way. If it's a deep hurt, it's going to come to mind again
tomorrow, the next day, maybe several times even again this day. What happens if
it comes to mind again?

Then you let it go again. Every time it comes to mind, you let it go. You're
going to find that as you do that, it'll come to mind less and less often and
the bitterness will recede and a deep sense of God's grace will replace it.

As we pray today, so we take a moment to talk to Jesus Christ, would you just
ask him this question sincerely? Say to him, "Jesus, who do I need to forgive?
Who is there in my life that I need to forgive?

" And then ask him, "Jesus, would you give me the strength to forgive? I don't
know that I have it in myself, but I know you have the strength to forgive.
Would you give me strength that I do not have?

" I ask this, Jesus, in your name, amen. Join us tomorrow. We're going to
continue to see how Joseph's family works through this process of forgiveness
and restoration.