Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You Living For Yourself? | Torah | Genesis 37:1-11

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

What are you living for? Yourself? Your family? Your career? God? What's your purpose? Do you have a clear mission for your life? In today's episode, Patrick shares how God reacts to Joseph living for himself in Genesis 37:1-11. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Genesis 37:1-11 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we're going through the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Victor Frankel was a therapist in Vienna in the years leading up to World War II, and he became famous by rejecting the theories of a different German named Sigmund Freud. Now, Freud claimed that the secret to battling depression was to unpack your past. And so he took his clients on a journey through the complexes that they developed. as children in the hope that this would set them free as adults.

But Frankel believed that the secret to battle depression, it wasn't found in your past. The secret was found in the future. Sure, going through your past stuff, that mattered, but having a mission and a purpose in life, that mattered far, far more. And so this explains why he asked his patience a really jarring question. He would ask them, why don't you commit suicide? Now, please keep in mind, I am not giving recommendations. on how to encourage friends who have suicidal thoughts. I actually would not recommend that

question. You should help get them connected to a professional or if they're saying that they're going to do something you should call the police. But remember, Frankl was a professional. And he used this question to force his patience to articulate their reason for living and not dying. Why don't you commit suicide? Frankl was of Jewish descent. So when the Nazis began to ship Jews off to concentration camps, he knew that his time was limited. A month before his own imprisonment, he was engaged to a woman that he loved. The Nazis put him, his fiance, and his entire immediate family into different camps. And while he was there, he realized that if his theory was right, it would be able to work

even there, even in a concentration camp. And so he made it his personal mission to help other prisoners to survive by helping them fix their eyes on the future. He encouraged everyone around him to articulate what they were living for. so that they had something to fight for in the midst of the terrible labor, the hunger, the torture. And while he couldn't protect them from Nazi violence, he could protect them from the despair that took so many lives. Frankl ended up surviving. But tragically, his fiancé, mother, father, and siblings, none of them did. And so again, he made it his mission to help others with

what he learned in the concentration camps and to get him through his own depression, through his own deep sadness and grief over losing everything that he loved, he gave himself that mission. As long as I can help people, then my life is still worth living. What about you? I know it's a jarring question, but how would you answer it? Why don't you commit suicide? The problem for most of us is that we don't have a clear answer to the question because we don't have a clear mission for our lives.

We're all living in a little ego drama where the mission of my life, is myself. My success, my comfort, my happiness, my personal interest, my reputation, my wealth, my stuff, my kids, my, my, my, my, my, my, my. But Frankl's question shows the absurdity of living for yourself. It shows the absurdity of living in an ego drama. Why don't you commit suicide? Well, it's because I live for myself, for me, for my own sake. That answer sounds shallow because it is shallow. When we meet Joseph in the book of Genesis, he's a spoiled young man and he's living a shallow life. He's living in an ego drama where everything is about him because he's in a family where his father and mother act like this is actually the case. We'll pick up the story in Genesis 37, verse 2.

Joseph, a young man of 17 was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhaw and the sons of Zilpon. his father's wives, and he brought their father a bad report about his brothers. Now, Israel, that's another name for Jacob, who was Joseph's dad and the dad of all these other sons. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons. So we're seeing the same pattern of favoritism that has plagued the lives of Abraham's descendants. It's happening again in the life of Jacob, but let's keep going. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons because he had been born to him in his old age. And so he made an ornate robe for him. When his brother saw that his father loved him, more than any of them, they hated Joseph and cannot speak a kind word to him. Joseph had a dream.

And when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said to them, listen to this dream I had. We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose up and stood up right. Well, your sheaves, they all gathered around mine and bowed down to it. His brother said to him, do you intend to rain over us? Will you actually rule us? And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said. Then he had another dream and he told that one to his brothers. Listen, he said, I had another dream.

And this time the sun and the moon and 11 stars were all bowing down to me. When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebute him and said, What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you? His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind. Joseph's dreams, his dreams for his future, his mission for his life, well, in some sense, they actually do end up coming true.

But this doesn't make the dreams a good thing. It certainly doesn't make them something that are worth sharing. His dreams are kind of meant to show us something different, that Joseph is living for himself, that Joseph is living in an ego drama where everyone, everything is bowing down to him. Why doesn't Joseph commit suicide? Well, at this stage in his life, I think he'd say, because I love myself, because I live for myself. It sounds shallow. It is shallow. Now, here's the deal. Victor Frankel was both right and wrong. He was right that the path to happiness does involve living for a mission and a purpose for a future, but he's wrong

that any purpose out there will do. The best life is, live for something bigger than me. The best life is lived for something bigger than the ego drama. The best life is lived for something that is transcendent. God wants to show Joseph this firsthand by stripping him of his ego. He will tear Joseph and all of his arrogance down to the studs by allowing Joseph to be sold and enslaved and misunderstood and thrown into prison. Why does God do this? It's because God doesn't want Joseph to live in an ego drama. He loves Joseph, and so he wants Joseph to live in a theodrama, a God-centered drama. He wants Joseph to have a God-centered mission.

Why shouldn't Joseph commit suicide? Well, it's because God loves him and God has a calling, a transcendent purpose for Joseph's life. God loves you, which means he doesn't want you to waste away living in your own little ego drama. He will stop at nothing to shake you out of it. How's God trying to shake you out of your ego? Right now. How are you living for yourself? How are you making your life small by making it all about you?

Confess those things to Jesus. Share them with the friends that they would die in the light. Ask God to strip those things away from you so that he can take you out of the ego drama and put you into the theodrama so that he can give you a transcendent purpose and calling that truly, truly makes your life worth living. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.