Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Do You Seek Comfort Over Meaning? | Torah | Genesis 47:1-12

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

We should expect discomfort in our life. But how do you respond when you don't get your way? Do you seek control or do you seek meaning? In today's episode, Patrick shares how Jacob gave up on his own comfort in order to live a life full of meaning in Genesis 47:1-12. 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. 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 47:1-12 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. What will people say at your funeral? It's funny because if you're anything like me, you don't think about that question very often. And yet, that probably explains why in my day-to-day life, I spend most of my time fixated on my own personal comfort. I might not be able to control the big things in my life, but at the very least, I can,

can minimize my own discomfort. Now, I know I'm not alone. Our entire culture has an aversion to suffering. When it happens, we feel confused by it. We get angry at God, angry at the government, angry at the health care system, angry at the boss, angry at the roommate, angry at our spouse. It's almost as though discomfort and suffering are foreign agents that we don't expect in the country of our life. They just don't belong here. And because we don't expect them, we get angry at them. But of course, the reality is we should expect discomfort. We should expect suffering. When things make you uncomfortable or cause you suffering, how do you respond?

How much of your wife is about controlling your schedule or the people around you or your job or your finances or your classmates or whatever it is so that you can personally feel comfortable? It's kind of depressing to think about your funeral if that's how you live your life, isn't it? above your gravestone it's going to be written here lies patrick in my case who lived a comfortable life if you had to choose between living a comfortable life which again is what we spend most of our time worrying about because we don't want to suffer we don't want discomfort but if you had to choose between living a comfortable life and living a meaningful life which one would you choose well of course mentally everybody's going to say a meaningful life or at least a lot of people are going to say that but before you answer the question

Look at your schedule. Look at your relationships. Look at your life. Which kind of life are you actively choosing right now? Are you choosing comfort or meaning? When God called Abraham from the land of Shinar, he called him and his descendants to live a meaningful life. But he never promised them a comfortable life.

God said to Abraham, through you, through your children, your grandchildren, all the way down the line to Jesus, I'm going to bless, through your family, I'm going to bless all the families of the earth. Through Abraham's family, God's saying, I'm going to reboot Eden. I'm going to set the world right. I'm going to lead you, to lead a life of meaning. But the process of using Abraham and his family for a purpose, that process, it turned out to be very painful for Abraham and his descendants.

Each generation battles with different and similar battles. battles, infertility, powerlessness before violent monarchs, starvation. Each generation battles with their own internal problems, selfishness, favoritism, greed, the ongoing battle to trust God with their whole life. You see, God wanted Abraham to live a meaningful life, but that meant not living a comfortable life. And it didn't just mean it for him. It meant it for all of his descendants, which takes us to Jacob. He was Abraham's grandson. And Joseph, he was Abraham's grandson. And Joseph, who's Abraham's great-grandson, brings Jacob his dad before Pharaoh. And then something interesting happens. Let's read together in Genesis 47-7. Then Joseph brought in Jacob, his father, and stood him before Pharaoh.

Now, let's pause here. In the Hebrew, this is interesting. It's not saying that Joseph was just presenting Jacob to Pharaoh. It's literally saying that he had to physically stand Jacob up because he was incapable of standing on his own. That's what that word means to stand him up before Pharaoh. And so we've got this weak, old, frail man. Okay, so let's pick it back up. And so he stood him, Jacob, before Pharaoh, and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. And Pharaoh said to Jacob, how many are the days of the years of your life? And Jacob said to Pharaoh, the days of the years of my sojourning are 130 years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life. And they have not attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers and the days of their sojourning. And Jacob blessed Pharaoh and went out from the presence of Pharaoh.

So let's just be honest here for a second. On Jacob's tombstone, no one is going to write, this is where Jacob lies. He lived a comfortable life. That's obviously not the case. He didn't live a comfortable life. He lived through starvation. He spent a quarter of his life on the run from a murderous brother. He lost a child.

He had broken relationships with his family. But in the middle of his life, he had an encounter. counter with God that radically changed him. It made him rely on God for everything. And so the question here is, at the end of Jacob's life, did Jacob end up living a comfortable life, or did he end up living a meaningful life? Did he end up living a comfortable life? Or did he become an agent of God's blessing for all people? And the narrator answers our question in this passage. Maybe you missed it. In verse 7 and in verse 10, it says that Jacob blessed Pharaoh. The narrator's telling us not once but twice that Jacob is a blessing.

He is blessing Pharaoh. Two different times this happens. And again, what the narrator wants us to see is that somehow through Jacob, God's plan to bless the nations, to reboot Eden, to make everything right in the world, it's finally coming to pass. wherever Jacob goes, God's flourishing, his goodness, his mercy, his justice goes. Wherever Jacob goes, he becomes a vessel for blessing. You see, Jacob didn't live a comfortable life, but he led a meaningful life.

What about you? Are you living a comfortable life right now? Or are you living a meaningful life? Are you comfortable right now? Or are you being used as an agent of God's blessing and the lives? of people around you. Where you go, do people just see a comfortable person who, you know, doesn't have any problems, everything is going relatively well? They minimize the discomforts in their life. Not a lot of suffering. Is that what they see? Or do they see someone who exudes God's mercy

and kindness, forgiveness, grace and peace? Do you bless the lives of people around you? Or would they say, no, they're really about their own comfort? Do you bless the lives of your friends, of your classmates, your co-workers, your spouse, your children, would they say that you're a blessing? You see, you can't choose both comfort and meaning because seeking comfort only blesses you. The only meaning of your life will be yourself. Seeking meaning will bless others at the cost of you. You will die to your comfort, but others will gain. This makes me think of a guy named Alan Tibbles. In his early 20s, Alan was a fun, good-looking, athletic guy. And by his late 20s, he was married. He had a wife, two kids, and he was becoming the

kind of person who everybody would have said had a promising future in front of him. One day he's with his friends and they're playing basketball. And as he's driving to the basket, he trips. Alan hits his head against a wall. And when he wakes up, he can't feel his arms or his legs. He was paralyzed by the injury. And at first, when he discovered this, he battled depression. He realized that his paralysis meant that he was going to be a nobody. It meant that he was never going to be able to hold his child or teach his son how to shoot a basketball. His life dreams were being crushed. And it wasn't just that. He wasn't going to live a comfortable life. For the rest of his life, nothing was going to be easy. Nothing was going to be comfortable. Relationships wouldn't be

comfortable. Going to restaurants wouldn't be comfortable. Living in a house wouldn't be comfortable. He would spend the rest of his life and discomfort. But Alan wasn't crushed by his depression. He decided that even if his days were few and evil, just like Jacob, they'd be days of blessing. He wasn't going to live a comfortable life, but he'd live a meaningful life. And so he prayed, God, I don't know how you could use a wheelchair-bound, paralyzed guy like me. But I don't need to be a big deal. I don't need to be comfortable. I just want to be used by you.

I just want to have a meaningful life for your purposes. I just want to be an agent of your blessing. after he ended up coming back home from the hospital his life was uncomfortable but it wasn't uncomfortable enough for him so somehow he convinced his wife to move into this rat-infested house in sandtown baltimore he even convinced his friends to come and move right alongside him in sandtown was one of the most destitute drug addled dangerous neighborhoods in baltimore most people who saw him thought that he was a cop or a drug dealer when someone mugged him one day he invited them to come to church with him. Looking around the neighborhood, though, Tibbles and his friends, they saw broken windows,

crumbling foundations and slumlords that were bleeding their tenants for rent. And he realized that these houses, they told people a story about their worth. You're not worth much. Just like these houses, their windows, their disrepair, they aren't worth much. And so he set out to tell them all a new story. You are made in God's image. You are worth far more than you can ever imagine. He ended up contacting Habitat for Humanity. And over the next 30 years of his life, he oversaw the overhaul of over 250 houses from his wheelchair. From his wheelchair, he helped transform nearly 15 square blocks of Sandown. People who were once paying $600 a month for rent were now paying $300 a month on a mortgage. He hired ex-cons and drug addicts who'd been cast aside and helped them reintegrate

back into society. He gave Sandtown a taste of God's redemptive story. And that's how many of these people came to know Christ. Alan Tibbles didn't live a comfortable life. He wasn't ever going to live a comfortable life after he was paralyzed, but he chose not to live a comfortable life. He chose to give of himself. He chose to invest in his neighborhood. He chose to invest in the lives of people around him. People used to say that Alan Tibble saves Sandtown. He'd always correct them. He said, no, I didn't do anything to save Sandtown. I don't save anyone. God saves people. All Alan Tipples did was choose to not live a comfortable life and to instead live a life of meaning,

live a life of purpose, live a life which is defined by God, God making him into an agent of his blessing. Are you going to live a life of comfort or a life of meaning? Give your life to God. Die to your comfort. Ask him to make you into an agent of his blessing in the lives of everything. everybody around you. 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.