Revived: The Journey From Grief To Goshen

Amen. How many of you glad to be in the house of the Lord this morning? How many of you love Jesus? Amen. Can you give him some praise? Amen. God bless you. What a joy and an honor it is to be here with you this morning. I am so deeply grateful for Emanuel Church for a number of reasons. One, I so appreciate your pastors, Dr. Nate and Pastor Jody. They've just been such wonderful friends to us. They pastored us in a very difficult season as we were transitioning from the pastorate ourselves to our new role at North Central as professors and then ultimately my transition to serve as president. So I'm grateful for their friendship and their partnership. I'm grateful for Emanuel and how you have been a great partner to North Central. One of the things I like to do as I travel, especially in the Twin Cities, is to do something. So I'm going to do it now. If you graduated from North Central, sent a child to North Central, married somebody that graduated from North Central, hired somebody that went to North Central, would you stand? We want to acknowledge you. Let's look all around the room. Amen. All around the room. All around the room. Isn't that amazing? Praise God. North Central is 96 years old, and my commitment is we are raising up a generation of Daniels that can influence Babylon and not be influenced by Babylon.

That's our commitment. Amen? And so I want to just thank God for them. I'm joined this morning by my beautiful wife, Pastor Charlene Williams. Would you stand and just let people be able to greet you? We've been married. We're working on year 34, so amen. So God has been good to us, and we're grateful. I want to just recognize there's a couple of people that attend Emanuel that's deeply connected to this church. As Dr. Roos mentioned, he is a board member and one of our regents, our trustees. Also want to acknowledge our board chair attends one of your campuses, Dr. Sean, excuse me, Sean Docter. Dr. Gary Grogan, another regent attends church here. Our campus pastor and his family, Josh Edmond, goes to church here. Our director of the school of ministry, Dr. Adam Sikorsky, attends church at Emanuel. So there's a deep partnership between Emanuel and North Central. Amen? Praise the Lord. So I'm grateful to be here. This morning for the next few minutes of the time we have together, I want to talk to you from the subject of revived. Can you say that word with me? Revived. Now usually when we think about revival, we think about what God is doing sovereignly and corporately, bringing, refreshing, and renewing to a congregation or a community. How the Lord shows up in a spontaneous moment and the spirit of God is so rich and so free-flowing that people repent of their sin and come to know Jesus and the pardoning of their sin. But this morning, I want to tell you a story about a personal revival. Someone who had chains that had him bound, they got broken in a moment because of him

being able to change his posture, change his position, get a new vision for life, and declare it's enough. Amen? And at the end of service, we're going to pray together. We're going to ask the Lord to let that experience happen for some of you in this room. Amen? There's a picture of my family up. So you see my wife here. There's also a picture of our son, Darnell Jr., Adrian. It's funny. He's a junior, but I've never called him Darnell a day in his life. He has his own middle name, and he is known to our family as Adrian. So when I hear people call him Darnell, I turn around, because I'm Darnell. He's Adrian. Amen? But he is a junior. So we're so proud of our son. He is right now in medical school. He's earning a dual doctorate degree in both medicine, and he's working on a PhD at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. So if you think about him, pray for him. Amen. He loves the Lord. He is up this morning as he is every Sunday taking a carload of his classmates to church. Amen. So we're grateful for him. All right? Let's go to the word of the Lord. Amen.

This clock here is quite intimidating. It's big. Pastor Graham, I mean, come on, man. This clock is big. It's just ticking, ticking, ticking, ticking, all right? They didn't even give me grace to just do the little introduction. That was part of my time. So that time is gone. Genesis chapter 37, verse 35, when you have that, would you say amen? And I know that in my acknowledgement of people in the room, if I missed you, as my mother used to say, please charge it to my head and not my heart, right? Genesis 37, 35, and all his sons, whose son, Jacob, and all his daughters arose to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. And he said, Jacob says, let's read it together. For I shall, thus his father wept for him. A lot of pronouns there. Thus his father, Jacob, wept for him, Joseph. So usually when we are in this part of scripture, the predominant story that's being told is that of Joseph, where we see Joseph being sold into slavery, getting the coat from his father, being sold into slavery, thrown in a pit, sold into slavery, cast into a dungeon, and ultimately promoted in the palace. And it's easy to miss a profound story that's happening underneath that narrative of God working in the life of Joseph. But this morning, I believe the Holy Spirit wants us to stop here and let us sit with our father, our patriarch, Jacob, and his grief. This is not a detour to Joseph's story. It's a doorway into our own hearts and our own experiences. You know the story, the context. The brothers take Joseph, their younger brother, who they despise, they take him outside.

They find an animal. They kill this animal, innocent animal. They strip Joseph of his cloak. They soak it in blood. They sell their brother into slavery. They bring this bloodstained cloak back to their father, present it to him, and they say, is this your son's cloak? He looks at it, and you can imagine the pool of this warm blood pooling at the feet of Father Jacob, holding this coat and realizing that his son must have been killed by a wild animal. And his heart is so overwhelmed with grief that he makes an intervow in that moment and says, for the rest of my life, I'm going to perpetually live in a state of grief over the loss of my son, Joseph. Now, grief is a tax sometimes we have to pay for loving deeply. We also can love times and seasons, positions that we serve in, and when we experience loss, it does something to us. Amen? So much so that our Father Jacob here says, he refused to be comforted. Now, this is not Jacob's first experience with grief. You remember that he loved Joseph's mother, Rachel, and that she died giving birth to his last son, Benjamin. And it's an interesting story that as she is giving birth to Benjamin, and everybody in the room is recognizing that she is dying, she says to her husband, Jacob, name him Ben-O-Ni. Which means, son of my sorrow. This mother is in the state of her own grief, her own personality. Pain wants to memorialize her life and her grief and her pain and her son. And Father Jacob refuses. That's the kind of thing that happens when a mother is struggling, struggling to live He says, no, I'm not naming this boy son of my sorrow,

I'm going to name him son of my strength, son of my right hand. So we see how Jacob was able to handle the loss of his wife, how he was being able to connect the dots and say, I cannot let my son live this memorialized grief and pain. So he breaks the vow to his wife and renames his son. But when Joseph dies, something happens in him. Now the brothers, when they present this cloak to their father, they don't say a word. They just present it to him and ask the question, is this your son's cloak? And he fills in the gap. He begins to create a narrative in his own heart and his own mind about what happened. And the narrative that he creates is not the truth. It is built upon a lie. Touch your neighbor and tell them, stop believing the lie. He filled in the blanks. The evidence creates silence and his own fear fills in the blanks. He begins to associate and build a narrative of what has happened. You see a lie, this lie, didn't just take what was lost, it took his hope. It took his hope. They say we can go three days without water, 40 days without food, but we cannot live one moment without hope. Paul talks about God being the God of hope. But Jacob loses his hope.

And once his hope is gone, his sleep leaves, his appetite leaves, his comfort leaves, his worship leaves, his dynamic relationship with God Almighty leaves. Jacob, remember, he was the man that got a vision of heaven being open and a ladder where angels were ascending into seven. Jacob was the one who got the vision of Bethel. Jacob had this close, intimate relationship with God, but from this moment forward, you don't find any connection, no dreams, no vision, no prophetic word, nothing. Everything in his life shuts down except the operation of his grief. Are you with me? He says, I will go down to my grave mourning my son. Listen to me. This is more than just grief and emotion. He makes what is called an intervow, a decision consigning himself to the rest of his life. He says, for the rest of my life, I'm gonna live in mourning. Notice the text said, his sons come to him, try to comfort him. His sons come to him, try to comfort him. And can I just meddle a little bit? I'm so disappointed with these boys. These guys go on to become the 12 tribes of Israel, but right here, they're a bunch of scoundrels. They let their father sit in this grief knowing all the time that he's believing a lie. And not one of them has the courage to go to their father

and say, we lied to you. We've deceived you. No, they let him sit in the grief. And he makes this vow, a decision about how he's gonna live his life. He vows inwardly and quietly to embrace pain, to never trust again, to never be happy again. He consigns himself to say, Joseph has died, so I'm going to die as well. And the tragedy about the story is that Jacob built a permanent posture on a false set of information. He lived inside this vow for over 20 years. Can you imagine? Hollowness, emptiness, pain, loss, suffering, grief, no joy, no hope, no anticipation of things getting better. He just. shuts down emotionally. And sometimes that can happen to us saints, hello. Where we are believing a lie and we've shut down and we're going through the motions, but it's not real. And that's why God sent me this morning because he wants you to get free in Jesus' name, amen? Not every vow that you make. Now, the Bible tells us about making a vow to the Lord. Solomon said, be careful when you make a vow to God because you may over-promise and realize you've done a little too much. My wife and I went on a missions trip and we went to a part of the world where it was hot.

I mean, it was hot. I was like, look, this is enough to tell me I do not want to go to hell. And we were there and we went to a office building where a Bible college had their administrators. And I mean, it's a brick building. They're up on, you know, maybe the fifth or sixth floor. It is hot, humid, everybody's sweating. Got fans in there. And I just turned to our host. I said, man, I really want to commit to putting in an air conditioning unit here for you guys. I got back home. Somebody laughed. You probably know where this story is going. I got back home. He sent me an email. He said, based on your good name and the man of integrity, I know that you are. I went to the bank and got a loan to begin getting the air conditioners installed and it's going to cost 42,000 US dollars. You got to be careful when you make a vow. And right about that time, 2008 rolled around when we were pastoring. How many of y'all remember 2008? What happened? The bubble burst and everything contracted, right? And I had to figure out how to fulfill this commitment because I had made a vow and I had to pay it.

Solomon told us, be careful when you make a vow to the Lord, because you're going to have to what? Pay it. Jacob makes a vow, not to God, but to who? Himself. And he honors this vow. And some of us make vows to ourselves. Somebody betray you, I'll never trust again. A friend walk out on you, I'll never let anybody be that close to me again. Someone rob or steal from you. Someone, as the old preachers used to say, put your name on the highway, gospel about you, tell tales about you, and we make an inner vow, I will never let this happen to me again. And Jacob took on a permanent posture with false information and lived this way for 20 long years. Not realizing that as he is living in this perpetual grief over a son that he thought was dead, God was working in the life of his son to move him from being thrown into a pit, sold to Potiphar, thrown in prison, to then become prime minister in Egypt. And through a set of circumstances that time will not let me unravel, his brothers, because of a famine, go down to Egypt. And they don't realize, because when they last see Joseph, he's just a kid. And now they see him almost 20 years later,

he's a grown man, he's speaking the tongue of the Egyptians, and he's running Egypt. So they don't realize this is their brother, but he recognizes them. And finally, through a series of, it's almost like a chess match, I don't have time to go over it, because this clock is ticking, ticking, ticking, ticking. He finally says to his brothers, I am Joseph, your brother. And the first question he asked them, is my father still alive? He knew his brothers. He knew that they would give him some narrative that would exonerate them. I also have to explain why Joseph is missing. So he kind of begins to think through, they probably told my father that I'm dead. And I don't want my father to go to his grave thinking his son who is alive is really dead. And they say, yes, our father, he said, go get my father and bring him back. So the Bible says, turn with me to Genesis chapter 45. You see, we started at 37, right? And now we have to go all the way to 45, 20 years of story. And in Genesis 45, starting in verse 26. Joseph, being a man of power and influence, creates an entire caravan

to be sent to bring his father back to Egypt. So he sends them with grain, with food supplies. The Bible tells us a story, right? Donkeys laying down with grain and food and provision for their father. And Joseph says to them, listen, while you're going, don't argue with each other. Joseph was a great, mature Christian man, amen. He said, don't argue with each other. I know you meant this for evil, but God turned it for good. Don't get mad at each other. Don't start blaming each other. Let's put this behind us. And the Bible picks up and it says, so they went from Egypt and came to their father, Jacob in the land of Canaan. And they said, Joseph is alive. Not only is Joseph alive, he's not just a beggar in the streets in Egypt. He is the ruler over the land of Egypt. The Bible says Jacob was stunned. He's trying to understand this information. He's probably experiencing information overload. How do I process this? What does this mean? What are you telling me? And then the Bible says something that is profound to me. He believed them not. Now let's get this straight. When they lied to him, what did he do?

He believed. When they told him the truth, what did he do? Didn't believe them. Listen, I passed it for 28 years, my wife and I. I can tell you this is the tension Christians live in. There are lies we believe and truth we reject. And part of your role, part of the role of being a good pastor is trying to get people to unbelieve lies they've been told all their life and start believing the truth that is reality that they should live into. You call that process sanctification. The impetus of that is what happens right here in this space week in and week out. Don't believe the lie that you don't need to come to church. That's a lie. Behold how good and how pleasant it is when brothers dwell together. Say together. Amen. Now sometimes you have to watch online. Sometimes those things happen, but the normal posture should be we should gather what? Come on, say the word. Amen. See, that's the process. We have to help people unlearn lies and learn how to embrace the truth.

The Bible says that when they told him the truth that Joseph was a liar, he didn't believe them. Then verse 27, watch this. But when they told him, Jacob, all that Joseph had said to them, Joseph began to rehearse his life and the stories and his adventures and how God took him from being a slave to being prime minister in Egypt. You know, there are some things only God can do for you. Listen, did you hear me? There are some things only God can do for you. My father in the ministry used to say, God just set me up. This ain't part of my message, ain't part of my testimony. Can you just think about a time where God set you up and just give him praise right now? Can you think about something that God did for you that you could not figure your way out, you couldn't pay your way out, you couldn't see your way out, your education didn't get you out? It was God and God alone who worked it out for you. Come on, give Him some praise right now. When they told Jacob all that Joseph had told them, verse 27, Genesis 45, verse 27. And when, watch this, he saw the wagons that Joseph has sent to transport him, the spirit of their father was revived. Now, let's take this and pick it apart a little bit. The words that he spoke when he was bound with his grief was, I will die mourning my son. The posture he takes is he refused comfort. Literally, his children, and you know, especially fathers and their daughters,

his daughters came around trying to comfort him and he pushes them away, no, just leave me alone, I don't want your comfort, I don't want to feel better, I don't want it to be better, I'm going to grieve. And he lives in Canaan with a future that says, looking back, my son is dead. Same man, same physical place he had been standing the last 20 years, same sons, same daughters, but it's a different message. His words pivot from, I will die mourning Joseph. Hear what he says, I will go see him before I die. Oh, hallelujah. The Bible talks about how his posture changed from refusing comfort to now being revived in his spirit. The Bible says that in Canaan, he was mourning a dead son, but in Goshen, he's ready to go see his son who is blessed and alive and doing well. And I want you to hear the words of our father this morning. He said, it is enough. In that moment, he confronts all of these years of pain and grief and hopelessness that were locked away and contained in his own heart. It's enough. Sometimes in life, we just got to get to a place where we say it's enough. Enough of my own sin, enough with my bad attitude, enough with my negative outlook, enough with my negative mindset, enough with my defeated outlook. I'm going to rise up and be the man, the woman that God has called me to be. I'm going to reject the lies that I've been believing in my life, and I'm going to embrace the truth that God has set before me in his word. It is enough. Why don't you lift your hands this morning and say, it is enough. This type of revival we're talking about is not hype. It's not performance. This is a revival that resets Jacob's life.

There are people carrying an inner vow. We made a permanent decision based on false information, and we consigned ourselves to a particular way of life. And revival, in one regard, in the corporate and the communal sense, is the sovereignty of God moving in a place. But this type of revival is a faint heart deciding, Lord, I'm tired. I see the lie I've been believing, and I want your truth to be at work in my life. How many of you need to be revived this morning? Joseph was alive the whole time, but Jacob was in a place of mourning. How many of you need to be revived this morning? Amen. Amen. I tell our students, we're going to clap. Let's clap. Come on. Come on. Our father, Jacob, gets in that wagon. He came out in glory, and David lied, and he cried, that his son sent for him. and out he came. He goes down to Egypt, And I'm not pregnant, I'm not with a groom, and you see a different man land in Egypt. That's why the title of the message was From Grief to Goshen. When he gets down to Goshen, it's a different man. He sees his son, he embraces him. He begins to say, I want to meet your wife. I want to meet my grandchildren. And when he meets his grandsons,

he does this prophetic act of blessing the younger one with the greater blessing and blessing the older one with the lesser blessing. And Joseph tries to correct him. And he said, no, this is God's doing. Did you catch it? Because for 20 years, God and Jacob haven't had any relationship. Not because God has withdrawn himself from Jacob, but because Jacob has consigned himself to his grief. So you read of nothing prayerful, nothing prophetic, nothing moving in the spirit for our father Jacob. Why? Because of an inner vow based on a lie, he consigned himself to a life of grief. But now with his spirit revived, he's operating in his gifts. He's got his prophetic ear open. He's sensitive to the voice of God. And so this morning, I want to say, there are some of you bound, you've constrained yourself to a life of grief. You made a vow based on a lie. And there are things the Holy Spirit wants to do in and through you that have not died, that are waiting for you to catch up. And just like our father Jacob, you need to get a vision of something that you've never seen before. I don't know what it was about the wagons

that when Jacob looked out the window, when he looked out his tent and he saw the wagons, that was proof to him that things were changed, that what the sons were telling him was now the truth and not a lie. And maybe, just maybe, as we look into the word of the Lord this morning, that that would be enough to break the chain and to open the spirit of your eye and to see God has a promising future for you. If that's you, would you stand? All over this room, hallelujah. I'm ending five minutes early because I want to pray for you. If you're near someone who is standing, would you just stretch your hands toward them? Maybe you could touch them. And we're just going to pray. And we're going to ask God this morning to revive your spirit. That as you've heard the word of the Lord this morning and you say your cry of your heart is, it's a thought, it's a vision, your cry of your heart is, it's enough. I'm tired of walking around empty. I'm tired of walking around hopeless. I'm tired of walking around. I'm doing the things that are needed and necessary, but I'm stuck. And this morning, the Lord wants to give you

a promise of a future. The Lord wants to show up in your life and give you hope. The Lord wants to move and manifest himself in you. The Lord is not finished with you. The Lord has a great plan and a great destiny for you. The Lord has people that you are the wind to him. The Lord has a plan for you to fulfill. The Lord, not the lie, the Lord. Father, in the name of Jesus, I pray for these precious souls that are standing here. There was a message when Pastor Nate invited me that I felt like you wanted me to share and as I was preparing that message, you redirected me to this text and to share this message this morning. And Father, I believe that there's something supernatural that can happen in the heavens, that as your people look up to you by faith, that as they say, I've been walking in this lie, I've been walking in a vow, and I'm going to turn away from it this morning. So Lord, let hope return. Asha, yabo, sandala, baha. Let hope return right now. Let vision return. Holy Spirit show up and speak. Spirit of the living God, move and manifest yourself in the lives of your people. Those that have been walking around with grief, consigning themselves to a joyless life,

a hopeless life, a helpless life, but right now we declare it's enough. It's enough, it's enough. Come on, saints, lift your hands and just begin to talk to God and tell Him, it's enough, it's enough, it's enough. My spirit is going to get revived this morning because God has a work for me to do. Right now, as the musicians come, Pastor Nathan. would you just talk to the Lord right where you are we're gonna sing a melody of Zion we're gonna sing a song that's going to take us into the throne room of heaven but right now God is waiting to meet you he's waiting to manifest himself he's waiting to show up in this moment to revive your spirit your weeping season is over the Bible says weeping may endure for a night your night is over your joy is coming come on come on your laughter is coming back your peace is returning the plan of God is is going to be fulfilled in and through you come on just begin to worship him right where you are