Something Is Going to Happen
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:1 (NIV)
In the beginning was the Word. You’ve heard those words before. Where have we heard them? In Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
John is building a bridge to introduce Christ, and the very first thing he says is, “Here’s how you interpret who Jesus is: In the beginning.” John unapologetically introduces Jesus as being the God of Genesis, and it’s this parallelism that sets the stage for John’s announcement. It’s as if John is saying, “Since you know God’s eternal presence, God’s reason, and God’s planning existed before anything was created, I want to tell you that Jesus is God revealing God’s self in a way to make God’s reasoning rational to you as a human.”
Jesus is God. And in the confusing season when John was ministering, when it was considered forbidden to even mention the name of God because God’s name was holy, they would often refer to the actions of God by saying “the word of God,” which refers to an action rather than an idea or a person. God’s actions are His words and God’s words are His actions. That’s why it is believed that the Bible, the Word of God, is sharper than a two-edged sword—because it is action. It cuts between bone and marrow. Here’s what it means: when you engage the Word of God, something is going to happen.
When you believe in God as revealed in Jesus, you are sending a message to all who encounter you. That message is bold and clear. The active presence of God in your life is the explanation for why you walk the way you do. It explains why you cannot give up. It explains why you’re not married to a negative view of life. It explains why you believe that things work out for good. It explains why you know justice will roll down like a river and righteousness like a mighty stream—why love is preferable and that it covers a multitude of sins.
To say you follow Jesus and believe in Jesus is to boldly confess that you have surrendered to God’s actions as revealed in Jesus Christ.
The Comfort Has Come
But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.
John 14:26 (NIV)
I, you, us, we are not without guilt—all of us—but my Advocate has pleaded for me so that I am not getting what I deserve. And what is it that I deserve? Death for the wages of sin is what we all deserve. Instead, we are comforted by the knowledge of the grace and mercy that God has extended to us. The opportunities you are chasing in life are not based on you deserving them. The Advocate has pleaded for you to have a right to chase life more abundantly based upon the paid sacrifice of Jesus, whose blood was enough to atone for all of our sins.
God created us and gave us free will, knowing that it would cause us at times to make choices for the satisfaction of the flesh. So think of it like this: God set it up so that you would not have to stand before Him based on your guilt, receiving the wages of your sin. He sends Jesus to tell you that you don’t have to live as a slave to sin, and He proves it to us by taking on sin without sinning. He knows that even with that knowledge, we are going to sometimes choose the flesh over the spirit. So He sends the Advocate who stands as a reminder, in the place of our guilt, of the sacrifice of His Son, so that God is not revengeful or vindictive.
Jesus then introduces what will be the gifting of the Holy Spirit—not among you, but inside of you. This emphasizes the enduring nature of the Holy Spirit’s presence and the Holy Spirit’s guidance in the lives of believers. The Spirit moves in us all the time, in every believer, never having to divide His time. The Spirit’s movements include moving between temporal and eternal realms. You are connected to an eternal reality that you are existing in right now, which means you are in God’s presence as you always will be.
God wants to dispense grace to you. Therefore, He arranged things so that you could be the recipient of His grace that connects you to His eternal being.
Why Me?
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Genesis 1:26 (NIV)
You are more important than earth-level existence. Becoming educated and employment-placed and relationally connected and economically weighted… These are earth-level pursuits. These are earth-bound preoccupations. But while we may have preoccupations that are earth-bound, we can never lose sight of the fact that each one of us also has a transcendent meaning. We have a meaning that is above going to work every day, above working until 65, having a retirement celebration, and moving somewhere that doesn’t get snow. Here’s what Scripture says: God called you and ordained you before you even made your physical appearance in creation.
How else can you understand yourself if you don’t know who created you? You’ll be stuck on earth-bound issues rather than connected to your transcendent meaning in life. Believe in God because God created you. God loves you. God sustains you. He provides for you. You grow in God because it’s the only way to understand your purpose at a transcendent level. Why are you here? The answer lies in knowing God.
If you want to know why you have been created, it’s because God, standing in nothingness, decided He wanted to create something that looked just like Him that He could fellowship with. And you are the result of that. So when you come into church every weekend, one of the things you ought to thank God for is that God made sure no accident would prevent you from being there. Only Providence could have determined that you would turn out to be the you that you have turned out to be. And in light of that, is God not worthy for us to enter his gates with thanksgiving?
God wants to spend your life with you. Please don’t bypass that fact. God wants to spend your life with you, letting you enjoy going around resembling Him and sharing in His creativity. You were created to know Him and fellowship with Him.
Sowing Seeds
But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.
Matthew 13:23 (NIV)
There’s an old story that goes like this: An aged and frail Emperor knew his time was limited and it was time to name a successor. He called all the young people in his kingdom together. He gave to each one of them one seed and told them, these seeds are special. Go home, plant the seed, and water it. Come back here in one year with what you have grown from this one seed, and when you bring back what you have grown, I will judge it and I’ll then choose my successor.
Young Ling was there that day and he, like the others, was given his one seed. He went home, seized a pot, planted the seed, and watered it carefully. Every day, he would water it and watch to see if that seed had grown. Others around him began bragging about the growth they were seeing. Others claimed to have had tall trees and tall plants, but not Ling. And he, of course, said nothing to his friends.
It was time, however, to present what they had been able to do with the seed given to them. Youth from all over that kingdom brought to the emperor their plants for inspection. When Ling got to the palace, he looked around at the beautiful plants of all shapes and sizes. Ling set his empty pot on the floor among all of the growth around him.
Kids, of course, started laughing, being cruel as they sometimes can be. Then, in walks the emperor, and amidst all of this growth and greenery, he spots Ling’s empty pot in the back and orders guards to bring them up to the front. The emperor turns to the crowd and says,
“Behold, this is your new emperor. One year ago I gave everyone here a seed. But I gave every one of you boiled seeds. I knew when I gave them to you that they would not grow. All of you went out and replaced what I gave you and brought me back fakery. And yet Ling was the only one with the courage and honesty to bring me back the seed I gave him. Therefore, he is the one who will be the kingdom’s new emperor.”
This is what has happened to the spiritual understanding of God’s church and the disappointment that the seeds we have planted have demonstrated little to no growth. This reality has tempted far too many who have initially claimed Christ to exchange Christianity for counterfeit seed, which looks good but is not the result of what has been extended from the hand of God.
Jesus understood the danger of the seed of the kingdom when placed in the hands of those who would not scatter it appropriately. So He decided to image it in what is referred to as the Parable of the Sower.
When the Plan Comes Together
As soon as Joseph appeared before him, he threw his arms around his father and wept for a long time. Then Joseph said to his brothers and to his father’s household, “I will go up and speak to Pharaoh and will say to him, ‘My brothers and my father’s household, who were living in the land of Canaan, have come to me. The men are shepherds; they tend livestock, and they have brought along their flocks and herds and everything they own.’ When Pharaoh calls you in and asks, ‘What is your occupation?’ you should answer, ‘Your servants have tended livestock from our boyhood on, just as our fathers did.’ Then you will be allowed to settle in the region of Goshen, for all shepherds are detestable to the Egyptians.”
Genesis 46:29, 31-34 (NIV)
As the tears of reunion flow, Joseph’s heart overflows with awe and reverence for the God of his fathers who had orchestrated all of this divine convergence of human destiny. And in that one sacred embrace, Joseph beheld the mystery of God’s unfathomable grace, which transformed this suffering into a vessel of salvation for his family and the fulfillment of divine promises.
When the storms settle and the suffering ceases and the pain subsides, the blurriness gives way to some clarity that so much of our spiritual growth is developed in the context of our suffering.
How do you respond to life when there’s no more battle to fight? When things have changed for the better and it has finally worked out for your good—when what you have waited for is now upon you, can you take off your fatigues, put down your weapon, and enjoy that the sun is now shining? How do you live then? What is the proper spiritual posture when the plan works, when the blessing has arrived, and when the season has changed?
Joseph teaches us in this text that faith in God is not just response and reaction. Surrender and offering faith is also a thinking matter. Joseph has this deep emotional response to the first embrace of his father Jacob. He hasn’t seen him in more than two decades, and his response is visceral. It is deep. Joseph has been holding on to these emotions for a long time and the text is emphatically descriptive when it tells how he hugs the old man Jacob and weeps for a long time. But then he immediately switches emotions, turns to the others, and says, “We have to exact the plan.”
You can’t stay in your emotions so long that you forget that your faith employs a strategy. Do you see how quickly Joseph goes from emotional gratitude and appreciation to God for sparing the life of his father into action? It’s a flooding of pent-up emotions. He’s weeping so long that the writer needed to make mention of it. But that emotional display did not dissipate the mission that was in front of him. Joseph has enough spiritual maturation to know that faith expressed must be wed to faith strategically moving within the extended blessings of God.
