Unrecognizable, Part 2

Hello and welcome to this Wednesday edition of Destined for Victory. In just a few moments, Pastor Paul Shepherd takes us to the life of Joseph, his trials, his tragedy, and his ultimate triumph.

Tell us what we can expect in today's message. As most of our listeners know who have heard me any length of time, the challenges of life can teach us we will become so unrecognizable to people who only remember us when we were immature or when we were unspiritual and those sorts of things. Joseph started out a spoiled brat.

There's just no way around it. The dude was spoiled. The dude was walking around with no job but a Versace robe on.

I mean, it just really is pathetic. When you see him at the end, his brothers literally don't recognize who he is. First of all, they assume he's probably long dead by now or at least in some foreign country.

And there they are in Egypt trying to get food and the guy who's making the decision is the very one they sold out. And so we're going to learn a lot of lessons about leadership and about life as we just go through this series and take to heart the lessons. The fact is God loves us like we are but he loves us way too much to leave us like we are. So he's going to cause us to grow and he's going to cause us to mature. And when you get to the end of Joseph's experience, you see that he is bilingual.

He is married with two kids who are named after the things God's done in his life. All kinds of great things are happening but the journey wasn't pleasant. It meant he had to learn. He had to grow.

He had to mature. So do all of us. And I hope people will be blessed and helped as they receive this word. Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. That's James chapter 1 verses 2 and 3. A great reminder that some of life's greatest challenges produce some of our greatest spiritual growth. With that in mind, Pastor Paul has written a booklet that I believe will be a great benefit to you as you navigate your way through the challenges you may be facing. It's called Turning Your Test Into a Testimony and it's our gift to you by request for your generous gift to Destin for Victory.

That's turning your test into a testimony. Request it today when you make a generous donation. Call 855-339-5500 or visit pastorpaul.net to make a safe and secure donation online. You can also mail your gift to Destin for Victory, post office box 1767, Fremont, California 94538.

Once again, our address, Destin for Victory, box 1767, Fremont, California 94538. What happened after he was a slave, after he was traded for money by brothers who hated him, who were jealous of him, who resented the fact that he was a favorite son and then resented the fact that he had a dream of prominence. What happened? The first thing is he became focused. Focus. Athletes and entertainers talk about it all the time.

The ability to shut out the noise, to ignore criticism and pass setbacks. You see the same quality in the life of Joseph, whose story continues next. With his message unrecognizable, here is Pastor Paul Shepherd. I'm here to declare to you that God wants to do some marvelous things in your life, so marvelous that people who have known you for a long time will not recognize you because of the hand of God on your life. And even if they happen to recognize you physically, they will not recognize the person God has made you to be. They won't recognize the power in which you're operating. They won't recognize the grace in which you are moving. They won't recognize the things that God has destined you to do that are now coming to pass in your life. And we're looking at what the development of Joseph's character was like, that he became unrecognizable.

How is it that he recognizes them but they don't recognize him? What's going on in his life? What has God done over the past 22 years? And the first point I want to continue making is Joseph became focused. What happened after he was a slave? After he was traded for money by brothers who hated him, who were jealous of him, who resented the fact that he was a favorite son and then resented the fact that he had a dream of prominence.

What happened? The first thing is he became focused. When you get to Genesis chapter 39, you discover that as a slave in Egypt, he is bought by a man named Potiphar who is one of the officials of Pharaoh. And he starts out as a lowly slave in Potiphar's house. But I want you to notice right away that it says about him, verse 2 of Genesis 39, the Lord was with Joseph and he prospered. This tells me that Joseph did not focus his attention on the wrong things or the wrong people.

I want you to notice with me that the focus was of such that you don't see Joseph talking about, I don't believe my brothers did this to me. He doesn't spend his time crying over challenging circumstances. He doesn't spend his time plotting revenge. He doesn't spend his time saying, well, obviously nothing good can happen in my life. I'm no longer with my family.

I'm no longer a spoiled child in my daddy's house. I'm now a lowly slave so who cares what happens? You know how that mentality can be. We see it a lot on the news. You see people who do stupid things because they have a sense of hopelessness about their lives. They don't care at the end of the day because they don't feel any sense of God moving in their lives. They don't have any sense of purpose or direction and so they do stupid things and we see it all the time, crazy, ridiculous murders and hijackings and kidnappings and all kinds of stupid things because people don't really care. At the end of the day, the most dangerous people you and I are living around are these people who just don't give a flip. They don't give a flip. If you quote me, quote me right. Want to make sure you're listening.

If your heart skipped a beat, pastor got it covered. I know exactly what I wanted to say. They don't. They don't care. They could care less. Do you know how dangerous people are when they just don't care one way or the other? They don't care whether they live or die. They don't care whether they go to jail or stay.

You used to be able to threaten folks. If you act crazy, you won't go to jail. There's a whole lot of people out here who say, I just got out of jail.

Jail doesn't mean anything to me. I'll never forget as a young man before I moved into ministry and all that was just working out of college, just doing whatever you could do, waiting for the right thing to come along. One of my jobs was working at a loan company in accounts receivable trying to collect money people had borrowed from the company and said they were going to pay back. And I was one of the collection officers in one of the jobs I had and I had to call delinquent people as part of what I did. And I called this one man and said, listen, you are X number of days behind in your loan payment and the company needs a payment.

When can we get payment from you? This one man said to me, I'm not paying y'all. And I said, sir, you signed the loan agreement.

And I was very polite in explaining to him that he had agreed. He said, I know exactly what I signed. He said, and I'm telling you, I'm not paying y'all. Furthermore, I don't want you calling my house anymore.

And so the protocol of this particular company was I had to say to him, well, now, if you don't do that, somebody is going to come to your home as the next step and have a discussion with you about the consequences of the delinquency of this loan. And he said, y'all can send somebody out here if you want, but I'm telling you now I will meet them with my gun and I will blow them into the street. I said, sir, you won't do that because you don't want to waste your life and waste all the potential of your future and go to jail. And he said to me, I just got out of jail. And I promise you, I know how to handle myself there.

So jail is nothing to me. Y'all come out here if you want to. One of y'all going to be dead. What do you do when folk don't care? You better have your hope sold in Jesus because if you're depending on people to do what's right by you, if you're depending on circumstances to always fall in place for you, you are in the wrong world. We live in a fallen world among fallen people who are submitted to a fallen enemy, Satan, and you don't know what's going to happen.

We live in uncertain times and we live in a place where the old folks had it right. They said in times like these, you need a savior. You need an anchor.

Be very sure that your anchor holds and grips the solid rock. And I'm here to tell you that you can't afford to get sidetracked because there's no certainty in this world except your walk with the Lord and what he is destined to do in your life. Joseph had no certainty that he was going to remain the favorite son in his daddy's house and sure enough, as God would have it, he finds himself a lowly slave in a foreign country but he refuses to focus on that negativity. He instead, what does he do? He becomes focused on being an excellent servant. Why is he focused on being an excellent servant? Because he's a slave.

A slave's job is to serve. Wherever you find yourself in life, whatever station you find yourself in life, you are to excel there. I came to tell somebody, God's calling on your life in this season is to excel where you are.

How do you do that? You do that by making sure you learn how to take the Lord with you everywhere you go. See, a lot of us want to see the Lord's presence only in the context of wonderful things happening to us. But the Bible talks about the Lord's presence being with us in some very dark and dismal places. When you read your Bible, God's not just with you on the mountain top. He's with you in the valley. Psalm 23 says, yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Why? Because of who's with me in the valley. Listen, some of you all got to quit claiming your mountain top so much that you ignore the fact that God's with you before you get to the mountain top. You got to claim the victory in the valley. You got to say, I'm not where I want to be.

I don't like this dark, dingy, damp valley, but I love my company. The Lord is with me and he's going to protect me while I am here. We'll be right back with more of today's Destined for Victory message from Pastor Paul Shepard. Listen to the broadcasts on demand at pastorpaul.net.

That's pastorpaul.net, where you'll find a host of great resources at our online store, including books and DVD messages from Pastor Paul. From the life of Joseph, here again as pastor with the rest of today's Destined for Victory message, Unrecognizable. I want somebody to claim the victory before you get where you're going and the way to do that is recognize the Lord is with you.

Why? He said he would never leave you, never forsake you. You're on a job you don't like, but God's with you on that job you don't like. You're working around people you wish you didn't have to work with, but the Lord is with you while you're with them. You are under circumstances you want desperately to change, but the Lord is with you right where you are. You're in a marriage that isn't all that much fun, but God says I am with you in this marriage and I will get you through it. You're dealing with some family crisis, some personal trouble.

Whatever it is, I want somebody to see God is with you right where you are and like Joseph, you can prosper in a place you would prefer not to be in. You can prosper right where you are. You can prosper with a supervisor that gets on your last nerve. You can prosper doing things that you'd rather not do. You can prosper being overlooked and underpaid. You can prosper people disrespecting you.

You can prosper while folk are taking credit for things you did. You can prosper raising your kids through the different seasons of their lives. God can give you toddler raising grace. Preteen raising grace. Teenage raising grace. Come on. Young adult raising grace. Chronologically they're no longer your kids, but you know if you turn them loose, all hell going to break loose.

So you're still doing a little overtime. God will give you grace at every season and so I need you to understand something. Joseph didn't just prosper. When you see him later on up in the palace, Joseph prospered as a slave. I'm here to tell you it's because he focused on the right things. He said, Lord, help me to be an excellent servant and with the Lord blessing him and the Lord working through him, he was so good that we are told in Genesis 39 that Potiphar saw.

This is marvelous to me. When Potiphar saw the hand of the Lord was on him, how does Potiphar, a pagan, see the hand of the Lord? He doesn't even know the Lord.

Have you ever heard preaching about the Lord? He's not in a country where there's any servants of Jehovah except this guy who works for him and Joseph wasn't there preaching. He was there focused on being a servant, but what this means is Potiphar didn't know what deity Joseph knew, but he knows this guy's in touch with somebody. I see a divine hand on him and when the Lord showed himself through Joseph's excellence, the Bible says that even Potiphar saw the Lord's hand on him and promoted him and he became, I love this, in his daddy's house, he was favored and he hadn't done anything to be favored. He was just a spoiled boy and he was the first son of Rachel. And so you got to understand that what he got in his daddy's house was not as a result of his focus, but what he got in Potiphar's house was a result of him focusing his attention on the right things. And I love that the Lord so blessed him until he got promoted through the ranks of slave and he became the head servant in Potiphar's house.

I know the other servants who had been there for years were like, uh-uh, wait now, hold up, he just got here. What's up with this? But they're slaves, they can't say anything, they can't start a slave union. You know what I'm saying? You know what that tells me? Favor ain't fair. When God's favor is on your life, you just got to learn. People aren't going to understand it. This isn't something to be understood.

It's an intangible. It is the Lord's favor. I want somebody to get so focused until you will see God's favor and other people will see God's favor in your life. And when God starts favoring, you don't even bother trying to explain it. You're going to see haters rise up, that's what they do.

They don't like seeing somebody prosper. You'll be driving favor. You'll be living in a favorable circumstance.

You'll be working a favorable job. And people won't understand it, but don't bother trying to explain yourself to them. In fact, you might want to get yourself a bumper sticker and just tell the world, I know it's favor.

What can I say? It's favor. Just testify as you go through life.

I know it's not fair, it's favor. Joseph was focused enough where the favor of the Lord came upon him. Before I get off at this point, I want you to understand the importance of focus because some of us, I'm convinced, are focused on all the wrong things and all the wrong people. And you got to get focused on pleasing God right where you are. Lord, I am where I don't want to be, but until you get me out of here, I want to please you and I want to be focused on serving you and doing your will. I want to be focused on taking care of the matters that you want me to take care of and I'm going to leave all the results with you. Here's the way Paul puts that kind of single-mindedness.

In Philippians chapter 3, verses 12 through 14, Paul says, not that I've already obtained all this. See, some of you all are looking at where you know God has destined you to be. You have a vision in your heart. You have a word from God you've been holding on to.

Some of you have it posted up on your job, in your office or something like that. And you got the vision and you've written it. People are right to vision and that's all that's good. Vision written down and you look at it every day, that's great. But right now, you are nowhere near the fulfillment of that vision.

What do you do? You focus on where you are right now. Paul said, not that I've already attained where I'm going or have already been made perfect, but what does he say? But I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

What does that mean? Paul says, I want to know God in a powerful way. And he says, I'm not there yet. I'm not where I want to be. He said, but I have a single minded pursuit of it.

I'm forgetting everything behind me. I'm straining toward what's ahead because my goal is to please God and to experience what he has destined for my life. That's where you got to be at this season of your life. My job in this season of life is to please God. That's going to mean he's going to call me to please some people. He's going to cause me to work right on my job and he can prosper me for his own purpose there. God wants to testify by what a good employee you are. God wants to testify.

God wants to give you divine appointments that will be set up as a result of your diligence and your focus on the right things. Don't spend your time fighting with people on your job. Don't get into these skirmishes. It's not worth it. I said, it's not worth it. It can't be a fight if you don't participate. A fight requires combatants, multiple combatants.

If they run in their mouth and you just smile, that's not a fight. You just say, I'm sorry you're frustrated. You keep on doing what you're doing. You stay focused because the favor on Joseph's life followed his focus and the favor on your life is going to follow your focus. Be like Paul, one thing I do.

See, a lot of y'all got about 10, 12 things on your agenda. Paul said, no, one thing I do, I'm straining toward one thing, that is to please God so that I can experience all that he has destined for my life. Consider these words from Micah chapter 6 verse 8. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? If you want to drown out all the clutter, including your own challenges, meditate on that verse and put it into practice.

Focus on pleasing God, walking humbly with him according to his will and purpose, and you'll find joy and peace even in the midst of your most difficult trials. Thanks for being with us for today's message, unrecognizable. If you'd like more information about the Destined for Victory ministry or a special thank you gift we have for you as you generously support this ministry, be sure to stop by our website, pastorpaul.net.

That's pastorpaul.net. Now for us, our enemies really is threefold. I've taught many times before, a believer faces three enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil. All of us face the world, the flesh, and the devil. What does that mean?

That means we have to avoid the pitfalls that come with buying into a world system. That's next time in Pastor Paul's message, unrecognizable. Until then, remember, he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. In Christ, you are destined for victory. .