Steven Furtick - You Can't Change What Happened, But...
This is an excerpt from: Bent Knees Break Chains
The more we separate the event from the decision, the more room it gives God to move in our situation. I'll go a little deeper. Here's one. I thought of a bunch of them, but I won't give them all to you today. Y'all won't like this. Traffic is an event. What time you leave the house… Got 'em! Like traffic was the Red Sea, like you didn't know it was there, like it isn't there every morning. "I'm sorry; the traffic was bad". The traffic is always bad. It's 485. They're going to be building it for the next 485 years. You knew that when you pushed it till the last minute and hit "snooze" for the third time. Leaving early is a decision, and the decision to leave a little early might affect your decision to road-rage.
See, we have to stop blaming so much stuff in our lives. Joseph is a model. We have to stop blaming the events and start making the decisions God is calling us to make within the events that can empower us to move forward or else we will always be a slave to what happened. Joseph has a decision to make now, and I think it's such an emotional moment for him, because his father loved him a little too much, because he was born of Rachel, who was the wife Jacob really wanted, not Leah. Because he was the firstborn son of Rachel, Jacob's favorite wife (Holly, you're my favorite wife, by the way), that gave him a little extra status. But he's going through this shift. A lot of people will tell you Joseph's life is about going from the pit to the palace. I don't see it that way at all, although that geographically describes his position, because he ended up being promoted, when he interpreted Pharaoh's dream about the famine, to a position of responsibility where he could prepare the people for the famine, even his own family.
Although that's true, it's really not the heart. He's really going from status to service. God brings him from a place of great status to a place of great service. Or you could see it this way too: he's going from a place where he has to get from pain to purpose. The position you're in determines a lot of the decisions you make, and a lot of the decisions you make will determine the position you're in. If at any point in Joseph's life he would have decided, "This isn't fair. Forget it, God…" If he hadn't served with excellence in small positions, he could not have been trusted in a bigger one. All along the way, there were little decisions he was making that you're making…to do it with your whole heart or to only do it when someone else is looking. Little decisions you make…corners you cut or you don't; words you speak and times you bite your tongue because it's not going to help anything anyway. Little decisions. Where would you be financially if you had made little decisions differently along the way?
"Well, now I don't have any money, and I'm doing like what Pastor said. I'm in a bad position, so I'm taking desperate measures". But would you have to take desperate measures if you made some different decisions? Could it change from this point forward, that your future is not chained to your past? We've talked a lot about the chain of events that led to Joseph's moment of decision, but how about the chain of decisions that put him in this place? The chain of decisions. Think about that. It's a lot more interesting than giving me a list of everything life did to you. I told somebody one time, "When I first got married, I got fat". And I did. I was turning into a big old boy. The way I explained it was like how Adam explained why he ate the apple in the garden. "This woman you gave me, Lord, is a wonderful cook".
I was actually perverting the gift God had given her as a cook to explain the situation of my cellulite. Y'all know the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the cellulites. Well, they were all coming against me. Somewhere in that, I had to own the fact that I ate what she put on the plate and then went and filled the plate three more times to get this way. So, it's not exactly true to say, "I got fat," like it's something that just crashed into the earth, like it was a meteor shower, like it was a snow day. I ate food. I didn't exercise. I got fat. That's the event. The number on the scale screamed at me. I rebuked it. It didn't change. I prayed about it. It didn't change. I quoted Genesis 50:20. "What you mean for evil, God means for good". I reversed the curse. It didn't change. Then I decided. I didn't get to decide once; I got to decide daily.
Joseph has a decision to make in this moment, because now his dad is dead, and the only thing that can keep him being kind to his brothers is how he views his relationship with God, because his relationship with them is obviously never going to change. They lied about him when he was 17, and they are lying about him as he's 56. He has been playing with it. He has been playing with whether or not he wants to pay them back. He has been doing it for decades. When they first came to him, he was 39. The famine had only been going on two years. When they came to him, he pretended like he didn't know who they were. I think he was trying to decide, "How am I going to move forward"? He was already in a position of power. He was already in a position of authority. He was already in a position of influence. The position you're in influences the decisions you make.
So he didn't tell them. For a little while, he'd go cry in private, and then he'd come back out and be strong in public. He even stuffed their bags with silver and then sent his own men to arrest them and throw Simeon in prison. That's how bad it felt to him. So, I want you to think about when something bad happens to you, the event. (I wish I could draw this. I am not a good artist. You can draw it and post it online later. Okay?) Something bad happens. When Joseph says, "God meant it for good," he does not call their abuse, neglect, and betrayal good. He's moving past that. So, something bad happens. Many bad things happen to Joseph. It's almost a disservice to what he has been through to call it "Something bad happened," but let's just call it that. This thing happens, and it's bad. Now the decision Joseph has to make… Because, remember, the event is not the decision. So now he says, "That was bad, what you did to me. That was bad, how you sold me. That was bad, what I went through. I'm not sugarcoating anything or spiritualizing your decisions. It was bad".
Sometimes the first step to getting to "God is good" is to say it was bad. "It was bad, and it hurt, and it harmed, and it set me back, and I wish it hadn't happened. If I got to write the script, I wouldn't have put that in it. It was bad". You know we do "God is good all the time. All the time God is good". But it is bad a lot of the times, and a lot of the times it is bad, but God is good all the time, and all the time God is good. But it is bad. That's bad. Read the news. That's bad. That's horrible. That's unthinkable. That's inhumane. A lot of us in this room know somebody like Joseph. Everybody in this room knows a Joseph. You watched what happened to them, and you could not believe how they responded to it.
My Joseph who I think about all the time is my buddy Levi Lusko. He's a pastor in Montana, a foreign country. He's an international missionary to the state of Montana. I love him for many reasons, but, y'all, I put my hand on his chest to pray for him the other night, because he turned 40. I was praying, and God anointed me, and I was speaking stuff over his life that I couldn't even understand where it was coming from. When Graham was 5 and his daughter was 5, and his daughter died of an asthma attack while he was out of the house, and he stood over her and prayed God would make the sun stand still and save his daughter's life, and she died… That would have broken me. I had a context for it because I had a boy who was 5. I thought, if I were in that position, I think I would be tempted to stand up and tell y'all I quit, because how can I speak this faith over you? How can I trust a God who would let me go through that?
So now, standing on 10 years later and watching him turn 40 and seeing… I hope he watches this message. Text him and tell him to watch it. He can watch it right now. He's on a different time zone out there in Montana. I think it's, like, 1843 in Montana. It's like a different year zone in Montana. I prayed over him, and he's a powerful man. He wrote a book. It was bad. He wrote a book to let the Devil know, "My daughter Lenya will live on even if there's no breath in her lungs". Do you follow me? This is my Joseph. I think about him all the time when I go into a pity party, because I think about, "If he can decide that, to keep preaching in the middle of what he…" That's why I love lifting these Bible characters up to you on Sunday. Even if you don't know somebody like that personally, you get to be with Joseph for a little while, and you get to think about the fact that at the moment… I mean, most of us would have been waiting for this moment to pay our brothers back.
"Oh, I'm just waiting until Jacob dies. When Jacob dies, I'm about to let y'all have it". Jacob lived to be over 140. Do you know how long Jacob held on until he had put a blessing on all of the kids? Then he dies, and they walk for 11 days to bury him, they walk 11 days back, and then his brothers send some weak message, talking about, "Before he died, Dad said…" Trying to relay a message, showing him the evidence that there has been no change in their hearts. They bow before him, and he has to decide what he's going to do, because he can't control what they do. You can't change them. Stop trying. They're on their knees before Joseph, but not for the right reasons. "Forgive us. Forgive us. Forgive us. We are your slaves. We'll do whatever you say. We're sorry". You're not sorry. You're still lying. And he wept. He came out and showed us something. Right after he got done weeping, he still made the right decision. Your emotions don't determine your decisions, not when you've seen the goodness of God. "What these brothers did was evil, but I'm not going to let what they did be the final word on what I do, because I still have life to live".