Today’s passage is Genesis 39:20-40:4. Joseph is put in prison, the warden puts him charge of the prison, and Joseph is successful because the Lord is with him. Pharaoh imprisons his baker and cupbearer, and Josep has the care of them.
What prison are you in?
How is the Lord blessing you in your difficulties?
What and who are you responsible for even though you don’t want to be?
The closest I came to prison was when I was ten years old and arrested by the military police. A friend and I were trespassing on the base.
We were taking a shortcut instead of going the long way and showing our ID at the gate. The MPs put us in their jail and called our fathers. They all thought it was a good joke.
The next closest thing to prison was when I had to live at the YMCA because I didn’t have a job or enough money to live in an apartment. I lived there because of a rash of sins in the years preceding.
The YMCA was a weigh station on my way to Korea.
I was there to reflect on my sins, but all I did was complain to God and cry out against him and the others I blamed for landing in that small room with a bed.
I didn’t see that God was there with me, preventing me from sliding any further down on the social scale, down to the street bums I recognized every day on my endless walking complaints, staring in the windows of coffee shops I didn’t have money to go into.
The prison I continue to languish in is my own attitude towards my life and the people in it.
Despite the manifold blessings of wife, church community, job and reasonable health, I look at myself with heavy judgment, seeing all too clearly my impatience and a quick anger bubbling just below a calm surface.
I think God made me a principal instead of leaving me as a teacher because I would likely hit my students. As it is, I come close to striking some teachers for insubordination.
Joseph was thrown into a cistern by his brothers and then sold into an easy slavery to Potiphar as his right hand man.
Potiphar then threw him into another cistern in which he becomes the right hand man of the warden.
Eventually he will be taken out of that prison and made the right hand man of Pharaoh.
God always makes him king of his prisons. God teaches him patience, endurance, responsibility and self-control.
Those are the same attitudes that the Lord is teaching me by putting me in charge of a small school.
I don’t own the school. Like Joseph, I have been put in charge of it.
When I remember my place and pray for God’s guidance, I feel the Lord is with me.
When I drop my cross and try to carry the school, I have to go to the chiropractor and problem after problem harass me.
When I try to rule instead of follow, I betray my spiritual arrogance just as Joseph did in the end when he tried to tell his father who to bless.
Application: Talk to the CFO tomorrow about a teacher’s contract and trust in the Lord, not me.
Lord, let me remain in the prison of my circumstances until I see with your eyes and an attitude of responsible service.
