The Gospel According to Joseph: The Gospel and God's Presence

We have been working our way through the story of Joseph, Jacob, and Judah in a series of devotions and sermons. In the previous devotion, we learned about temptation and godly living from Joseph in Ge. 39. The sermon that goes along with that devotion, however, focuses on the main thrust of the two episodes of this story in Ge. 39-40: the impact of God's presence on Joseph's life. The sermon is entitled "The Gospel and God's Presence, and you can listen to it here or read it here.

Now, as I mentioned in the previous sermon post of this series, one of the things I am trying to do is teach how to study these Old Testament (OT) stories and how to see what the Holy Spirit was showing the original audience and is showing us about God's redeeming work in Jesus. For Jesus Himself told us in passages like Lk. 24:27, 44 and Jn. 5:46 that the OT is about Him, but seeing exactly how it teaches us about Him is not quite so easy. My senior pastor, Chris Hutchinson, has written a couple of great articles on preaching/teaching Christ from the OT that can be found here and here, and there are several of good books written on this subject like David Murray's Jesus on Every Page. But, in the interest of ease for this series of sermons, I have been teaching some basic questions that we can ask of any OT passage to help us to see how Jesus may be in that passage. Now, all these questions do not always apply to each OT passage, but we can ask these of any passage and one or more of them will help us to see Jesus on that page of Scripture. In this sermon, there one new one come up: How does this passage reflect upon or prepare us for the person or work of Christ—i.e. who He is to us (His person) and what He does for us (His work)? These two episodes of the Joseph story show us that part of Jesus' work for us is His presence with us to give us the strength to endure, and they prepare us for His person as our Lord, showing us that whatever we do, we ultimately work for Him, no our earthly masters.

I pray that this sermon will show you Jesus clearly and Him only and that it will be a blessing to your soul.

By His Grace,
Taylor