Genesis 41

A. Intro

Good afternoon and welcome to church today. My name is Jade and I have the privilege of unpacking the passage that was just read out for us. Before I do, I have something I want us to think about that sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but I promise you it’s not. 

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What’s the difference between a vending machine, a slot machine and God? If you’ve ever used a vending machine, there is a particular relationship, a particular way you interact with it. You put your money in, you press the letter and the number that you want, D5 for peanut M&M’s, and you expect your snack to fall. The entire transaction is built on a predictable logic: input equals output. You know what you are owed. You know what you paid for. And if the machine takes your 12 dollars for a 20gram pack of M&Ms and gives you nothing in return, you do not shrug and say, "Well, the machine is sovereign." You bang on the glass. You press the buttons. You put you hand through the hole on the bottom. You feel that a contract has been violated and you have been robbed. 

Now think about a different machine. The slot machine. You put your money in, you pull the lever, and you have absolutely no guarantee of what comes out. Actually, most likely, nothing is going to come out. You know this going in. The entire architecture of the slot machine is built on unpredictability — on the seductive possibility that this time, on this pull, the symbols will line up and everything will change. And yet people sit in front of slot machines for hours. They develop rituals. They have lucky machines, lucky seats, lucky times of day. They talk about being "due" for a win. They speak of the machine as though it has a personality, a mood, a memory of what it owes them. They are not operating on a contract — they know the contract doesn't exist — and yet something in the human heart can't stop trying to find the pattern, the formula, to discover the sequence of inputs that will finally make the machine pay out.

Here is what is interesting about those two machines sitting side by side. The vending machine tells you exactly what you will get. The slot machine promises you nothing. And yet both of them, in their own way, train you to believe that the right combination of inputs, applied with the right consistency, will eventually produce the outcome you are looking for. One machine is transparent about its logic. The other machine hides its logic. But both machines have logic. 

Now here is the uncomfortable truth: most of us — probably all of us at some point — have tried to have one of those exact relationships with God.

Sometimes we approach Him like a vending machine. We are not always conscious of it. It doesn't always announce itself as theology. But somewhere beneath the surface of how we pray, how we serve, how we give, how we endure — there is often a quiet ledger, a list of good deeds, that we keep. I stayed faithful, so the door should open. I gave sacrificially, so the diagnosis should change. I forgave the person who hurt me, so the marriage should heal. We have inserted our quarters into the machine. We have pressed our selection. And we are standing there, arms crossed, waiting for the snack to drop.

And when the vending machine approach fails — when our obedience doesn't produce the outcome we expected — some of us shift strategies. We stop expecting a contract and start looking for a secret pattern. Something that we need to discover. A bible verse that is going to reveal the future. A feeling that we should follow. We become slot machine theologians. We are not sure God owes us anything exactly, but we are convinced that somewhere in the universe there is a particular sequence — a particular kind of prayer, a certain level of fasting, a specific prophetic declaration, the right anointing oil, the right conference, the right pastor to lay hands on us — and if we can just find that sequence, the symbols will line up and everything will change for us. We are not operating on a contract anymore like a vending machine. We are looking for a system, a secret sequence that will work. We develop spiritual rituals. We talk about being "due" for a breakthrough. We speak of the heavens as though they have a mood that can be managed, a resistance that can be overcome with just enough spiritual pressure and prayer.

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Both approaches feel very different from the outside. The vending machine Christian looks disciplined, obedient, consistent. The slot machine Christian looks passionate, hungry, desperate for God. But underneath, they share the same fundamental assumption: that God is a mechanism. That He has an interior logic. That the goal of the spiritual life is to learn that logic well enough to make the machine pay out.

The problem isn’t that we want good things. The problem isn’t even that we pray for them. The problem is this underlying architecture — the assumption that God's role in the universe is essentially to honor a contract we have drawn up, or to reward a formula we have finally discovered.

What happens when neither machine delivers? One of two things, typically. Either we conclude that we did not put in enough quarters, or that we haven't found the right sequence yet — that our faith was insufficient or our obedience was imperfect — and so we double down in a kind of desperate, joyless performance, pulling the lever again and again with increasing anxiety. Or we conclude that the machines are broken, that God can't be trusted, that the whole relationship was a lie, and we walk away.

What Genesis 41 offers us is something far more unsettling, and far more beautiful, than either of those options. It offers us a God who is not a vending machine and not a slot machine — who is not dispensing blessings in exchange for properly formatted prayers, and who is not hiding a secret formula that the spiritually elite eventually unlock — but a God who is actually governing history. Governing it. From the dreams of a pagan king to the suffering of a forgotten prisoner, he moves all of time towards purposes that are so large and so good that they could not fit inside any transaction or any system we might think of.

He is not a mechanism at all. He is God. And the one true God has a plan that predates us, He has purposes that surpass us, and He has a faithfulness that doesn't fluctuate based on whether we have figured out a particular sequence that unlocks a mystery.

Joseph's story has been turned by popular preaching into almost exactly the story of a machine. Put in faithfulness; receive a palace. Put in a prophetic gift; become Pharaoh's right hand. Some preachers even talk about finding the Joseph Anointing; or pulling the right lever and getting the Joseph Blessing. It is this same input-output logic that seems so tidy, so encouraging, so applicable. Some preachers sell it as a contract. Others sell it as a secret formula. But both versions are selling you interactions with a machine instead of inviting you into a relationship with the Architect of the universe. 

Genesis 41 has three surprises in it. Three places where the story goes somewhere different than we expect. And I think if we can see them clearly, they will change not just how we read the story of Joseph — but how we read our own lives.

The first one will challenge how you think, pray and speak. The second will challenge how you think about gifts. And the third will challenge what you're actually hoping God is going to do for you.

1. Transactional Theology

So let's start at verse one — and I want you to watch the very first thing the text shows us, because it is the sentence that dismantles both the vending machine and the slot machine in ten words.

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"When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream..."

That phrase — when two full years had passed — is one of the most quietly devastating phrases in the entire Joseph narrative. And I need you to feel its weight before we go any further, because if you miss what is happening in these ten words, you will miss everything.

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To appreciate it fully, you have to remember what happened two years before this moment. Go back to Genesis 40. Joseph is in prison. He has been there for years already — thrown into a pit by his brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused by Potiphar's wife, imprisoned without trial. And in that prison, two of Pharaoh's men arrive: his cupbearer and his baker. They each have a dream. The Lord gives Joseph the interpretation of both dreams. The baker will be executed in three days. The cupbearer will be restored to his position. Joseph asks the cupbearer for one thing — one thing — when you get out, remember me. Mention me to Pharaoh.

"The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph; he forgot him." And chapter 41 opens two years later. Two more years in prison. Not two more weeks. Not two more months. Two full years. And here is what I want you to notice: Scripture doesn't say Joseph lost faith during those two years. It doesn't say he gave up. But it also — and this is critical — doesn't say he was in some extended prayer revival either. It doesn't say his faithfulness finally reached a threshold that moved God to act. It simply says: When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream...

God decided to act. Not because Joseph finally unlocked some spiritual secret. Not because he had accumulated sufficient units of faithfulness. God acted when God decided to act.

Now this is where contemporary preaching often takes this story and turns it into something the story itself refuses to be. The argument goes something like this: Joseph stayed faithful in the pit, therefore God eventually rewarded his faithfulness with the palace. The lesson for you, therefore, is to stay faithful in your pit, and God will eventually bring you to your palace. It sounds right. It sounds encouraging. It has the shape of a biblical promise.

But follow the logic carefully. If Joseph's faithfulness was the operative cause — the thing that ultimately opened the prison door — then why did the door not open when Joseph's faithfulness was at its clearest? He interpreted the dreams correctly. He served faithfully. But he got not one positive outcome from it for two full years. The cupbearer was restored and forgot him completely. If faithfulness were the transaction — if it worked like a vending machine — the machine should have paid out long before chapter 41.

And here is where I want to be pastorally honest with you, because this is not just a theological problem. It is a pastoral one. When you tell people that their faithfulness is the key that unlocks God's deliverance, you set them up for one of two crushing conclusions when deliverance doesn't come on schedule. Either they decide they were not faithful enough — and so they enter a grim, guilt driven, exhausted performance of trying harder, believing harder, praying more earnestly, pulling the lever one more time — or they conclude that God can't be trusted, that He did not keep His end of the bargain, and they walk away.

There is a particular cruelty in teaching transactional theology: it is actually cruelest to the most faithful people. Think about the people you know who have suffered longest and most quietly. The marriages that didn’t survive despite every effort. The illnesses that were not healed despite years of believing prayer. The prodigal children who have not come home despite decades of faithful, heartbroken intercession. Transactional theology looks at every one of those people and implies, however gently, that something in their life was insufficient. Something in that parent who was praying for their child to come to know the Lord is wrong. That the machine should have paid out, but they must have done something wrong.

That is not what the Scriptures say.

What this first verse is insisting is that God's timing is not always a response to our behavior. It is a function of His purposes. Joseph did not get out of prison “when he was ready”. He got out of prison when Egypt needed him. God was not waiting for Joseph to pass some threshold of faithfulness. God was arranging a famine, preparing a Pharaoh's dream, letting a cupbearer's memory resurface, orchestrating events across an entire region — toward an end that had almost nothing to do with Joseph's personal comfort, and everything to do with the survival of God’s people and the preservation of a covenant God had made with Abraham four generations earlier.

Now — and I want to be careful here — this doesn't mean faithfulness doesn't matter. Joseph's character mattered enormously. A man who had spent those years in slavery and imprisonment becoming bitter and self-serving would not have been useful to God the way Joseph was. Character is forged in waiting. But there is a profound difference between saying character matters and saying character is the currency that purchases God's action. One of those is true. The other is a vending machine.

The irony is that the preaching which most loudly claims to exalt God is often the preaching which most thoroughly reduces Him to a mechanism. A dispenser of blessings in exchange for correctly formatted faith. He is not that. He is something far more unmanageable, and far more magnificent.

But here is the grace in it: if God is not a vending machine, you can't break Him. You can't out-sin His purposes. You can't under-perform His plans. Your seasons of weak faith, your years of confusion, your times when the cupbearer forgets you — none of that can derail what God is doing. Because what God is doing doesn't ultimately depend on you the way transactional theology implies.

Joseph was not delivered because his faith was finally sufficient. He was delivered because God — who had never once lost track of him in that prison — decided that it was time. And that is actually better news. Not because it removes suffering. Genesis 41 doesn't pretend it does. But because it means our hope is anchored in something that can't fluctuate with our spiritual performance.

At the end of two full years, Pharaoh dreamed. God acted. In His time. For His reasons. And they were good reasons — better than Joseph could have imagined from the floor of a prison cell.

And so the first surprise that challenges the way we think, pray and speak is that we need to rid our hearts, our minds and even our language, our tongues of this transactional theology, this transactional idea of how God operates. 

2. Gift-centric theology

So Joseph gets out of prison. And the very first thing he does is the second thing that surprises us.

So what has happened so far is that Pharaoh had 2 dreams, no one has been able to tell him what these dreams meant; which finally reminds the cupbearer of his promise to Joseph. Pharaoh called for Joseph to quickly be brought from the dungeon. Joseph is shaved and changes his clothes and comes before Pharaoh. 

And I want you to watch what Joseph does the moment he gets his first real opportunity to speak.

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Genesis 41:15–16 — "Pharaoh said to Joseph, 'I had a dream, and no one can interpret it. But I have heard it said of you that when you hear a dream you can interpret it.' 

'I cannot do it,' Joseph replied to Pharaoh, 'but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires.

I cannot do it. That phrase deserves to be printed large and placed on the wall of every church that has ever marketed itself around a celebrity pastor instead of Jesus. I cannot do it, but God can. 

Think about what Pharaoh has just offered Joseph. After years in prison, he is standing before the most powerful man on earth, who is looking to Joseph as his only hope for understanding a vision that has shaken him. This is the moment. Everything that has happened — the slavery, the false accusation, the imprisonment, the cupbearer's two-year forgetfulness — it has all been leading to this room, this conversation. And Joseph's first words are not, "I'm so glad you asked, because I have a gift for exactly this." His first words are a redirect. A displacement. I can't do it. It is not in me. You are asking something that only God can. In other words, if God decides not to do it, Joseph has no control over this so-called ability. He doesn’t get to turn it on and off, he doesn’t command it. And then after he explains the dreams to Pharaoh. look at how he phrases it. 

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Genesis 41:28 — "It is just as I said to Pharaoh: God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do."

Genesis 41:32 — "The reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that the matter has been firmly decided by God, and God will do it soon."

Not with a celebration of his own insight. Not with self applause or a declaration that he has supernatural powers. He doesn’t even use this moment to get a good deal for himself. It begins and ends with God. The meaning belongs to God. The future belongs to God. Joseph is simply the voice.

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Now I want you to understand why this is so significant in the cultural context of this moment. In the ancient world, dream interpretation was a prestigious and lucrative skill. The magicians and wise men of Egypt were professionals whose entire social standing depended on their interpretive abilities — and the text contrasts them with Joseph. They could not do it. He could. Joseph had every cultural incentive to present himself as uniquely gifted. He had every personal incentive — having just come from prison with nothing to his name — to use this moment for maximum personal advancement.

And instead, everything he does begins and ends with removing any ideas that he has any powers and attributing everything back to God.

There is a version of modern Christianity that has turned spiritual gifts into something Joseph would not recognize. You might have heard it. Preachers who speak of having a "Joseph Anointing," as though someone can carry in themselves a supernatural ability that makes them the essential center of the story. There is an entire market built around this — conferences, books, ministry brands, prophetic networks — all organized around the premise that certain people have special access to divine revelation that others simply do not have.

What is wrong with this is not that spiritual gifts are real — spiritual gifts are real. It is not that God uses individuals in particular ways — He does. What is wrong is the center of gravity. This gift-centric theology, by definition, pulls our eyes toward the person who possesses the gift rather than toward the God who gave it. It turns the instrument into the hero. And when the instrument becomes the hero, something very dark tends to follow.

And so when Joseph says I can't do it, he is doing something theologically precise. He is not performing humility. He is correcting a cosmological view of the world that the Egyptians had. You see Egypt back then was not that dissimilar to some of our cultures today. Pharaoh's question presupposes a world where dream interpretation is a human skill — where the right person can unlock secret meaning. Joseph's answer dismantles that entire framework. The question isn’t whether Joseph is a talented enough interpreter. The question is whether God chooses to reveal what He is doing, and to whom.

And here is what I find particularly interesting about the content of Joseph's interpretation. He tells Pharaoh something Pharaoh absolutely did not want to hear. This is the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream.

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28 “It is just as I said to Pharaoh: God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do. 29 Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, 30 but seven years of famine will follow them. Then all the abundance in Egypt will be forgotten, and the famine will ravage the land. 31 The abundance in the land will not be remembered, because the famine that follows it will be so severe. 

This is not an encouraging word. This is not a blessing declaration. In most ancient courts, this kind of message would be grounds for the immediate execution of the messenger. Joseph is not playing to his audience. He is not softening the edges to protect his access. He is reporting accurately what God has shown him, regardless of how it lands, and honestly based on his history, it is very possible he thinks he could be killed because of what he is saying. 

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That kind of courage is only possible when you are genuinely convinced that the gift is not yours. If you think the gift belongs to you, you protect it. You tweak it and manipulate it. You use it in ways that protect your reputation. You become — whether consciously or not — a manager of your own brand rather than a servant of the God whose message you carry.

Joseph had nothing to manage. He was a former prisoner standing before Pharaoh. And precisely because he understood I can't do it, he could tell the truth without calculating the cost to himself.

There is a massive implication here for all of us. We all carry things that could be framed as our gifts — our intelligence, our creativity, our relational instincts, our professional skills, our financial resources, our experiences that give us insight others don't have. And we all face the same temptation Joseph navigated in that moment: to stand in the center of the story our gifts are helping to tell.

Now I get it — I can't do it — can sound like refusing credit you legitimately deserve. But what Joseph understood is that the moment you put yourself at the center of your gifts, you lose access to the actual source of them. You become a person managing their own talents rather than a person who the living God is working through. And there is a loneliness in that — a spiritual dryness — that gift-centric theology never mentions, because it is too busy celebrating the gift.

The most alive moments in any work done for God are the moments you can't fully explain. When something happened through you that exceeded what you brought to the room. And those moments are experienced by people who have loosened their grip on being the hero of the story.

Some of the best experiences I’ve had talking to people about Jesus are when I’m exhausted and find myself in the middle of a conversation I did not plan in an uber or in a cafe and I’m praying hard because I’m so aware of my weakness and I’ve found myself walking away thinking, where did I come up with that answer to that question. And the truth is that I didn’t, I couldn’t, but He can.  

'I can't do it, but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires.'"And He did. And the glory went where it belonged.

So we’ve looked at the problems with transactional theology and gift centric theology, and in our final section, we’re going to look at the third surprise and unpack the problem with promotion theology.

3. Promotion theology

So Joseph explains that the dreams are what God is going to do. He explains that there are going to be 7 years of abundance that come on the land of Egypt and then 7 years of famine. And then Joseph suggests a way forward. He essentially explains that Pharaoh needs a leadership structure that can lead the nation through the next 14 years and save up enough food during the first 7 years to be able to survive the famine in the next 7 years. Look what happens next:

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42 Then Pharaoh took his signet ring from his hand and put it on Joseph's hand, and clothed him in garments of fine linen and put a gold chain about his neck. 43 And he made him ride in his second chariot. And they called out before him, “Bow the knee!” Thus he set him over all the land of Egypt. (ESV)

This is the moment. The robe of fine linen. The signet ring. The gold chain. The chariot in which he rides, second only to Pharaoh. Everyone bowing the knee. He is only thirty years old. 

Thirteen years after his brothers sold him for twenty pieces of silver for telling them that his dreams meant that one day they will bow the knee to him, he is the second most powerful man on earth and all of Egypt is bowing to him.

If you wanted to end the sermon here, the crowd would leave satisfied. This is what is called the “Joseph Blessing”. The prison-to-palace trajectory. The God who restores what was taken, who lifts the one who was cast down, who gives the robe to the one who was stripped of his coat. And it is genuinely a good and true part of the story. Restoration is real. God does lift up the humble. These things are not lies.

But if you end it here, you have ended it precisely where the text doesn't end. Because look at where the story goes next.

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48 Joseph collected all the food produced in those seven years of abundance in Egypt and stored it in the cities. In each city he put the food grown in the fields surrounding it. 49 Joseph stored up huge quantities of grain, like the sand of the sea; it was so much that he stopped keeping records because it was beyond measure.

And then jumping down to verse 56

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56 When the famine had spread over the whole country, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold grain to the Egyptians, for the famine was severe throughout Egypt. 57 And all the world came to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph, because the famine was severe everywhere.

And all the world came to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph. The palace was not a reward for Joseph's faithfulness. The palace was a position of enormous, exhausting, world-scale responsibility in the middle of an unprecedented catastrophe. Joseph spent seven years of abundance building a massive infrastructure of food storage — traveling throughout Egypt, overseeing grain collection, administering a massive operation of staggering complexity, city by city, region by region. And then when the famine came — a famine that covered the known world — he became the single human bottleneck through which the survival of nations would flow.

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The palace was not a vacation. The palace was not a retirement party after thirteen years of suffering. The palace was a mission field. The gold chain and the signet ring were not God's way of saying, "You've been through enough — now enjoy your blessing." They were God's way of positioning one man to do the work of feeding the world.

And this doesn't even get to the part of the story that Genesis 41 is only beginning to set up. The reason all of this had to happen — the slavery, the prison, the dreams, the palace — was not primarily for Joseph's benefit at all; or even to feed hungry people. I say 'not primarily' — feeding hungry people and blessing Joseph were real outcomes, but they were secondary to something far larger. The reason was ten brothers who would eventually show up at the grain distribution office, bowing before the Egyptian official they did not recognize, fulfilling a dream Joseph had told them about before they sold him. The reason was Benjamin, the youngest, who would be brought to safety. The reason was Jacob — an old man who had been mourning his son for over a decade — who would eventually hear the words: "Joseph is still alive, and he is ruler over all the land of Egypt."

The palace was the means by which God preserved the family from which the Messiah would come.

That is the actual point of the story. And if you end it with the gold chain, you have missed it entirely.

There is a prosperity teaching that has entered so much of Christianity, that is laced with New Age teachings, that treats personal flourishing as the goal of God's redemptive activity. In this teaching it is said that God wants you blessed so that you can be a blessing, but the "so that" is more like a footnote while the blessing becomes the headline. The palace becomes the prize. The promotion becomes the testimony. The healed marriage, the successful business, the restored relationship — these are framed as God's grade on your faithfulness, the measure of His approval of you, they are framed as if they are the destination of the journey.

I think what Genesis 41 insists on is that the palace, when God gives it, is not a destination. It is an assignment. And the assignment, in Joseph's case, was to spend himself — his time, his intelligence, his administrative gifts, his political position, every resource of the platform God had given him — in the service of people who had no other hope.

Joseph did not retire to a palace. He ran one. He managed grain distribution for an empire during a catastrophe. He was responsible for the survival of people he had never met, in lands he had never visited, who came to him desperate and helpless and whom he could have turned away but didn't.

And then his brothers arrived. And instead of using the palace to take revenge, instead of using the position God had given him to finally settle the score with the ten men who had ruined his life — he wept. He forgave. He provided. Look what he says when he meets them in chapter 50.

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50:20 You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.

That is the palace. That is what it was for. Not the gold chain. Not the fine linen. Not the second chariot. The saving of many lives — including the lives of the very people who had made those years of waiting so agonizing.

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If the palace is a mission field rather than a prize, then the suffering that came before it was not meaningless. Every year in the pit, every month in prison, every morning the cupbearer forgot him — all of it was forming the man who would need to manage the provision of grain for a famine-stricken world with wisdom and compassion and the particular kind of unbreakable character that only comes from having been broken in very particular ways. Joseph couldn’t have been Pharaoh's counselor if he had not been Potiphar's slave. He could not have administered justice with mercy if he had not experienced profound injustice. He could not have wept over his brothers when they finally arrived if he had not experienced God’s faithfulness and forgiveness over the years.

The suffering wasn’t just the intro to the story about a man who was promoted. The suffering was part of the formation for the mission.

C. Conclusion

As I close, I want to show you where all three of these threads actually lead. Because Genesis 41 is not ultimately a story about Joseph. It is actually a story about a much greater Joseph.

We said the palace was not the prize — that the point of Joseph's elevation was not Joseph's comfort but the preservation of the family line through which God had promised to bless the whole earth. And that is true. But even that is not the deepest layer. Because the family that Joseph preserved — became the twelve tribes of Israel. And from those twelve tribes came a different man named Jacob who had a son named Joseph and this Joseph was set to marry a young woman named Mary. And an angel told Mary that she will have a Son who will be the Saviour of the world. The Son who had been promised from the beginning of time. 

The grain that Joseph stored up — the grain that kept the world alive during seven years of devastating famine — was pointing forward to something. To someone. Jesus stood up in the synagogue in CAPERNIUM and said: "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry." He didn't say he had bread. He said he was bread. He was the thing that the grain was always pointing toward.

Joseph spent himself — his freedom, his years, his suffering — so that a starving world could come to him and be fed. And then, centuries later, the one Joseph's life was foreshadowing did the same thing on an infinitely deeper scale. Jesus spent himself. Not managing grain reserves, but giving his own body. Not administering a food distribution system, but becoming the food. At the last supper He says, "This is my body, broken for you."

The reason Joseph's suffering was not wasted is the same reason the cross is not a tragedy. God was working. In both cases, what looked like abandonment was actually architecture. What looked like the end of the story was actually the hinge of the story. Joseph said to his brothers: "You intended to harm me, but God meant it for good." And if you listen carefully, you can hear the same logic echoing across centuries — in a garden, in a trial, on a hill outside Jerusalem, in an empty tomb.

You intended to harm me. But God meant it for good. To accomplish what is now being done. The saving of many lives.

So don’t ask: are you faithful enough to get out of prison? 

Or: do you have the right gift or anointing? 

Or: have you done enough to deserve the palace?

Instead ask: do I trust the God who is always working — even in the silence, even in the forgetting, even in the suffering — do I trust Him to be doing something in my life that is larger than I can currently see and that I am not the center of?

Because that God — the God of Joseph, the God of the cross, the God of the empty tomb — is not a vending machine. He is not a slot machine. He is not a mechanism you can learn to operate. He is a Father who gave His only Son so that a starving world could come to His table and be fed. Not with grain that runs out but with bread that lasts forever.

And the invitation standing in front of every single person in this room is not to find the right formula or accumulate the right amount of faith. The invitation is to come. Hungry, confused, disappointed, waiting — come. And feed on Him.

And in light of that, today we are going to share in the Lord’s supper together. The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic meal where we share in bread and grape juice as a way of remembering that Christ gave up Himself for us. The Lord’s supper is a declaration of faith in Jesus and a life lived for Him. If you are still exploring Jesus, use this time to reflect on what you have heard and consider whether today may be the day when you declare your faith in Him for the first time. 

For the rest, before I invite you to come up and take your break and drink, take a moment to reflect on what you have just heard. Through this series we’ve been using a tool called my one thing. 

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It is simply an opportunity for us to stop for a moment to reflect and process on what we’ve just heard. This series we’re doing in both our CGs and Church. A timer will come up with some questions to help you reflect. I encourage you to write your answer down and then after the timer is up, grab your bread and juice and head back to your seats and we will take communion together. 

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WHEN READY SLIDE

1 Corinthians 11:23–26:

23…The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 

And so we now take and eat remembering that Christ died for you. 

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25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 

And so now take and drink remembering Christ’s blood poured out for you.  

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26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

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Pray with me: Heavenly father, we thank you for the suffering that Jesus endured for our sake. We thank you that when His body was broken and His blood poured out that that was not the end. That in His death He proclaimed his victory over sin. So that we can stand with confidence that our sins have been forgiven. And there is no more to pay. Amen.

Let’s stand and sing our last couple songs together.