Our text today comes in a frame: God will carry through with his promise. It begins with Jacob and that vision in the night, “Here I am. I am the God of your father.”

Now if it sounds familiar, it should. We’ve heard this same kind of language several times now with many of the patriarchs. With Abraham.

Later on we’ll hear it with Moses and with Samuel. Jacob had been feeling caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, his family is out of food and he’s afraid they might starve. And yet on the other hand, the thought of taking his family out of Canaan - the land that God had asked Abraham to go to, that God had promised to Abraham and to his family - seems a violation of God’s promise that they might leave that land. So God says, “Don’t be afraid to go to Egypt. I will make of you a great nation there. I myself will go down with you. I will bring you up again. And Joseph’s own hand will close your eyes.”

So Jacob believes God and he goes. And he brings his family down into Egypt. Again, that’s one end of the frame. God’s promise is still active. The text also ends with a theme of promise. Jacob has Joseph make this oath, “When I’m done and gone, bury me with our ancestors.”

Now just a brief word about this burial area. Most of the great promises – the promises of land and the promises of blessing to Abraham and to his people – took place right in that area around that burial ground. Several times in Genesis its mentioned that this burial ground was acquired very publicly; everyone knew about it...that Abraham acquired this particular land and that this particular land was in Canaan.

Over and over and over again in Genesis we hear that this area was in Canaan, as if to remind us God is working out his promises. This place was the place where God had promised to Abraham and Sarah that they would, within a year, have a son. And it was the first land in Canaan that Abraham or his family acquired. So the question that frames all this is, “Is God going to come through? Can they trust God now?”

What takes place in the middle is messy. It gives us ambivalent feelings. We’re not sure if God’s really coming through like he says he’s going to. Sometimes things are going well; other times not so well. And there are times when it doesn’t seem much like a promised existence.

Monica and I are a little behind the times with TV, but we’ve lately been watching DVD’s of the show “Alias.” If you’ve seen the show, you know that every show sort of works the same way. It begins with a crisis – they’re in a life-threatening situation. And within a couple of minutes they’re out of a jam. They probably have around 6 or 7 minutes of peace and then they’re in trouble again. And by the end of the show, their lives are in jeopardy. There are many shows on TV like this.

This text here reads to me something like that. It’s looking good. No, it’s not looking so good. It’s going okay. It’s not going so okay.

Jacob brings his family into Egypt and his family is met by Joseph. Joseph we see has been thinking about how he’s going to provide for his family and he knows they’re going to meet up with Pharaoh. And so he says to them, “Tell Pharaoh when you see him that you’re shepherds.”

Now Joseph knows two things. First, he knows that the Egyptians hate shepherds and so they will be given a pretty good degree of autonomy, which isn’t a bad thing if you’re trying to preserve a culture in a foreign land. He also knows that the place most conducive to shepherding is Goshen, and Goshen is the choice peace of land. It offers opportunity. It looks like they’re going to be provided for there. It looks like their security is well established. So things are looking good.

But it’s not too long before they run out of food and things don’t look so good anymore. They sell their livestock and they get more food, and things are looking okay again. But the food and money runs out and now they’re in trouble once again. And after awhile the only thing they have left is their land and themselves, and so they sell that back to Pharaoh.

Now slavery back then was a little bit different and in this arrangement it simply meant that a fifth of what they had belonged back to Pharaoh. So this wasn’t a tragic situation. But we know where the story goes. In a few short chapters the Egyptian taskmasters will bear down on them in fear, and then the story does not look very good once again, and the Hebrews cry out to God to be delivered.

It’s messy. It’s incomplete. For awhile we think things are going well, and then it gets ugly. And then things turn out alright. Then it gets ugly again. Goshen is a messy place. It offers a lot and sometimes it delivers. But sometimes it’s messy.

As I read the story I can’t help but think, “This is a lot like our story, too.” You and I, when we met Christ, we also received a series of promises: that our sins would be forgiven, that we’re heading for a new home, that the Holy Spirit is given to us, and that there are things that we are victorious over. We’re a people of promise. And yet things for us aren’t always feeling like a promised existence.

• We do sense the Spirit at work in our lives.
• We have been forgiven.
• We have been given some victory over sin and death.
• We’ve been made part of God’s family.

But

• We don’t always feel so victorious.
• We don’t always receive the answers to our prayers as we would like.
• We see things happening around us that don’t always make sense.

Some of you know that one of my responsibilities is working with young adults and college students. A couple of weeks ago I was visiting with one of them over coffee. And we got into a long discussion. She started asking some great questions. There were some things about life that just were bugging her and she wanted to do some reading. So I said, “Well, why don’t you spend a little bit of time thinking through ‘What are those questions?’. I’d love to give you some book titles and I’d love to talk about what you read and what you think.”

And so not too much longer I got an email from her, and this is what she says, “Todd, I had a 2 ½ drive home from my family’s cabin today so I had time to think about my questions. Here are the big ones:

How do I learn to have a day-to-day faith…a relationship with Jesus day to day…since most often it’s either me fighting him or needing him to get me through some sort of crisis?

What is a “normal” relationship with Jesus look like?

What are you supposed to do during the plateaus? How do you maintain your faith when you don’t feel it?

They’re great questions. I don’t know about you, but these are my questions, too. “What does faith look like?” “How do we live it out when it doesn’t always feel as we, at least, would hope it would?"

We live in a world a lot like Goshen. At times we see God at work, and at times things get messy. And we don’t always feel victorious. We’re forced to trust.

God is something like a swimming teacher in front of us saying, “Come here. Come here.” all the while backing up. Forcing us again and again to ask the question, “Can we trust God now?”

Several years ago a friend of mine was finishing up a PhD at Fuller. He had spent the last five years in school. He had moved his family from Texas, which was a big deal. They had great friendships and were deeply connected with a group of people there. His wife was lonely. They missed their friends a lot.

His work was difficult, and so they didn’t have as much time as a family as they would like. His kids were missing their friends. But they were willing to make the sacrifice because they knew Dad was on his way to becoming a professor. He had paid for five years of private school. He had finished five years of coursework; five years of graduate level reading and papers and exams. He had passed all of his oral exams and was a significant way through his dissertation. And then he became unavoidably and painfully aware that he was not called to be a professor.

I remember that moment like yesterday. We sat eating a cheeseburger at McCormick & Schmicks. Looking each other in the eye. And he said to me something I don’t think I’ll ever forget. “You know, Todd. It’s always the same question. Always the same question. Am I going to trust God or not? Am I going to trust God now?”

Can we trust Jesus now?

For some of you, your experience of Goshen is a difficult one. Maybe you’ve experienced the break up of a family or you’ve lost someone you love, and things have been really hard.

I was reminded this last week of a friend of ours who, for 9 years, had wanted to have children. And they had tried all of the options. They’d gone through infertility, they had run the gauntlet and had pretty much given up hope. And then conceived. And you can imagine the excitement of preparing the room and thinking about names and painting and just…joy. Two months later, the woman miscarried. She was convinced that this would be her one and only child. And to say she was crestfallen doesn’t quite cut it. Where was God?

In that situation, a year later she conceived again. In the meantime, you can imagine the kind of despair and discouragement and depression. Anger with God. In her mind she knew, “Perhaps God is doing some sort of work to make me a better, more spiritual person.” She didn’t really care to be that much more spiritual when it came down to it.

Her first born came and she looked at her husband and with a rye smile said, “You know, I can’t imagine life getting much better. I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to be a saint anyways."

But life is messy. What does it mean to trust God? And can we trust him now?

Many of you know the book Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis…one of my favorites. The book is a correspondence between two devils: Uncle Screwtape, who is the more senior, and his nephew Wormwood. And Wormwood is learning how to tempt a Christian person. Screwtape has lots of advice, including what I’m going to read to you now.

“God will start them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them; with emotional sweetness and easy conquest over temptation.

But He never allows this state of affairs to last for long. Sooner or later, He withdraws…if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience. All those supports and all those incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs, to carry out from will alone the duties that have lost all relish.

It is during such trough periods much more than during the peak periods that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants them to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those that please Him best.

We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for food. And the more their will is interfered with, the better. He cannot tempt to virtue as we do device. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand. And if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased, even with their stumbles.

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never in more danger than when a human no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our enemy (God’s) will looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished and asks why he has been forsaken and still obeys."

There’s a song that has come to mean a lot to me, and I’ve asked to have it played for you now. It’s a song by Rich Mullins. As it’s played, I’m going to invite you to look through the words and let it soak in. And I’d encourage you even to lift this up as a prayer, that God might make these words our own, and that we might offer them to Him. It’s If I Stand, by Rich Mullins.

If I Stand

So if I stand
Let me stand on the promise
That You will pull me through
And if I can't
Let me fall on the grace
That first brought me to You
And if I sing
Let me sing for the joy
That has born in me these songs
And if I weep let it be as a man
Who is longing for his home

There's more that rises in the morning than the sun
More that shines in the night than just the moon
There's more than just this fire here
That keeps me warm in a shelter
That is larger than this room
There's a loyalty that's deeper than mere sentiment
A music higher than the songs that I can sing
The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance
I owe only to the Giver of all good things

There's more that dances on the prairies
Than the wind
And more that pulses in the ocean than the tide
There's a love that is fiercer
Than the love between friends
More gentle than a mother's
When her baby's at her side
There's a loyalty that's deeper than mere sentiment
A music higher than the songs that I can sing
The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance
I owe only to the Giver of all good things
©1988 Rich Mullins & Steve Cudworth, BMG Songs, Inc., CCLI #176696