"But God Meant It for Good" - When You Can't Yet See What He's Doing

I want to talk to the person who's standing in the middle of something right now that makes absolutely no sense. You right now, something was done to you or something fell apart.And people around you keep telling you God has a plan, but from where you're standing, that sounds like a greeting card because right now, you can't see one shred of good in it. I want you to hear me loud and clear. That feeling is not a lack of faith. It's what it feels like to be in the pit before the story is even finished.So today I want to tell you about a man who got thrown in an actual pit by his own brothers. He was sold like a livestock. He was lied about, and he was locked into prison for years for something he didn't do. And he was forgotten.And decades later, you find him standing in a palace. He looked at the very brothers who had done this to him and said seven words that he's been carrying wounded people ever since.He meant evil against me, but God. Hello, and welcome to Truth Unveiled with Ralph Estep.I'm Ralph Estep Jr. And I'm so glad you're here today, especially if you're somebody who's carrying that feeling like you. You can't make sense of what's going on in your life.And I want you to hold on to something, even right now, if you can't feel it, because this is some reassurance. We're going to start off with some reassurance right now. That pit you're in right now isn't the end of the sentence.And I know that's hard to hear, that's hard to believe right now because you're, Ralph. The pit's all around me. But trust me on this. There's a but God coming that you can't see from where you're standing right now.And I want to start off by being honest. Today we're going to talk about Joseph. And I'm not going to tell you that that evil was secretly good, because it wasn't.And Joseph never says it was that. But we have a God who takes what was meant to destroy to break us. And so many times he weaves it into a rescue.Now, he doesn't call the evil anything but evil. So let me read to you where the story lands. And this is from our primary text today. It's from the book of Genesis.We're going all the way to the beginning. Genesis, chapter 50, verses 15 to 21. And this is from the World English Bible. And this is what it says.It Says when Joseph's brother saw that their father was dead, they said, it may be that Joseph will hate us and he will fully pay us back for all the evil we did to him. They sent a message to Joseph saying, your father commanded before he died, saying, you shall tell Joseph.Now please forgive the disobedience of your brothers and their sin because they did evil to you. Now please forgive the disobedience of the servants of God. Your father Joseph wept when they spoke to him.His brothers also went and fell down before his face. And they said, behold, we are your servants. And Joseph said to them, don't be afraid, for am I in the place of God.As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. He meant it to save many people alive and is happening today. Now therefore, don't be afraid. I will nourish you and your little ones.He comforted them and he spoke kindly to them. I just want to focus on something that Joseph said again. Remember, these were his brothers who sold him like livestock. And what does he say?He said, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. In our minds, we're like, wait a second, how does that even work? How can both halves be true at the same time?Well, that's the whole message of the gospel here isn't, was meant to be evil, but God did good with it. So let's start off by talking about what the pit feels like from the inside, because we got to start there.We can't just start at the palace where Joseph found himself. We can't rush to the palace because maybe right now you're in the pit and I just want to sit there for a second and let's talk about Joseph.So as far as we can tell, when Joseph was sold, he was about 17 years old. He was his father's favorite son. And his brothers hated him. They despised him.And they throw him in a pit and they sit there and have a meal while he's screaming. Then he was sold to traitors.Can you imagine your own family, your own brothers throw you into a pit and you cry and scream and they just laugh at you. And then they sell you to as a traitor, dipped your coat in blood and tell your own father that your favorite son is dead.But it doesn't just stop there to pick. It's deeper. He was sold into Egypt. He was a slave in Potiphar's house. But yet Joseph did everything right, the Bible tells us.And then of course, it got even deeper. He was falsely accused of something and thrown in prison. He helps. A man has to be remembered and forgotten. Two more years.So think about this for a second. We can just pile on. He was betrayed by his family. He was enslaved. He was falsely accused. He was imprisoned and forgotten. That's 13 years.If you stop the story at any point, it looks like God had just completely abandoned Joseph. And here's the interesting part of it. And as I researched for today's show, I thought about this for a second.Nobody tells you Joseph never got the memo. Joseph was living this figure and this is what was going to happen to him. There's no verse where God explains the plan. Joseph lived it.He lived it forward, as they like to say. He lived it in the dark. And that may be right where you are, right as I record this right now. You may be in that pit. You may be in that darkness.I want to tell you about my story. I call it the weighted 8. When I was 8 years old, I'll never forget it.I'll never forget the day my parents went out on the back porch and I knew something was wrong because I just heard my mother weeping. And about an hour later, my mom and dad walk in the back door and they announced it to us. Your mom and I are going to split up right now.And the last words my dad said to me, they echo to this day. I'm 53 years old. That was when I was 8. He looked straight at me in this square in the eyes and said, son, you're the man of this house now.Can you imagine being 8 years old? Just got told that the people, the rock stars that you look up to, your mom and dad are splitting up now. It's not like I hadn't seen this before.In my neighborhood where I grew up, it seemed like everybody was getting divorced. So I was just hoping it wasn't going to be us. But then one Sunday morning in the summer, it was us.And when my dad said that, the only thing I could think of was I needed to figure out how to keep this family afloat, to keep it financially afloat, how to be there for my mom. I'm eight years old. Here I am facing grown up problems on a third grader shoulder.There is absolutely no way that I can go back and look at that and say, well, that was a blessing. At the time, I was in a pit. And that was a pit I didn't ask to be in. And for many years, many years, I could only see the cost of that.My friends were out doing what kids do. They were Going, having fun. And I'm trying to figure out how to put heating oil in the house and try to figure out in my backyard how to.How to make the lawnmower work for my mom and how to paint and how to do all the things that, quote, the man of the house had to do. I remember turning 20 years old, and if you had asked me, was there any good in it, you know what I said? Absolutely not. This is a horrible situation.I was in the pit, and from the inside of that pit, you can't see the palace. And trust me, there's a palace I'm going to get to here in a little bit. So here's my honest question for you. What's your pit?Seriously, what is your pit that you're in right now that you can't see outside of thing where people say, well, God's got a plan. But it makes you want to scream because people keep on saying to you, oh, God's got a plan for you. Just, just keep praying. Just keep hunkering down.It's going to work. Because all you can see is the bottom of the hole, because that's all that's around you.And I want you to hold that because now the same story, I want to look at it from the other end. And I talked about this a few minutes ago. We talked about two sentences that are both true in our minds.In our, I'll say, feeble human minds, we can't understand how two things can be true when they seem like they're diametrically opposed. But let's talk about the palace, because think about what Joseph went from. He went from being enslaved to second in command all over Egypt.I just think about that chain that started the chain of his life. It started in the pit, but he found a position to store grain, and he fed nations. He actually fed the family that sold him into slavery.And then we get to the end of the story, and here his brothers come in, they're terrified. He's like, oh, my gosh, what are we going to do with ourselves? This is the brother we sold into slavery. Now, he's done so much for everybody.And if I'm his brother, I'm going, oh, boy, I'm going into this meeting with him. He's going to seek revenge.And I'm going to ask you right now, how would you have felt if your family sold you into slavery, treated you the way that Joseph was treated? How would you feel? Look, as a human being, fleshly? I'm going to tell you right now, I Probably would have wanted my pound flesh.But that's not how God finishes his story, is it? And what does Joseph say? He says the thing that so many of us would be like, I can't believe he'd say that. But he said it.He said, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. And I just want to dwell on that. But God meant it for good. You see, we got to be real careful here.Joseph didn't say, hey, guys, it worked out, so no harm done. And just think about it. Here he is. He arrived. He's at the palace. He never said, oh, guys, you didn't really mean it. Not at all. He names it.He says it straight up. He says, you meant evil. That was real, that was raw, that was wrong. And he's not going to pretend otherwise. What they did to him was horrible.But in that same breath, he says the beautiful ending to that. He says, but God meant it for good. Two completely different sentences, but true at once. Both true at once in our human minds.Most people collapsed into one side. Think about it like this. Most of us keep only half of that. You meant evil to me, right? But it curdles into bitterness.And that pit you lived in becomes the permanent address. Oh, you just meant. You just meant evil for me. I can't get past that. And then a lot of us say, well, let me just keep the other half.Because, you know, God meant good for this. See, it all worked out in the end. How many times we heard that. It's all going to work out in the end.And we skip degree and we slept this verse over an unclean wound. It's easy to do that because we have the benefit of seeing how it lays out, how it plays out. But Joseph holds on to both.Evil was evil and God was working. Now, God wasn't the author of it, but God was greater than it. Which leads us to Romans, chapter 8, verse 28. Again, world English Bible.And I love this verse. You know, I've talked about it on the show before. Romans is my favorite. If I could read a book of the Bible and be like, that's Ralph's book.That's Ralph's book. But this is what it says. Romans 8, 28.It says, we know that all things work together for good, for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose. Now, you got to be careful what it says here. And I didn't even catch it the first time I read it. It doesn't say all things are good.It doesn't say that at all. Some things are evil. And we've got to be willing to say, there is evil in this world. That's not something that God constructed.That's not something that God created. There is evil in this world. Not all things are good, but God. And we got to just go there. God works all things together for good. Just think about God.He's weaving all this together. What I believe from the other side of my pit, God wasn't absent from the prison. He was in it in the dark.And friend, I'm going to tell you right now, he's in yours or he was in yours too. But what do you do while you're still living in chapter 36, right?You're still living in that pit because it's easy to say, oh, you know, the spiritual folks, the folks at church say, I'm praying for you, brother. It's all going to work out. But yet you're looking around and you're still in that pit.Number one thing you got to do is you got to tell the truth about the pit. Name it. Don't over spiritualize it away. We live in a culture right now that just wants to spiritualize stuff. We don't want to name anything.If someone hurt you hear me on this. If someone hurt you, it was wrong. You didn't deserve to get hurt. It's okay to say that person did me wrong.My grandmother used to say, that person did me dirty. It's okay to say that. And grieving it honestly isn't a failure of faith.I think we have this belief that if I'm faithful, I can't grieve what happened to me because you can't get to. But God, if you pretend half of it didn't happen because you got to see the beginning. You got to see the evil first.Unfortunately, you got to live in that a little bit. You got to acknowledge that. Here's the next thing you got to do. You got to be faithful. In the small room. Think about Potiphar's house. This is Joseph.He was basically still a slave. But what did Joseph choose to do? And he had every reason to be angry. He had every reason to be salty. He had every reason to be negative.What did he do? He worked with integrity even in the pit. When he ended up in prison, what did he do? He served the other prisoners. And think about it.Joseph didn't have the big picture. He couldn't see, oh, I'm going to be in the palace one day. I'm just buying my time here. He had no idea where this was going to end up. Maybe he did.Maybe there was faith in this. And he goes, I know God is going to restore me from this. But he chose to be faithful in the small assignment in front of him.You can do that right now, even amidst the pit, even with that person that has hurt you, the person who has grieved you. You can make a decision right now that I don't have to be the victim. I can do that small thing in the pit, that palace that God led him to.That's God's job. We can't ask to be God, but we can do this. We can say the next right thing is for us to do. What is the next right thing that you can do?Which I want to get back to my story, because I want to talk about what God did with the weight at 8, it kind of rhymes. I thought it was pretty good, but the weight at 8, when I was 8, all I could see is the cost of it. But I sit right here at 53 years old.I'm going to tell you something right now. And it was just a couple years ago I figured it out. It's the very reason that I do what I do.I. I do what I do because of what happened to me when I was 8 years old. And I'm fixing to get a little emotional about this because it's the truth.I have empathy for that scared family across the desk from me that didn't come from some textbook. And listen, I've got the textbook education. I've got a master's degree in accounting.And I don't say that to be arrogant, but that's not where the real lessons came from. When somebody sits across from me, I get it, because I was at terrified kids staring at bills, too.Bills that were too big for me, things that I didn't understand, those things that were too heavy for a child, became the very thing that lets me tell an adult, I know that fear. I know what you're going through, and it's going to be okay. So I never imagined that eight in that pit, that this was going to be my life's calling.God was working out this the whole time. And I've spent 30 years as an accountant. My whole mission is to be that person that puts the arm around the shoulder.I came up out of a pit that I never wanted. And listen, that pit wasn't good, but God meant it for good, and he's fed a lot of people through it. So what else can you learn from this?Let your pit Become someone's rescue. That's what I've done. My pit's become a rescue for so many people. Just think about Joseph.His suffering saved thousands of people, including the very ones who caused it. That's God's pattern. He redeems your pain by making it the thing you use to help someone else survive theirs. Think about that. What has God given you?What has he given you to be able to help somebody survive?The worst chapter of your life, the darkest chapter of your life, the things that you don't want to have to go through again become bread for someone starving in that same place. And you may still be in the pit today, but I'm going to re encourage you about something. God hasn't left you alone there.You might feel like you're in the dark, but he's working right there in the dark. And you can't see through it right now.And one day, that sentence, it starts with they meant evil is going to turn on the two hardest, most beautiful words in the whole story. And you're going to know, just like I've learned, but God.Now, I want to get quiet with you for a minute because I want you to think about your pit, the real pit that you're in right now. And it might not be sold into slavery, it might not be some terrible thing, but there's some pit right now.And I want to ask you, and I want to ask you gently, what half of the sentence have you got stuck on? Are you camped in? The half of you meant evil, and it's easy to stay there. It's a true thing. It was meant evil.But have you been hardened in the bitterness and allowed that to become your whole story? Honestly? And I'm not. Listen, I'm not judging you because I get where you are. Are you there?Or did you skip to the second half too fast and just pulled up by your bootstraps and says, God's got a plan, and you slapped over a wound. You never grieved, but it's still infected underneath because you've never grieved it.There's a lot of people walking around with wounds that have never been cured because all they did was slap a holy mandate on it. That doesn't work either.So can you believe even a minute that God isn't absent from your prison, that he's there, that he's in the dark, that he's working? Because that's what you need to believe. What would you change if you trusted him with the palace and just did that next right thing?In that small room you're standing in right now. I encourage you to do that. And here's the truth, unveiled for today. You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.And both halves are true at once, friend. God is not the author of the evil done to you. I truly don't believe that.But he is so much greater that he reaches into the pit and pulls out a rescue. And I know you can't see the palace from the bottom of the hole, but he's working in the dark. He's right there with you.The pit isn't the end of your story. There's a but God coming. But maybe today the real pit you're in isn't something somebody did to you.A lot of people listening to me or watching me right now, they're like, Ralph, somebody did me dirty. Like my grandmother said. Maybe that's not your pit.Maybe your pit's the distance between you and God, and you've never actually crossed over that pit. The most beautiful but God in history. Think about this. The most beautiful but God in history was Jesus Christ. Because we were all dead in our sins.We had a gap that we couldn't cross. That's the truth, right? But that's only half one. Because what comes later?But God, the same shape as Joseph's story, rich in mercy, sent Jesus into our pit. Jesus was in that pit for us. And he took the worst thing. He took the cross. He took the deepest evil ever.And in all of that, God meant it for the good of saving everyone who'd come. The very worst day became the rescue of the world.And if you believe that and you've never made that connection to Christ, I want you to pray with me right now, wherever you are. Doesn't matter where you are. I don't have any magic words. I just want you to pray from where you are right now.Jesus, I. I've been in a pit that I couldn't climb out of on my own. I've tried. And I believe you came down into it. I believe you died for me.And I believe you rose again to save me, Lord, right now, where I am, as I am right now in my brokenness. Meet me here, Lord. Forgive me, Lord. Take my whole story.Take the evil done to me and the wrong that I've done as well, Lord, because I gotta acknowledge that too. There are people that I've heard, Lord, and I just ask for your forgiveness right now. But. I know that there's a but God, here. Make it good, Lord.Because from this moment Forward, I pledge. I'm yours, Lord. I accept you as my personal savior. And I ask this in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen. Friend.If you prayed that, I want you to tell somebody. You can reach out to me at https://www.truthunveiledwithralph.com/decision. I would love to pray with you. I'd love to talk to you.You can reach out to me, no problem. If you don't go talk to a church person. Find a believer that you trust that God who found Joseph in prison just found you, my friend.But the thing is, we got to remember something. The major over point today is you gotta hold both sentences. That was the whole reason I recorded today.Don't deny the evil, but don't get stuck in it. There's a lot of people running around stuck in the evil that was done to them and I grieve that. I get it. But don't get stuck there.Be faithful in the small room you're in. You don't have to see the palace, just that next right step that you can take right now.And trust that God is working in the dark even when you can't see through it. He's right there with you. Go back to Genesis, chapter 50, verse 20. As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.To save many people alive. Your pit, my pit in the Lord's hands becomes the very bread for the starving. That's what our God does. How about we close in prayer together?Father, I just want to thank you for your work in the dark that we can't see through. And I pray right now for the one that's in that pit right now. They've been betrayed, They've been forgotten. They're in way over their head.Lord, I just ask that you would meet them at the bottom and show them that you haven't left them, Lord. And for that one grown bitter who stuck in the first half of that Lord, I just ask that you would gently heal what's hardened just enough for.For hope to be. But God's still coming.And for that one who skipped their grief and just buried a wound under a verse, Lord, I just want you to give them permission to feel it honestly, so you can heal it. Because, Lord, we know until they embrace that you can heal it. And for that one whose pit is old, they've waited years for it.We know Joseph waited 13. But you were there every minute of those 13 years. You were never absent. Lord, be with that person too.And for that one ready to emerge to come out of that deepest pit. Lord, welcome them and start working their whole story for good.You're the God of but good and we trust you in the dark, Lord, and we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. Wow, that was a message today, wasn't it?And if you are affected by that, I want you to think about somebody right now who's sitting in a pit and they're sure that God has forgotten them. I just want you to send this to somebody. Let them hear that he's working in the dark.Just think of that person right now that you know they're struggling right now and they need to hear this message. Just send it to them. You can just send them a link to this particular episode or send them a link to our YouTube channel.That's how this ministry grows. It grows one arm around one shoulder at a time. And if this is your first time joining us, thank you for coming.I want you to subscribe to us and come back next time on Truth Unveiled.As I said earlier, you may still be in chapter 37, but God is writing a but God, you can't even see yet, so don't close the book in the middle of the sentence. Keep seeking that truth and let it set you free. God bless you and I'll see you next time.