Lent is here, and the daily scripture readings have returned to Genesis and to the story of Joseph.  Joseph is one of the two people in scripture that I return to regularly to ponder.  The other is Mary.  These two individuals can teach us a lifetime’s worth of wisdom about how the Lord uses his Word to fulfill his plans through people. Joseph’s adventure is about how the Word of God comes and forms us for a dramatic destiny.

Psalm 105:19 has a “throw away line” that sums up Joseph’s entire life:  “until what he said came to pass, the Word of the Lord tested him.”  From what I can tell, this one verse sums up about 35-40 years.

When Joseph was a boy he had a dream, and in the dream he symbolically saw his family bowing down to him.  Frankly, it made his brothers so mad they threw him into a pit, pretended he was murdered, and sold him into slavery.  Talk about a dysfunctional family.

For the next few decades Joseph gets forced into hard labor, he becomes a household slave, he gets falsely accused of sexually assaulting his boss’s wife, get’s thrown into prison, get’s brought before Pharaoh, and becomes the most powerful man in Egypt!  Whew, what an adventure.  Through it all, God never fulfills the word.  Yet in the midst of all of the adventures, the word doesn’t go away.  When God speaks a word to you, it sticks in your side.  You can’t let go of it, and it begins to shape you.   Being shaped hurts, because it requires change.  Change is always painful.

In the end, Joseph’s brothers and his parents do bow down to him.  Through that word when he was a boy, the stage is set for the Exodus.

Why does the Word test us?  When we receive a word from God it does two things,  it calls us up and out of ourselves, and begins to work in us our destiny.  Joseph may have been content to be a shepherd like his family if he had never been called to something greater.  At the same time, the word began to reveal, right from the beginning, Joseph’s weak character.  By living with an unfulfilled word, a person begins to measure themselves against the word, and they begin to accept that things have to change in order for them to be trusted.  The word tests you to build in you character.  When the word finally did become reality, Joseph could handle most of it.  It’s clear that he had changed dramatically as a person.

In the story of Joseph we see the creative power of the Word of God.  The word created the man who would be Joseph.

I have lived with several words that have tested me for some time.  The first is a word that I would help lead a major great awakening one day.  I have lived with that word for 24 years.  Let me tell you, looking back I am glad the word wasn’t fulfilled even 10 years ago. I had major gaps in my character that would have short-circuited the word’s fulfillment, and probably hurt many people in the process.  By God’s grace I was allowed to be tested away from the public eye.  Sometimes I wonder about the years, and the failures, that Scripture overlooks in Joseph’s life.

Seven years ago God gave me a word about owning a house.  Over the next year he showed me that the house would be used for prayer, for refuge, and for artists as a center of worship.  He also showed me that I would be responsible for great amounts of money.  Even more than that word from 1988, these words have tested me.  I have made more than one mistake as I lived with these words.  Like Joseph, I have learned you have to be careful about how and when you talk about promises God gives you.

One critical thing I have learned is that a word from God is not a merely human vision.  You can take steps to make a vision become reality.  In contrast, there is nothing you can do to make a word from God reality outside of saying “yes” to God.  At best you will get an Ishmael, and you will have more problems in the end than promises.   As I wrote last week, there is no “10 Easy Steps for a Successful Virgin Birth.”

In my pilgrimage, I have experienced some dramatic tests.  Three years ago God used me to spearhead the Red Envelope Project.  I experienced more attention and more criticism than ever before in my life.  In the end over three and half million empty red envelopes were sent to the President.  Although at the time it was hard, I know that I handled that situation exactly as God instructed me.  The biggest part was letting it go and not trying to build a successful “creature” out of it.

This past year God took me on an adventure with a local crisis pregnancy center.  Part of my time there was leading a major fundraising campaign.  The Lord told me to pray for an amount of money that was really beyond anything anyone would have set as a goal (actually, about 4 times a normal goal).  For weeks, and with a lot of sweat, I prayed for this amount.  Finally, the day came, and one individual wrote a check for $200,000.  That check was exact answer to my prayer.

Through these experiences I was shaped and tested.  Although they were not the fulfillment of the words, they were clear indications of how much money, responsibility, and instruction from the Lord I could handle.  I think that’s what Potiphar’s wife was about–would Joseph do the right thing.  He passed that test.  But there were other areas that needed changing.  I am sure he often thought while he was in the prison “What if I had just done the easy thing?”  My guess is the story would have been different, and he would have been a Samson–a footnote to the story rather than a chapter.

God is calling us all to be chapters in salvation history.  Has God given you a promise that is a little beyond your ability or your circumstances?  The bigger the word, the bigger the test, and bigger the victory in the end. God wants you to succeed.  Psalm 105:22 sums up Joseph’s testing, and why it happened:  “to instruct his princes at his pleasure, and to teach his elders wisdom.”  Testing gives us something to give away.

I like how the apocryphal book the Wisdom of Solomon puts it:

“Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good,  because God tested them and found them worthy of himself; like gold in the furnace he tried them, and like a sacrificial burnt offering he accepted them.  In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble. They will govern over nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever.” (Wisdom 3:5-8)