PASTOR’S NOTES
Give your livestock, and I will give you bread…”
To walk towards something in life also means that we have to walk away from something else; That the beginning starts at the end. To die is to live and slavery to God is actual freedom to the soul. This type of language is used all throughout the Bible as we are told truths of the faith that contradicts everything our former self believed to be true. All of these thoughts and truths are said over and over again in God’s word. However, these concepts are impossible for the world to understand and even hard for the faithful to fully fathom. How could dying be living and slavery be freedom?
In this week’s text we see a picture of how all of this is true by it being lived out by the people of Egypt in the midst of a famine. When reading this week’s text, one could easily see this as a bad deal for the people of Egypt. They have hit hard times and now they have to give up all that they have to simply survive. This works out perfectly for Pharaoh, while things couldn’t get much worse for the people. “First we are starving, and now we have to give up all that we have.”
The world reads chapter 47 as oppressive to whereas born again followers of Christ are led to read the text as freedom. Romans 6:22 tells us, “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.”
The truth is, when the master is all-knowing, loving, and merciful provider, submission to all we are and have should be desired. Much like the people of Egypt, God tells us to bring and lay down all that we have and in return He promises that we will have all that we need. We see that provisions will always be more important than processions and what we lose will be replaced with what we could not imagine!
“You have to lose your life to save it”, the Bible teaches us.
As hard as this truth is to understand, we must trust that giving over what we have to gain what He gives is good news! This week is all about trusting our master with all that we have and having faith that He will provide all that we need. God calls us to give over everything, to make Him the center of all that we are and have. He calls us to submission and obedience. He calls us to trust Him.
EXTRA READING THIS WEEK
Read Luke 14:25-33 (taught on Wednesday night) on the subject of submission.
