IT TAKES BRAINS
Genesis 43:15-25
To forgive in your heart is often a pretty tough task. It’s a fight with yourself. It’s a matter of your heart and will. Yet it is the easier part of forgiveness, even when not easy. To tell your forgiveness, and make the other eager for it—ah! that’s another thing, a far harder thing. That’s a matter of brains and tact. It’s the heart stimulating the gray matter of the brain. Yet this is what forgiveness means, often.
WISE FORGIVENESS
Genesis 45:1-15
Wise forgiveness is difficult and rare. It needs an exquisite blend of graciousness and firmness. Joseph had a ticklish job on his hands. His brothers didn’t want forgiveness. They weren’t penitent. It wasn’t simply that he should have a forgiving spirit toward them, but that he should so handle them as to lead to that brokenness of heart in them that would long for forgiveness and be grateful for it, and become utterly changed in conduct.
SCHOOLTIME
Matthew 25:14-30
This is schooltime. We’re in training. There’s a new order of things coming to the earth some day. God carries an ideal in his heart. Some day he will carry it out on this old earth. In that ideal time coming he will need men and women whom he has trained, and whose experience and judgment he can trust. Let’s be good scholars in school, patient, steady, quick to learn, with unfailing trust in the Teacher.
GOD’S CLOCK
Genesis 41:25-32
There’s a simplicity about God in working out his plans, yet a resourcefulness equal to any difficulty, and an unswerving faithfulness to his trusting child, and an unforgetting steadiness in holding to his purpose. Through a fellow-prisoner, then a dream, he lifts Joseph from a prison to a premiership. And the length of stay in the prison prevents dizziness in the premier. It’s safe to trust God’s methods, and to go by his clock.
OPEN UPWARD
Genesis 41:14-24
God prefers using natural ways of working out his plans. Nature is really his method of working. He speaks to Pharaoh through a dream, so vivid that it seems distinctly significant. He makes clear to Joseph’s mental processes just what that significance is. Joseph is open to God. So he could get what was being given. Keep open to God in heart and head and life; and when you need rain look toward the sea.
