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Introduction:
I’d like to begin our lesson by looking at the story of Joseph, someone who exemplifies perseverance.
The sweet smell of success – everybody loves success.
And in this passage of Scripture we see Joseph, at the pinnacle of his success, standing before the king of Egypt, and the king handing him complete authority.
By most people’s standards, that’s success.
But I bet there were people who didn’t know his background who thought, “Yeah, well that’s okay for you, mate.
Life has been handed to you on a silver platter.”
But Joseph wasn’t always a successful man.
At the age of 17, ten of Joseph’s brothers ganged up on him, faked his death, and sold him into slavery.
His new owners took him to Egypt, and sold him to a man named Potiphar.
He proved to be so trustworthy that his master entrusted the entire handling of his affairs to Joseph.
And then the trouble began.
Potiphar’s wife, who no doubt was used to getting her own way, took a fancy to the young Hebrew slave.
Day after day, she pressured him to sleep with her.
Finally, when he continually refused to sleep with her, she accused him of attempted rape, and Joseph was thrown in jail.
Betrayed by his own brothers, enslaved, wrongfully accused, jailed, Joseph didn’t get it easy.
I think that many of us can relate to facing difficulties in life.
Today, we continue our series on Perseverance in support of our 2022 theme “Renewed Faith.”
It’s a quality that Joseph had.
And it’s most definitely a quality that Jesus personified.
That quality is perseverance – the ability to hang in there, to stick with it, to keep on going.
Following are five things to note about “Persevering.”
1. Persevering People experience failure just like everyone else
Sin and striving are common for man.
Joseph went though it.
Persevering people try, and fail, and sometimes it’s their own fault, sometimes it isn’t.
But they get over it.
They are not some super-breed of human who go from success to success.
The thing is, we all make mistakes, we all have down times, we all fail sometimes.
Nobody is fail-proof.
Failure may not necessarily say anything about you personally.
It might say something about others
ILLUS – Did you know that Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike competition?
He came third.
When experiencing failure it may have less to do with you than with the way others perceive you.
But even if your failure was your fault, that’s not the end of the world.
Some of the greatest people in the Bible had monumental failures –for instance:
ILLUS – Moses once committed murder.
King David committed adultery and then tried to cover it up by committing murder.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob establish a family tradition of lying and deception.
In Jesus’ hour of need, Peter denied even knowing Him.
Yet, all of these men went on to be greatly used by God – despite their failure
2. Persevering People choose not to live in the past
There’s a wonderful function on a computer – CTRL Z.
For those who aren’t computer literate, it’s an undo function.
So you’re typing away, and you look at the screen, and you realize that your hands have been on the wrong row of keys.
(anybody ever done that?)
So you’re faced with all this gobbledygook.
No problemo.
CTRL Z saves the day.
And it’s just like you never made a mistake in the first place.
On your IPhone if you’re typing all you have to do is shake your phone, and whamo Undo.
But life doesn’t come with a CTRL Z function.
ILLUS – You’re in a conversation, and some angry words escape.
And you think: Quick!
CTRL Z! Whew, that was close.
But you can’t; what’s said is said, and what’s done is done.
But that doesn’t mean we have to be pulled down by our past mistakes for the rest of our lives.
Unless we choose to live in the past.
Here are four things we can experience that tell us we might be living in the past: anger, resentment, regret, guilt.
And you know what?
God has an answer for every one of those.
But we have to allow Him to be Lord of our Life,
and we have to choose not to live in the past.
Paul was able to forget the things which were in the past, because he had already brought those things to the Lord.
3. Persevering People decide to keep moving on
ILLUS – One of the worst train disasters in history happened in Spain in 1944.
It was a long passenger train with an engine on each end.
It was on its way through a tunnel when the front engine stalled, so the engineer in the rear engine started up and started to back out of the tunnel.
Meanwhile, the front engineer got the front engine going again.
With no way to contact each other, both engines continued to pull in opposite directions.
Full-speed ahead in both directions means you are stationary, and over 500 people died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
All those people died for one reason alone: the train stopped moving.
And the train stopped moving for one reason alone too: there was one too many drivers.
In the passage we read just before, Paul said, “…reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
We have to keep moving forward, and the only way we can do that is to decide who is going to be in charge.
Will it be us, or will it be Jesus?
If it’s going to be us, we’ll keep going backwards.
If we want to try both us and Jesus (that’s two drivers pulling in different directions), we’ll stand still on the spot.
The only way to move forward is to put the Lord in charge, and to keep Him there.
4. Persevering People take one day at a time
In Acts 14:19-22 Paul persevered one day at a time...
I’m reminded of Damala Moses who reported to us many years ago that after the dogs were sent to chase them out of town for preaching the Gospel
They would return the next day…to preach again
they took it day by day...
I think there is a lesson in this for us with our relationships as well
You tried to make things right today and it didn’t work out.
Perhaps you even made them worse.
tomorrow is another day
Here’s a really profound truth; it may sound really simple, maybe even a little stupid.
You can’t live tomorrow today.
That’s like forgetting where you are today, and saying you want what is over there, in tomorrow.
We’re stuck in this 24-hour slot, subject to time.
And there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, but that’s not for want of trying, is it?
We worry, we fret, we get fearful about what might happen tomorrow.
And all the while, today – the day we’re in – may be a wonderful day, but we can’t enjoy it, because we’re trying to live tomorrow.
ILLUS – A little bit like Adam and Eve, in the garden of Eden.
They’ve got everything they want there.
Everything is perfect.
And there’s only one thing God has told them they can’t do: eat the fruit of the tree that’s in the middle of the garden.
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