Thank you, friends, for your singing tonight. If you'll turn with me to God's Word in the first book of the Bible, in Genesis. Four more sermons in this, Lord willing. What I'd like to do is read our text, which will be in chapter 47, verses 13 through 31, and then I'd like us to take a moment to express dependence to God and on the help of His Holy Spirit as we open the word. Genesis 47, verse 13. Now there was no food in all the lands, for the famine was very severe, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished by reason of the famine. And Joseph gathered up all the money, or he took all the money that was found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan in exchange for the grain that they bought. And Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh's house. And when the money was all spent in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came to Joseph and said, give us food. Why should we die before your eyes? For our money is gone. And Joseph answered, give your livestock and I will give you food in exchange for your livestock if your money is gone. So they brought their livestock to Joseph, and Joseph gave them food in exchange for the horses, the flocks, the herds, and the donkeys. He supplied them with food in exchange for all their livestock that year. And when that year was ended, they came to him the following year and said to him, we will not hide from my Lord that our money is all spent. The herds of livestock are my Lord's. "'There is nothing left in the sight of my Lord, "'but our bodies and our land. "'Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? "'Buy us and our land for food, "'and we with our land will be servants to Pharaoh. "'And give us seed that we may live and not die, "'and that the land may not be desolate.'" So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt, for Pharaoh. For all the Egyptians sold their fields because the famine was severe on them. The land became Pharaoh's. As for the people, he made servants of them from one end of Egypt to the other. Only the land of the priests he did not buy, for the priests had a fixed allowance from Pharaoh and lived on the allowance that Pharaoh gave them. Therefore, they did not sell their land." Then joseph said to the people behold i have this day bought you and your land for pharaoh now here is seed for you And you shall sow the land and at the harvest you shall give a fifth to pharaoh and four fifths shall be your own As seed for the field and as food for yourselves and your households And as food for your little ones and they said you have saved our lives. May it please my Lord, we will be servants to Pharaoh. So Joseph made it a statute concerning the land of Egypt, and it stands to this day that Pharaoh should have the fifth. The land of the priests alone did not become Pharaoh's. Verse 27, thus Israel settled in the land of Egypt in the land of Goshen. And they gained possessions in it and were fruitful and multiplied greatly. Joseph lived in the land of Egypt 17 years. So the days of Jacob the years of his life were 147 years and when the time drew near that Israel or Jacob must die, he called his son Joseph and said to him, if now I have found favor in your sight, put your hand under my thigh and promise to deal kindly and truly with me. Do not bury me in Egypt, but let me lie with my fathers, carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burying place. He answered, I will do as you have said. And he said, swear to me, and he swore to him. Then Israel, or Jacob, bowed himself upon the head of his bed. The grass withers, we read in the scriptures, and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord endures forever. As we pray just for a moment before we dig into this passage, I'd like us to remember two couples yesterday. Joey and Shane did move from here to start a new chapter of their lives in Clinton, North Carolina, about I think maybe an hour or so from Raleigh, something like that. And so let's remember them, big change, a new town, new job, new house, new church. And so if we could remember them. And then also, even as we are together right now, Jeremy and Sarah with Little Moya, I believe, are on a plane flying back to Greenville. They had hoped to come back next Wednesday, but they shortened their time. And so they'll arrive, I think, sometime very late. tonight, and I think just remembering them as a church family. But I also want to take a moment and commend our body. You all together have fed their cats, you've cleaned their house, you've stocked their refrigerator, you've cut their yard, you have taken their vehicle to get it serviced to the mechanic, and you've even replaced a mailbox. I just want to commend your service, your very practical love as a church over the last 10 days. And just, and obviously you've prayed for them, probably texted back and forth. And Pastor Jamie mentioned this morning, Ephesians 2 10, that we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good work, that we should walk in them. You all have done that this week. Okay, you've done that. And we need to celebrate God's work in us to help us and to say he's enabled us to do that. But, and that's that practical type of love where we live and act with the hands and feet of our Lord Jesus. So with that, let's take a moment and pray. Father, thank you for your word, your written word. And thank you that we have not simply the facts of history in this book, But we have your truth, and even as we see that your son said that the truth of his words would set us free for that, we thank you. We thank you that our inheritance as your people is not bondage but freedom. Freedom from sin and all that sin brings in its nastiness. And for that we thank you, thank you, thank you. Tonight, we remember Joey and Shane and ask that you be with them in this new chapter of their lives in Clinton. North Carolina. We pray, too, especially, that you'd give them a church family where they can plunge in and invest. They can know and be known, love and be loved. They can serve and be served. We pray, Our Father, too, for Jeremy and Sarah and Moya as they fly back tonight, that, as Paul wrote to the church, at Philippi, to be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, to let the request be known to you. We pray that there would be an incomprehensible, indescribable peace for the Bouldens tonight. And we pray that you would help them as they grieve. to not grieve alone, to not grieve without hope, and to not grieve without your body. And that you would use us in the days ahead to be part of ministering hope and comfort. We pray that we might do that wisely and consistently. We pray that we might love and that we might live as salt and light, for you say we are those as your people, as citizens of your kingdom. Hear us now, we pray. We ask this in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen. Amen. If you've ever You ever had the occasion to travel to the southwestern United States? You know that in contrast to the eastern seaboard, to the continental divide of the eastern United States, something that looks like northern Georgia and western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwest Virginia, that's green upon green upon green. The southwestern United States are Quite barren, quite rocky, quite desolate. And so every golf course, think about this just for a moment. Flying over Greenville in summer, you might not be able to distinguish a golf course in terms of greenness from the rest of the surrounding countryside, almost at all, except that you can see the greens and the long fairways and the sand traps that are white, okay? But every golf course in Phoenix, Arizona is essentially an oasis. Have you ever thought of the irony of an oasis? An oasis, in effect, is something completely different than what surrounds it. It's green grass, in the case of a golf course in Phoenix, surrounded by rocks and desert. It's really, an oasis in that situation is an environmental exception, a place of lush, fertile, watered greenness in the middle of a desert or what you might even call desolation. That's how it feels in southern Arizona where John and Beth Ann Accordi labor. And I know there are many types of oases. For a moment, you might say, you might speak of green in the middle of harsh wilderness like a golf course in Phoenix. or economic prosperity for you while others are suffering or struggling, right? You might think about that. Even relational, maybe a relational oasis, where a friend or spouse or brother or sister is a person of peace, a very rock for your soul, while this relational conflict and dysfunction is swirling around you. And in our passage here in Genesis 48 or 47 tonight, I want us to see that Goshen is an oasis for Jacob and his clan. And when you look at the prospects or the trajectory of Jacob, his sons, and in his extended family, they were so very different from the world of those around them. You might say there was this incredible grace of God in Goshen. And so our sermon title tonight is Grace in Goshen. There was grace in Goshen for Jacob and his clan, this budding nation that was in fulfillment of the covenant promises of God. All right? First, those promises were made to Abram. We mark that in Genesis 12. Now we of course know him as Abraham, the father of a great multitude of nations. Those are passed on and repeated to his son Isaac, and further passed on and repeated to Isaac's son Jacob. So kids, what are the three patriarchs that we've been learning about in our Genesis series? What are their names? Abraham, that's one. How about another? What's his son? And what's Isaac's son? That's right. And what's Jacob's next to youngest son that we're reading about tonight? What's his name? The one that was in prison? Sold by his brothers? That's right. We've even got a Joseph among us. Okay? So I want us to see how God here is granting this oasis to Jacob to his sons, his daughters, and to their family. And I want us to think about, here's the big idea for our sermon, and then I wanna back it up, and I want you to try to connect these things for a moment. Here's the big idea. As God was for and with Jacob and his clan, clan is just another word for what? What's clan another word for? What? Tribe, okay. But you could also say what? Family. Family. Okay? Now, we normally don't say, hey, we're having a tribe reunion or a clan reunion. We speak of a what? family reunion. But those three words are what we call synonyms. They work together. And so, as God was for Jacob and his clan in the middle of a famished world, so he is for us. In fact, Paul writes in Romans 8, if God is what? If God is for us, then he asks a question. Who can be against us? And the answer that Paul is suggesting, or the answer that he's stating, is that no one can be against us. Well, let's look at our outline just for a moment. It's pretty simple. Verses 13 through 19, I want us to think of desperation in famine, part one, and then desperation in famine, part two, for verses 20 to 26. And then in verses 27 and 28, just like a little blip, just like this oasis. of the clan of Jacob in Goshen, verses 27 through 28, is what I call grace in the oasis of Goshen. And then finally, in verses 29 through 31, Jacob's grasp of the promise. Jacob's grasp of the promise. Now as we go through this, over the next 30 minutes, I want to be asking some questions. So kids, All right, if I ask a question, what am I seeking to get you to do? Answer, that's right. And for those who are watching live stream, I'll try to repeat that. All right, and so if you were watching live stream, the kids answered the question, who are the three patriarchs? Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And our focus now is on Joseph in these last 12 or 13 chapters, actually 14 of the book of Genesis. Well, we come to what you might call desperation and famine. And the presenting situation was desperation. If you said, hey, you call someone, how was your day? And they say, I'm desperate. You would be like this. That's not normally an answer that you expect. If, in fact, you ask me how I'm doing on the phone and I say desperate, I have some, I have a request for you. Please drive over to my location and confront me and see how you can help me. They were desperate. How bad was it? How desperate were the people in this hour? Kids, let me help you think about this for a moment. This is how bad it was. Get in your car after the service. There are no crackers. Drive to Food Lion over here. You walk in and guess what's on the shelf? Nothing. Go home and on your way home, see McDonald's and Arby's and Chick-fil-A and all the restaurants closed and their sign on the marquee says closed, no food available. Now get home, get to your house, And you go in and like some of you grays, like you go by, maybe some of you kids do this. You open the refrigerator sometimes and you look in. Does anyone ever do that? Or you do that with a cabinet? Okay. But imagine you go home tonight and there's nothing in the refrigerator. There's nothing in the cabinet. And you look at mom and dad and you said, what happened? And all they can say is, I'm sorry, there's no food. I think that's pretty desperate, all right? No rain, no crops, a virtual dust bowl here for two solid years. Now, no doubt some of you can recall times in your life when food was scarce. I think we might have a few. with us tonight who lived during some of the years post-depression in that sometime in the 30s. Do we have any that lived in the 30s? Do I see anyone that was born in the 30s? 30s? 30s, okay. And you might have known something of scarcity of food, but that's not typically the case for us, okay. We might say that this was worldwide for all practical purposes. When you read here that there was no famine in all the land, Moses helps us see the scale. He says the famine was very severe. This is the level of intensity. And then he gives the scope. And for all practical purposes, this is the world as they knew it. He says, there was, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished by reason of the famine. Okay? Now kids, let me ask you a question. For a moment, think of making a face, of a face, that you would make if there was no food in your car, in the stores, in the restaurant, in your refrigerator, or in your cabinet. If you knew that was the case right now, how would you feel? How would you express that by your face? That was the world that Moses describes for us here in Genesis chapter 47 and verse 13. But Joseph had a plan and no doubt, And that plan was developed in partnership or at the instruction of Pharaoh. And there was a rule in the ancient world like this. There was no entitlement. And let me illustrate this for you. If some of you said, mom, dad, can we stop by this restaurant? Can we stop by Arby's on the way home tonight and get a shake? And you're thinking, we'll go by Starbucks, okay. And you just, mom and dad say, yeah, no problem, we'll do it or whatever. Maybe do that tomorrow, okay. But what if you're six years of age and you say, can we go by Arby's and get a shake? And your dad, you're in the back and your dad's driving and he says to you, Alright, I'm fine to get you a shake. I want three dollars now and you're cutting the yard tomorrow and you're emptying the dishwasher for the next five days. And the point is, in the ancient world, there was nothing for free. Do you get that? As long as you had something to part with, for you to ask something of another meant there would be this exchange. So kids, imagine a world like that. As long as you had something to part with or barter, you gave it up to obtain necessities. Maybe you do that in your home now, right? Like you've got an extra piece of pizza on your table. on your plate, and you said to your brother or sister, I'm happy to give it to you, but I want your piece of, I want your big cookie. There's some degree of bartering. And so it was with money. Joseph took it all in exchange for food, grain, and seed. And it's helpful that you understand that this grain, the seed initially spoken of as food, Because they're taking this grain, and it's the basis for their eating. At some point, as the famine ends, then they're able to use it to plant so that they might grow their own food. But initially, they're giving up money for their daily bread in the world where there's famine. Okay? The next year, though, they had no money. They were able to offer their livestock. Now, let's step back and I want you to think about this for a moment. No money. So the world is no food and now they give up all their money. So for a moment, who's got a piggy bank? Does anyone have a piggy bank? Something like that. Okay. All right. Does anyone have a checking account? Okay. Don't raise your hand. Does anyone have a place in your house where sometimes you've kept cash? Do not raise your hand. Okay. You understand the point. Imagine now you shake the penny bank and there's nothing in it. You go online, you do your password and there in your checking account, it's all zeros and savings. Okay, and now you go to that drawer where you had like the bank type of envelope and you thought you had three 20s, a 10 and two fives. It's gone. All right, we're talking everything is emptied out. And so They come, all right, no money. And all they had was their livestock. And so read verse 17 with me. It says, so they brought their livestock to Joseph, and Joseph gave them food in exchange for the horses, the flocks, the herds, and the donkey. Okay? He supplied them with food in exchange for all their livestock that year. Now, kids, do you all understand that normally livestock is what we call a renewable resource, okay? It's kind of like at our house, a year ago, my wife grew peas and then she kept some of the peas instead of us eating them, she kept those peas and guess what we did with them? She did with them this spring. She planted those. So that crop was renewable. She didn't eat all her harvest. She saved it to create a harvest. The harvest from 2020 became her, what we call corn seed for 2021. Well, animals like sheep and goats, In milking cows, they can have babies so long as you feed them, right? And so it's what we call a renewable resource. By taking care of it this year, it stays with us and we keep eating the next year. The problem is, is when there's nothing to feed all that livestock. And this was the situation in part that the people found themselves. So they gave it all up, money, livestock, and we'll see in a moment, not beyond that, the land and themselves. And so they gave all that up, no money, no livestock. And we might think of it this way, think of this year three, all their money is depleted. We've talked about this already. Imagine being absolutely penniless. You've sat on your couch and you've scrummaged underneath the cushions and in between. You can't find a penny. Not anything. Not a dollar in your wallet. You're scrounging around under the seats in your car. You're looking at your checking account again. You're asking your wife, like, honey, where did I put that envelope? I swear it was in here. We had money in it. And you cannot find it. And now, though, at the beginning of year four, it looks like they give up their livestock for that year's supply. It's all gone. And it brings us to the situation of verses 18 through 19. I want us to see how they express this. It's very open. We will not hide, verse 18, we will not hide from my Lord that our money is all spent. It's another way of saying we're broke. The herds of livestock are my Lord's, okay? So now they're telling Joseph, of course, what he already knows. We have no money. We have no livestock. They are yours. They are my Lord's. And you'll notice the way Moses communicates this, he gives it to us in the first person. Not simply our, but my. It's very personal, this extent of their impoverishment. He says, there is nothing left in the sight of my Lord, but our bodies and our land. Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? And the point is, they know it, they've still got something yet to give. by us and our land for food, and we with our land will be servants to Pharaoh and give us seed that we may live and not die and that the land may not be desperate. All right, and it brings us to part two in verses 20 to 26. All they have, this is it. They have their land, their real estate, and themselves, and you might call it your freedom, their freedom. And he takes these also as payment for food, because there's the rule again. What's the rule in the ancient world? There is nothing for free. There are no entitlements. As long as you have something to give to get what you need, the other party would typically take it from you. They basically reach into your back pocket and take it. And I imagine the words sound cold and heartless to most of us. It was only the priest of the land that received some relief because of a special allowance. So look what we read in verses 20 to 22. It says, so Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh. for all the Egyptians sold their fields because the famine was severe on them. What good did it matter if you had a title to real estate, but your little ones were looking at you starving to death? It's easy to think of Joseph as wise, but here he appears shrewd, almost cold, almost heartless. But watch how God is using him. It says, the land became Pharaoh. As for the people, Moses continues in verse 21, he made servants of them from one end of Egypt to the other. And the idea is that you went from this rural, this spread out people over the land of Egypt to a degree of like congregating kind of urbanization in the city. And the people were made servants of Pharaoh It says, as they were made servants of them, which could be Pharaoh and Joseph, from one end of Egypt to the other, all right? And it says, only the priests Joseph did not buy, for the priests had a fixed allowance from Pharaoh and lived on the allowance that Pharaoh gave them. and says he didn't sell his land. I want you to see Joseph's instructions to the people. We'll see this here in verse 23 and 24. He says, behold, I have this day bought you and your land for Pharaoh. I want you to imagine these words. I bought you. And I bought your land for Pharaoh. Now here is seed for you and you shall sow the land. So they give themselves up, they turn the deed of their land over to Joseph, and he says, here's a bag of seed. And it's not for you to do just what you want, you're to sow the land. And I think we must assume at this point that the famine is beginning to end. Perhaps we're nearing the end of that seventh year, okay? And he says, and at the harvest, you shall give a fifth to Pharaoh and four fifths shall be your own, a seed for the field and his food for yourselves and your household and his food for your little ones. They were essentially indentured servants to Pharaoh. Themselves, they turned over their land, and now here they were. They were instructed what to do with the seed. They were instructed about the 20% that they would have to give from that point forward. And it brings us, though, to this grace of God in the oasis of Goshen. And sometimes, you can see that one person's prospects are rising on this end while another's are falling on this end. Who can think of an Old Testament book where someone seemed to be doing better quickly while another person was doing poorly rather very quickly? Can anyone think of an Old Testament book that tells us something like that. You have anyone that can think? What's that? Does anyone have any offering? Okay, Esther, whose prospects begin to rise rather dramatically? Yes. And whose fall really quickly? Haman. Okay, we can illustrate that. And that's what's happening here in Genesis 47, whose prospects have gone down very badly. The whole country of what? The whole land of Egypt, right? Egypt, but even included in that is Canaan. It seems like Moses is putting those together in verse 13. Now whose though appear to be getting much better? Who? One man and his 12, Logan. What's the one man's name? Who's doing better? Great. And his father, you got it, okay? Because what's happened at the end, at the first 12 verses of Genesis 47, Jacob and with his 11 sons and their wives and their children and daughters and all their stuff and their livestock, they've come and they've been given a special piece of land. What is that land called? What's the name of that place? Goshen, where is that? In what country? You got it. That's great. In Egypt. Egypt falling. Israel, you might say, rising. I want you to look at these verses here, the response. or the description where it says, thus Israel settled in the land of Egypt in the land of Goshen. This might be the first time in the book of Genesis that Israel is used not just as a synonym or a new name for Jacob, but meaning the whole of this little budding, growing nation of Jacob, his 12 sons and their children, in fulfillment of the promise that God gave Abram back in Genesis 12 to Abram and Sarah, even when they didn't have one child, He said, what? I will make you into this great, great nation. And so we read, thus Israel settled in the land of Egypt, in the land of Goshen. And read what it says, it says, and they gained possessions in it and were fruitful and multiplied greatly. So it says, of the sons of Israel, or Jacob and his sons, they gained possession. That's very interesting. Because what had just happened to Egypt, they had given up all their what? They'd given up all their money. They had given up all their things on four legs, called what? Livestock. You got it. And what else had they given up? All this flat stuff that you sell. Land. And finally, when they didn't have anything else, they gave up what? That's right. Because they didn't have anything else to give. You got it. And in contrast, Israel is described as gaining possessions in the land of Goshen, it says, they were fruitful and multiplied greatly. Now, I want you to think about this just for a moment. In Genesis 46, in the previous chapter, Jacob and his 11 sons, not Joseph, but his 11 sons, all his, their wives, the grandchildren, all their stuff, all the livestock in these wagons, they come and maybe we might guess that there could have been with that. How many did we read came of that group? What was the number that we saw last week? Does anyone remember? Anyone remember? 70, but really 66 when you take away two sons of Judah who died and two sons of Joseph who were already where? In Egypt. So 70 minus four is what? 66, you got it, okay. And there they come and it says they were fruitful and they multiplied greatly. Now, At the end of the next verse, in verse 28, it says the days of Jacob were how many days? How many years? What, how many? 147. How old was Jacob when he came to Egypt and he blessed Pharaoh? 130 years, okay. What's the difference? 17 years. Now, if only 66, let's say some number under 100, came and then you came and you visited that group of people 17 years later, how many people would you expect to count in that gathering? Someone, let's think about that. What would your guess be? What's that? Okay, I hear 200. Does anyone wanna hazard a guess? Okay, Logan. Okay, 100. Okay, someone else. 150. Ah, God splits the middle. It sounds like we've got an auction going. Okay, now. But the point is, Israel is in the oasis of the grace of God in the midst of famished desolation. and they are described as, I love this, and it says they were fruitful and multiplied greatly. And I wanna take a moment and let's make application of this. This past week, the last 10 days, your hands have been extended on behalf of a couple with their little girl, okay? And I think it's fair to say that that was a multiplication and fruitfulness of good works, though you might say, well, it's only six or seven bullet points of things that were done for that couple. And the point is that fruitfulness is not always the precise number of where we're at, right? Even the growth of our church as a church family, growth is not always numerical. It can be qualitative. Are we loving one another more? Are we more quick to confess our sin? Are we more eager to own our role in a conflict, that is growth in grace in us as a church family. Does that make sense? Even if you say, well, we're still only 75 here on Sunday night, and last week we were at 77. Looks like we shrunk. No! Are we growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus? Are we growing in these two distinct markers of Christian maturity, love for one another? Are we growing in faith in our Lord Jesus Christ as the only name from heaven given among men by which we must be saved? That's the question for us. I want you to note this too. What was described of Israel, it says, they gained what? They gained, read it, verse 27. It says, they gained possessions in it. They were flourishing. They were multiplying. They're in Goshen, under the protection and blessing of Joseph and Pharaoh. How ironic though that in 1 Peter 2, 9, does it say that we're gaining possessions? Does it say that of God's people? No, it says that in fact we are God's, what? We are His possessions, alright? So kids, I want to ask you to think about this for a moment. You sometimes think of all that you have, like that's my soccer ball, and that's my Nintendo, and that's my cool shirt that I got for Christmas from my grandparents. You think about what you possess. But to become a Christian is very different. To become a Christian is to become the possession of God himself. that God says to you and to me, you're mine. And because you're mine, I have the right, I have the claim upon your life to tell you how you're to live in what life and how life is to be lived as my child. I want us to see here, as we think of Grace and Goshen, to look finally at just a couple of verses. Verses 29 through 31, and that's Jacob's grasp of the promise. Jacob, it says, he is about to die. It says, and when the time grew near that Israel must die, that day appointed in the mind and heart of God that he would die. It said he called his son Joseph and he said to him. So he says, if now I found favor in your sight, he says, put your hand under my thigh. It's a special way of making a promise. You don't need to do this with one another. Okay? But you can just imagine this tradition. He says, put your hand right there and make this promise. Do not bury me here. in Egypt, he says, but take me back so that I might lie with my fathers. Carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burying place, where my father and my grandfather are buried. And Joseph says, Dad, I will do as you have said. Now, where is that land that Jacob wanted to be buried in. What's the name of that land? Does anyone know? Yes, it's Canaan, that's right. How is Canaan, have you thought about this, how is Canaan different from Egypt? What's the difference between Canaan and Egypt? What land was promised, what land, go ahead, what land was promised It's the promised land. Was Egypt the promised land? No, Canaan was the promised land. And so what Jacob is saying to his son is take me back to the place of God's promise for me and not just my ancestors, all those who've come before me, but all those who will come behind me. And that's faith. He understood that as good as it was in Goshen, though their possessions multiplied, though they gained possessions, though they were fruitful and multiplied, that the place of promise was not where his feet were in Goshen, even surrounded by his children and his grandchildren and all these flourishing possessions and livestock. It was back at a place we'll learn about later in Genesis 23 that Abraham purchased. Alright, in the field of Mepella in a cave. We'll learn about this later. That Abraham bought from the Hittites. We'll see this in coming weeks. But that's very different. I want you to look. I want you to think about here Jacob's response that's a little bit different than the response of the Egyptians. Look in verse 25. It says, And they said, You have saved our lives. May it please my Lord, we will be servants to Pharaoh. There was no sense of promise. There was a transaction. Since you've saved our lives, we will simply be indentured servants to you. But look, this is amazing, consider Jacob's request to Joseph at the Aeneid and his grasp of the promise not to remain in Egypt, but for his bones, his body to be buried all those couple of hundred miles to the east back to Canaan, to the land of promise. This is grace. This is grace that's developing. It's easy to think of Jacob as a scoundrel. Jacob had his bad moments. But when you go to Hebrews 11, the fact that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and then even Joseph, as we'll see in coming weeks, are all listed there in Hebrews 11 as exercising faith. They're included in this whole group, this whole body of witnesses who expressed faith in the perfect, irreversible promises of God. It tells us of the power of grace in our lives. I want you to think, I want to quote here for a moment as we close from John Piper. John Piper in his book, Future Grace, says this, he says two things about grace. Because you understand what's going on in this chapter is there's this exchange, alright? There's this bartering, nothing is for free. You might say that everything that the famished citizens of Egypt received, they bought. Does that make sense? Money for grain, livestock for grain, land for grain, their very lives for grain. But John Piper says this, about our attempts to repay God, because it has no place. The effort to repay God in the ordinary way we pay creditors would nullify grace and turn it into a business transaction. If we see acts of obedience as installment payments, we make grace into a mortgage. And this is what he says, and I wanna close with this. He says, let us not say that grace creates debts. Let us say that grace pays debts. Grace pays debts. Grace never creates debts. It pays debts. And that's why he goes on to say that grace would not be grace if it were a response to resources in us. The reality is, is it is God that is enriching. It is God who is making fruitful. It is God who is multiplying greatly. Jacob and his measly clan in this oasis of Goshen while the rest of the world is in desperate famine. while the rest of the world is giving up their money, is giving up their livestock, is giving up their land and their very freedom. And so John Piper says this, grace is grace because it highlights God's own overflowing resources of kindness. I want you to think about what he says next. He says, grace is eternal because it will take that long for God to expend inexhaustible stores of goodness on us. Grace is free, he says, because God would not be the infinite, self-sufficient God he is if he were constrained by anything outside. himself. Grace, we might say, and grace expressed in our salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ is the freest, John Piper says, of all of God's acts. All of this serves as an antidote for us playing a victim card perpetually, okay? And it's not to say that some of you have not been legitimate victims, that you have not experienced legitimate, painful, soul-crushing heartache, all right? But it is to say this, that if we are in Christ, then God is for us, and if He is for us, None can ultimately, in a soul-destroying, life-quenching way, be against us. Because He who did not spare His own Son, Paul says, but who gave Him up for us all, will graciously, to eternity, give us all things, and nothing more richer than Himself. And to Christ, to Him who will never be taken away from us,