Turn with me and your Bibles to Genesis chapter 37. We return to the book of Genesis after our break in the book of Ephesians, and we come to this final section in Genesis. It's a well-known story, often called the story of Joseph. I think I even referred to it myself that way last week. But that's kind of a misnomer. Because Joseph is certainly the prominent character, but it's not just about Joseph. It's about Jacob. It's about Judah, Reuben, Simeon, and the other brothers. It's about the children of Jacob, truly. And it's a founding story. You know, every culture has them, nations, churches even, will have stories of your founding, stories of where you came from. And that story that you tell about how you started as a body or an organization or a nation or whatever, a family, how you as a married couple, how you came together, where you met each other and those kinds of things, those stories that you tell, those are really important to your self-conception, to your identity. You know, in America, We tell our children the stories of the pilgrims and the Mayflower and persecution and coming over, the founding fathers and the war for independence and all those things. You know, recently there's been an attempt to tell a different story of the founding of America, the so-called 1619 Project, which says the true founding of America was when slaves were first brought over And that's an intentional purpose to change the identity of America from one thing to something else. You change the story of the founding of something, of the origin of something, and you change the identity of that thing. This story is a story of the, like I said, the 12 sons of Jacob, 12 sons of Israel, who become the 12 tribes of Israel. A foundational story then of who and what Israel is. And because it's foundational to the identity of Israel, it's also foundational to our identity as the people of God, because we are the spiritual descendants of Israel. Let's read the first 11 verses of Genesis chapter 37. And may the Lord bless the reading of his word. Now Jacob dwelled in the land where his father was a stranger in the land of Canaan. This is the history of Jacob. Joseph, being 17 years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. And the lad was with the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father's wives. and Joseph brought a bad report of them to his father. Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age. Also he made him a tunic of many colors. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him. Now Joseph had a dream, and he told it to his brothers, and they hated him even more. So he said to them, please hear this dream which I have dreamed. There we were binding sheaves in the field. Then behold, my sheaf arose and also stood upright. And indeed your sheaves stood all around and bowed down to my sheaf. And his brothers said to him, shall you indeed reign over us or shall you indeed have dominion over us? So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words. Then he dreamed still another dream and told it to his brothers, and said, Look, I have dreamed another dream. And this time the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars bowed down to me. So he told it to his father and his brothers. And his father rebuked him and said to him, What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall your mother and I and your brothers indeed come to bow down to the earth before you? And his brothers envied him, but his father kept the matter in mind. So we're gonna talk about families for a while or a little bit. The next few weeks, families are important. We should strive for healthy families, right? Strive to raise our children in a loving and well-ordered and godly environment. Families do a lot to shape us, how we grow up. We all learn a great many things about life before we're even aware that we're learning them on a deep level from our family environment, where we come from. So yeah, we should strive for healthy families. But you know, it's some comfort to see that the Bible is just full of unhealthy families, really unhealthy families. And this is a prime example. Jacob's family must be one of the unhealthiest of them all. You think about what this would do to you as a young boy growing up in a family where you knew your father did not love your mother, did not even want to marry your mother, married her purely by accident and by the deception of his deception. And then your father married your mother's sister who was the woman he really wanted to marry and loved her much better than your own mother. And then by extension, your father didn't much care for you either and preferred the children of the wife that he actually loved for no other reason than the fact that he liked her better than your mother. And now you knew that the household was going to, the inheritance was going to be received and the household was going to be governed by your younger brother for no other reason than the fact that Your father liked his mother better than he liked your mother. Now you think growing up in that environment and what that would do to you. No wonder Jacob's kids were a mess. And so here we are introduced to Joseph. Joseph, the son of Rachel. Rachel, the beloved wife, says that Israel, Jacob of course, loved Joseph more than all his children because he was the son of his old age. Specifically, it's what it said, the son that he had when all of his other children were older. Also the daughter of the son of Rachel, the beloved wife. And Jacob wasn't shy about showing that favoritism. making it clear that Joseph was the favorite. We read that he was watching the flocks, feeding the flocks with his brothers, specifically mentions the sons of Zilpah and Bilhah. These were the two servant women, of course, the concubines, the servants of Rachel and Leah. that Rachel and Leah both gave to Jacob as wives when Rachel herself couldn't have children and Leah wanted to keep up and that whole mess that we read about some time ago. So it was with the sons of the concubines specifically and that's mentioned for a reason because as tough as it would have been to be one of the children of Leah, think about being the children of one of these concubines, And, you know, when you read the histories of the world, the histories of polygamous societies, kings that had harems and things like that, you see this sort of competition and backbiting and envy and all, it just, political just, they were always nightmares. This is nothing unusual at all. So he's with them, and it says that he brings to Jacob a bad, an evil report. of them to his father. Now, what is this? You know, parents, we use the term tattling. You tell your children, don't tattle. Now, if there's something that we really need to know, like somebody's doing something really dangerous or something like that, we want our kids to come and tell us those things, if they're being mistreated or abused. Tattling means when one of your kids tells on one of your other kids for no other purpose than to make that other kid look bad. They just want to make that kid look bad to the parents. And we all know kids do that, use that term tattling. Is that what was going on here? Was this something Jacob really needed to know? Well, we know that the word report here, that Hebrew word, everywhere that it's used has a negative connotation. Often it's used, often it's translated slander specifically. Psalm 31, 13, for example, for I hear the slander of many. Fear is on every side. While they take counsel together against me, they scheme to take away my life. That word slander there is the same Hebrew word that's used here for report. It doesn't necessarily mean something that's just flat out untrue. But it's a report that is given for a malicious purpose. Either a lie or a twisting of the truth or backbiting done to tear their reputation down. It always has an evil intent behind it. Now, Joseph is one of the heroes of the Bible. We so often see him held up as an example of faith, and he is. He is in a lot of ways. But here, our very first introduction to Joseph is not a good one. Now, of course, Joseph didn't really choose his life either. He didn't choose to be the son of Rachel, the loved wife. He didn't choose his father's favoritism. He didn't choose to come into a world, into a household full of people who hated him through no fault of his own, but simply because he was the son of the favored wife. You know, Jacob, in showing favoritism toward Joseph, not only did a great injury to his other sons, and he did, he also did a great injury to Joseph. Alienated him from the rest of his family, greatly tempted him, put a stumbling block in his way, tempted him with pride to think of himself as better than his siblings. And we see in our passage here, he falls into that. 17 years old, he's a teenager. And he uses his father's favoritism for his own benefit. Knowing that he would be believed, he tells this report. And again, we don't know the details. We don't need to know whether he just made it up a whole cloth. Probably knowing his brothers, he didn't need to make it up. Twisted it, presented it in such a way so as to drive a greater wedge between his brothers and their father. A terrible thing to do. to cement himself as the favorite. And of course, none of it goes as he planned. You know, the Bible doesn't just hit you over the head with things most of the time in these stories. It doesn't just say, here's the lesson to be learned. You know, here's what this all means. Here's how to interpret all of this. Here's the, exegetical lessons to draw from this particular narrative. And that's because the narratives of the Bible are skillfully crafted, very skillfully crafted. And Joseph's story, this story, these last 12 chapters of Genesis, are some of the most skillfully crafted narrative in all of human literature, even viewed from a purely human perspective. It is a brilliantly told story. And a well-told story, the narrator puts the clues, puts the hints, the information into the story that he puts there so that he can tell the story that he wants to tell. And that means that we as the readers need to pay careful attention. Which details the narrator selects to tell the story that he wants to tell? We see, just as we saw before with Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Esau, we see the tremendous damage that favoritism does. You know, in the New Testament, James condemns the sin of partiality when he's talking about, you know, one man comes in and he's dressed well and you treat him with honor and put him in an honored space. Another man, he's dressed in rags and he's dirty and he's smelly. And so you're like, ah, you kind of sit back there. We don't really want you here. The sin of partiality, he says. And partiality takes a lot of different forms. This is the way Jacob reacts to his children, is he's guilty of the sin of partiality, among other things. Treating Joseph better, so much better, so much obviously, visibly better than the rest of his children, purely only because Joseph is the son of Rachel and the others are the sons of wives that he doesn't like very much. Partiality, we see the tremendous damage that it does. It's no sin to treat your children differently. It's wise, it's necessary to treat your children differently. You don't treat a 17-year-old boy the same way you treat a six-year-old boy. Because you let one child stay up later than the other child because the one child is much older than the other child, that's not partiality, that's justice, that's right, of course, wisdom. But when you treat one child differently than the other, just because you like the one and you don't like the other, there's some superficial difference. Well, Paul tells fathers not to provoke their children to wrath. And that is very much what Jacob's done here, is provoked them to wrath. And it's one of the byproducts of polygamy. You saw it, as I said before, you see it all the time in the histories of the world that talk about polygamy and brothers killing their brothers. Anytime you hear a story of a brother killing another brother or a brother killing a father or something like that, you look into that story a little bit, you'll probably find polygamy there or something related to it. And we see those sorts of similar difficulties in our own society and blended family situations that can often be very tricky. Parents need to be very careful in the way they deal with those kinds of situations. So we see a lot of stories in the Bible, like I said. A lot of stories, especially in the Old Testament, about the damage that can be done by dysfunctional families of origin. Another really obvious example would be David and his children. The story tells us something else as well, though. as we anticipate the well-known ending of the story of Jacob's sons. Now, we don't need to be trapped by that kind of dysfunctional family, that the family of origin does not need to determine your history, does not need to determine who you are. It has profound impacts on us, and those need to be acknowledged and recognized and dealt with. But that doesn't need to be our identity. Our story is one to anticipate the future a little bit. Not that I'm spoiling anything, you all know the story and how it turns out. But it's a story of overcoming. It's a story of sin and it's sometimes very long-term consequences. This is a story of the long-term consequences of sin, among other things. But it's also a story of redemption. It's a story of pride and envy, really on both sides. Pride and envy are very closely related. Envy comes from pride. Pride is that focus on self, right? Me, me, me. what I deserve, how good I am, how much better than others. You know, children don't naturally start with a whole lot of empathy, as anyone who has raised children knows full well. You have to teach children to think about other people. They don't do it naturally. Naturally, what do we do? We come into the world. You come into the world extremely vulnerable, and you come into the world just in your own head, and you're concerned about your own comfort, and your own safety, and your own protection. That's natural. It's the way we start. You have to be taught to think about the way that your actions impact other people. We learn to guard against threats. And you know, those threats that we face, as you're a child coming into the world, perhaps you remember the threats that we face are a lot more than just the threats to our physical well-being, but also the threats to our self-conception, threats to our identity. The threat of hearing the message, I'm worthless. I'm no good. Nobody loves me. I'll never amount to anything. We learn to protect ourselves from those threats. There's lots of different strategies that people learn, that people gain to, that we all learn to protect ourselves from that threat. Those threats of thinking ourselves worthless and unloved and no good and shameful. And the natural result is always pride. Focus on ourselves, protect ourselves, take care of ourselves. And the flowing from that is then envy. As I look at others and see what they have and see some real or perceived advantage that someone else has, someone else is prettier than me, someone else is better than me at sports, someone else has more money, someone else, you know, mom loves them better than me, dad loves, spends more time, whatever it is, And I said, it can be real or it can be just totally imagined. The envy that then flows from that. And envy, we have to understand this, all of us are subject to envy, to one degree or another. Everyone is. If you don't think you are, that means envy is driving you invisibly, because it is natural. And envy is one of the most destructive forces in human history. One way of thinking about all of human civilization is how to organize societies in such a way as to guard against the destructive forces of envy. And when you see yourself fundamentally as a victim, when that becomes your identity, a victim of other people's evil, that can be the most dangerous kind of person there is. Someone who sees themselves purely as a victim. Now, I'm not saying you can't recognize the fact that other people have victimized you or other people have done wrong to you, because that is true. We are all victims of sin at times. Other people hurt us, other people commit sins against us, and that hurts. And we deal with that. But when that becomes your identity, that becomes who you are in your mind, is fundamentally a victim. Fundamentally, that is the self-conception of yourself as somebody who has been done wrong by others. And that becomes your overriding victim. There is a vitally important statement that Paul makes in Romans chapter 8, when he says, when he's talking about all these terrible things that can happen, he says, nonetheless, through all of these things, we are more than conquerors. But no, when I see myself as a victim, you see, you can justify anything. You can justify any evil that you do to other people when that's fundamentally how you see yourself. And that's what we see in our story. That's what we see in both of them. No doubt Joseph, growing up with a bunch of older brothers that hated him, could have a whole long train of abuses that he could cite. as to why his brothers were terrible and he was the good one. I must confess the story of Joseph as I've come back to it this time and as I've looked to it in preparation for preaching has been Challenging to me, I am the youngest of six boys and I always really identified with Joseph. I always really liked the story of Joseph. Joseph was the good one, right? Youngest of all the brothers and he was the good one, right? And to see this, to see, oh wait, Joseph is falling into his own evil as a result of his victim mentality, as a result of his perception of his identity. I'd say it was challenging to me. And the brothers likewise, they'd see themselves as victims. And they were victims in lots of ways. Except none of them chose to be the children of the disfavored wives. None of them did anything to deserve growing up in that, to growing up in an environment where you knew your father didn't love your mother or you. And as a result, they justify great evil. So at its heart, it's pride. All about me taking care of myself, focus on myself, and the close companion to pride, which is envy. were told specifically that the brothers envied Joseph because he had the love of his father. They said when they saw the father loved Joseph, and I mean, you know, as soon as you hear that, Jacob loved Joseph more than the brothers, boy, you could write the first part of this story yourself, couldn't you? You know how that's gonna go. That's gonna be terrible. And now he has these dreams. Now it's interesting. that in the initial telling of the story, the narrator does not tell us that these dreams are from God. He never tells us God gave Joseph a prophecy or a dream. He just said, Joseph dreamed a dream. Now later on as the story goes, we're given every reason to believe these were truly prophecies, but initially we're just told Joseph dreamed a dream. and went and told his brothers. Now, listen to the dream that I have heard my brothers. You're just like, oh no. Why? Did he need to tell them? He needed to tell those dreams to his brothers? He doesn't seem reluctant. Doesn't seem like the story is dragged out of him or anything. He seems pretty anxious to tell his brothers about his dream, doesn't he? We might interpret that innocently, that Joseph is just naive and doesn't know how his brothers are gonna react, except the narrator has already given us some pretty strong hints in a different direction. Now again, like I said, understanding any well-written story means paying attention, paying careful attention to the clues the writer puts in the story. And a good narrator, like I said before, doesn't just hit you over the head with what he wants you, what he wants the message to be, what he wants you to hear from this. He wants you, because when you work through a story, when you think carefully about it, you know, if it's just told to you, hey, you know, parents shouldn't show favoritism. Well, yeah, everybody knows that, sure. But when you have to struggle through a story to discern that and draw it out of the narrative, then that lesson becomes so much more powerful. That's why stories are told this way. So what do we see? Older sons, hard done by their father, the circumstances of their birth, taking it out on a younger brother who is at the least prideful and foolish. That's the setup we have here, the setup for our story. The pride and the envy that flows from it are hugely destructive forces. How many of the stories of the Bible revolve around this? Cain and Abel. Cain envied Abel. Esau envied Jacob, although Jacob envied Esau too, for different things. Saul envied David. The Pharisees envied Jesus. The Jews in the synagogues envied the success of Paul. Over and over, envy leading to slander and murder. These stories can always be good opportunities for gut checks on our own part. It's always easy. You know, you can read through this, and you can read through these stories, and it's the easiest thing to do to think of people in your life. Oh, that's like that person who did that terrible thing to me that one time. You know, that's easy to do. What's hard to do is to be ready to see ourselves in these stories. Now the stories of the Bible are not, a story like this is not primarily just about teaching us good moral behavior. The stories of the Bible are ultimately always about God. God is always the hero of the story. And that is always, the big lesson is always the faithfulness of God in preserving his people, doing his will. but we always see lots of human behavior at the same time. And it's one of the wonderful things about the narratives of scripture is that the narratives told by the Holy Spirit, we see a lot of the self-justifying motives that people, the stories that people tell themselves about why they do what they do. We see those stripped away and we see behind the curtain, we see what's really driving people. pride, the focus on self, self-aggrandizement, the damage that all these things do, envy, the keen sense of injustice, feeling the victim, the great evil that can lead to. And we see from our story, again anticipating later events, that it's trust in God which breaks the cycle. Joseph learns to trust God through his many trials, his many ups and downs, He learns to trust God, that God cares for him and does good for him through it all, so that eventually when he finds himself in the position finally to avenge himself on his brothers, he doesn't do so. And he doesn't do so because he's come to recognize God's goodness through everything that happened. Not that he denies the brothers did evil, he said they did evil, but God did good. God was in charge all the time and doing good. And so therefore, Joseph could put away pride and envy and all those things. It is interesting to me that at the beginning of the story, Joseph is gleefully telling his brothers about his dreams, about how they're all gonna bow down to him. And then at the time, at the end of the story, when they actually are bowing down to him, terrified that he's gonna kill them all, what does he say? He says, I'm not God to you. you know, and he lifts them up. It's a beautiful, beautiful story. And this is what we see in this situation. Consider the story. It was God that set all this up. It was God that put every one of these people in their position. God that created the circumstances of their life that guaranteed these brothers would hate each other. God that exposed them to the pain of their family situation. God that gave them the parents and the siblings they had. God sent these dreams to Joseph knowing full well what that would do to the relationship between Joseph and his brothers. And what's the ultimate result? These brothers, all of them, they have to wrestle with their pride and their sense of injustice and their hurt and their pain They learn to trust God. They learn to do what's right. They learn to own their own sin and not blame it on other people. God forms their character through these events, makes them who He wants them to be. And so it's all worth it in the end. That's why the fifth commandment is so important. So important. Honor your father and your mother. that your days may be long on the land which the Lord your God gives you. The fifth commandment forces us all to deal with our family of origin. Because you can't truly honor your parents by lying about who they are. You don't honor them also, of course, by holding on to bitterness and resentment towards them. And we make both of those errors. On the one hand, people will idolize their parents and refuse to see any. You think that honoring your parents mean pretend that they were better people than they were. Pretend that they never failed. Pretend that they never injured you and hurt you and let you down. Of course they did. Every single child that's come into this earth came into it through parents who were sinful and limited and failed in lots of ways. And dealing with that hurt, dealing with that pain, that is a requirement of the fifth commandment. Because forgiveness comes through acknowledging the wrong, naming it truly, facing it, and choosing not to hold malice and anger about it. It doesn't come through papering it over and pretending it wasn't there. Because pretending that something bad didn't happen, or it wasn't bad, that's not forgiveness, that's just repression. And truths that you repress still drive you, still shape you, still change the way you behave, just in invisible ways, in ways that you're not aware of. To be healed, it must be faced. To acknowledge a sin done against you, but to trust God with it and to know His purposes are good. To be able to say what Joseph says at the end of the story. They meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. That's forgiveness. And to put away, therefore, to be able to put away the anger and the bitterness. That's how sanctification and growth happens. And that's what we see in the long arc of this story. Because God knows what he's doing. And that's another great benefit of biblical narratives is we can see the whole thing in our own story. We're all in the middle of our own stories, right? So we don't see how it ends yet. But we can look at a story like this, and we can say, you know, a lot of it, we can say, boy, my family's messed up in a lot of ways, but it's not Jacob messed up. It's not that bad by God's grace, or maybe it is. But we can look at Jacob's story, and we can see how God, through that arc, through that, and a lot of those things we know happened by divine providence. Of course, we know all of it happened by divine providence, but some of those things are explicitly said to be that. And yet we see through all of those things, God works his purpose. God does good. God moves his plan forward. None of these things that make up this story, none of these elements, all of these, you know, and when you read this story and it's almost like God says, no, I don't think those brothers hate each other quite enough yet. throw a little bit more in the pot, you know? But none of those things that happened are in accidents. All of these elements of Jacob's family have been planned by God to accomplish his purposes in this family. And that doesn't mean the pain isn't real, that doesn't mean you can just gloss over it, it's always no big deal, it's fine, you know? Your feelings of pain and victimhood and hardship and all that are just delusions and you just need to No, it's real. And when you're in the middle of it, knowing that God is sovereign doesn't mean you get all the answers for how you need to react and how you need to think about things. But confidence in God's wisdom and goodness in the midst of these events will ultimately carry us through. Really, we only learn that by experiencing it. You know, you can say God is sovereign, all things in His will. And knowing that ahead of time is very helpful when you go through those things. But nothing teaches like experience. Nothing teaches us to trust God like going through those times, going through the valley, the shadow of death, and coming through on the other side and recognize God was with me. God cared for me. God preserved me. and seeing it in the story of Joseph and Jacob, seeing it in the story of David and Daniel and men like that does so much to teach us, to help us, to train us to see God, to see God in these stories, and therefore to see God in our own story. And that's why he puts us through these things. God could have just whisked us all off to heaven on flowery beds of ease, as the hymn says, But no, He's got a process. He's got trials for us. And through those trials, through that process, He teaches us to trust Him. He teaches us that He is good. And yes, God saves the life of many people through these events, as Joseph will say at the end of the story. But we also see the work that He does in each of these brothers and in Jacob. He shows these brothers who He is. He brings them to repentance, brings them to see their own sin, their own fault, so much more clear. They, all of them, stop blaming other people. They stop playing the victim and they start owning what they did. And through that, they come to wisdom and repentance. So the story starts out in a really bad place, like lots of stories do. There's no real heroes. There's early on at the very beginning, boy, there's no real good guys in this story. You think about the situation, you just hurt for these boys. And the pain that they were born into through no choice of their own. Put into a position where favoritism, envy, resentment, and backstabbing is just going to be the air they breathe. And we saw a couple of chapters before back when we finished that last section of of Genesis, we saw that the conflict between Jacob and his sons was already coming out. The story of Dinah and some of those other stories, the conflict that was already building, and now it's going to completely blow up. Getting rid of polygamy, incidentally, was one of the very best things that Christianity did for the cultures of the world. But it's like a good movie, you know? The worse a situation the hero finds themselves in, the worse a mess that Captain Kirk is in, you know? The more excited you get to see, how is he going to get out of it? You know? And we know that God is good and faithful. And what man does for evil, God does for good. We're going to have many insights along the way about human behavior, to shed light on why people do what they do. And as I said before, we should always be looking for ourselves in these stories. It is so easy for us to look at other people in our lives and say, oh, that seems like that person. That's like, you know, that other person really needs to recognize that truth. We need to be looking for ourselves in these stories though. Painful as it is, we need to be ready to see our own behavior and thinking in a new light as the Spirit of God exposes the secrets of our hearts. But above all, stories like this teach us to see God. You know, it's interesting, in the story of Joseph, God is actually pretty subdued. We don't hear near as much about God explicitly in the story of Joseph as we do, say, in the story of Abraham, for example. We don't have God directly saying, you know, we don't say God came to Joseph and said X, Y, Z, or God did this, or God made that happen, like we do in the story of Abraham quite a bit. God has receded to the background a little bit, the way the narrator tells our story. I'm not saying that God is any less sovereign over these events than he was at any of the other events, of course, but I'm saying the way the narrator tells our story, God's a little bit in the background, and that's on purpose. I believe that the narrator of Genesis has trained us to expect God to be working through all these things as he had throughout Genesis. So that now the focus is on the characters, the focus is on the human actors, the choices they make. God is the invisible sovereign working in the background. It's at the end of the story that it all becomes clear. And this is how we think of our own lives. Again, in our own lives, because our stories feel, to me, they feel a lot more like the story of Joseph than they feel like the story of Abraham. I've never had God speak to me in visions. I've never had a man come up to me and visit me and say, hey, I'm God, here's some things I'd like you to do. I've never had any of those things happen. I'm guessing probably none of you have either. visions in the clouds or whatever, dreams that you absolutely knew were divine revelations. But God is the backdrop of our lives as well. And we need to learn to see it. Amen. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for preserving these stories, telling these stories, Lord, that teach us so much about who you are and who we are. Lord, as we see this difficult, screwed up, hard situation, this family with so much anger and hatred and resentment and abuse, and yet we know that you are working your good and perfect purposes. Lord, help us to see ourselves rightly through these stories, that you would illuminate the thoughts and secrets of our hearts through these things. But above all, Lord, we pray that you would show us yourself through these stories, what you love, what you hate, how you work, how you are always faithful to your people, how you always accomplish your purposes in our lives, no matter how chaotic and confused and and broken things can seem. Teach us to trust you, teach us to walk in your ways, teach us to repent of our sin and find humility in the knowledge of who you truly are. I pray all these things in Jesus' precious name, amen.