Seize the Moment – Day 428
Faith in the Pit!
Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Wednesday, May 19.
Do you have a favorite Bible story?
Genesis 37 begins my favorite Old Testament story—the story of Joseph! This is a long story, one that will take us to the end of Genesis. It is my favorite story because I know how it ends. I don’t envy Joseph for the events of his life, but I do deeply desire to live my life faithfully, like Joseph, trusting God no matter how dark the circumstances of my life.
The story begins with Joseph as a teenager, seventeen years of age. God entrusted him with great responsibility at a young age—God gave Joseph dreams. Listen to Genesis 37:5, “Then Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more.”
Joseph was young and inexperienced and he didn’t know how to steward this responsibility at first. In his youthfulness, he did not show discretion and his brothers hated him and were jealous. But Joseph remained the favored son of Israel.
It was from this position of power that Joseph had to fall in order to become the man God would use to rescue the future nation of Israel.
Unfortunately, the formation process of the great people of faith very often starts at the bottom of a dark pit.
Joseph’s pit began with his brothers’ plot for his downfall, found in Genesis 37:23-24a: “So it came about, when Joseph reached his brothers, that they stripped Joseph of his tunic, the varicolored tunic that was on him; and they took him and threw him into the pit.”
Sometimes we dig our own pit and other times we are thrown in the pit by others, but regardless of how we get there, never forget that great faith is very often developed in the deepest, darkest holes of life.
Seize the moment and trust God no matter how deep or dark the hardships of your life.