I’m a little bit hoarse, so you might have to turn that up just to touch back there. And I have enjoyed the good singing tonight and the choir and Brother JP. What a wonderful what a wonderful message helped us. Amen. I appreciate that. And I call that preaching. Amen. Let me take a sip of this water.
I guess it’s mine. I hope it is. I was going to say if it wasn’t, it is now. We’re going to be in the book of Genesis tonight. I’m going to read a little bit from chapter number 47, genesis, chapter 47. He started on Monday night a little bit in the life of Joseph. Just some things the Lord been dealing with me about this week and I think we’ll continue with that tonight in Genesis, chapter number 47. I do want to say thank you. I probably won’t preach tomorrow night, so I would take the time while I’m up here and got a minute or two and it won’t be long, but thank you for the good place we have to stay. We’ve been staying at the Davis Bed and Breakfast and comes complete with grandchildren and we’ve been enjoying that. Brother Gary said to me earlier this week, we were talking about inlaws. He said, what do in laws and fish have in common? He said, they both start to stink after about three days. So we’ve been there all week. You’ll just have to ask Eric about that. I appreciate that. I appreciate the church, what you do for us, and thank you for allowing us to be here. Thank you for how you treat my daughter and my grandchildren, my son in laws. You do what you want to with him. But somebody said one time that handing your daughter to a son in law was like handing a strategy is to a gorilla. But it’s been better than that. And I appreciate Brother Eric, Brother Davis, Pastor Davis. And I appreciate Brother Dale Vance and his friendship and their family and appreciate the church. Here Genesis 47. I want to talk to you a little bit more about Jacob tonight than about Joseph. But in Genesis 47, Jacob is going to come to Egypt. Chapter number 45, joseph has revealed himself to his brethren. They have come home in chapter 46 and told Jacob about the fact that Joseph is alive and there are wagons that come along. He sees those wagons, his spirit is revived. In chapter 46, he heads for Egypt. I’ll read to you about that in a moment. And in chapter 47, the Bible says this then Joseph came and told Pharaoh and said, my father and my brethren and their flocks and their herds and all that they have are come out of the land of Canaan. And behold, they are in the land of Goshen. And he took some of his brethren, even five men, and presented them unto Pharaoh. And Pharaoh said unto his brethren, what is your occupation. And they said unto Pharaoh, thy servants are shepherds, both we and also our fathers. They said, moreover unto Pharaoh, for the soldier and the land are we come. For thy servants have no pasture for their flocks, for the famine is sore in the land of Canaan. Now therefore we pray thee, let thy servants dwell in the land of Goshen. And Pharaohs fake unto Joseph saying, thy father and thy brethren are come unto thee. Now watch this little phrase in verse six. The land of Egypt is before thee in the best of the land. Make thy father and brethren to dwell in the land of Goshen. Let them dwell. And if thou knowest any man of activity among them, then make them rulers over my cattle. And Joseph brought in Jacob, his father, and sent him before Pharaoh. And Jacob. Blessed Pharaoh. And Pharaoh said unto Jacob, how old art thou? And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, the days of the years of my pilgrimage are 130 years. Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been and have not attained in the days of the years of the life of my father’s in the days of their pilgrimage. And Jacob blessed Pharaoh and went out from before pharaoh. And Joseph placed his father and his brethren and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land of Ramses, as Pharaoh had commanded. And Joseph nourished his father and his brethren in all his father’s household with bread according to their families. Let’s pray a moment. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. I pray you’ll help us tonight to preach what you have put on our hearts. Pray you help me to say what needs to be said. I pray you’d season it with the Holy Spirit of God. And I pray as always, Lord, that you will be glorified. And if you get glory, your people will be helped. I pray in Jesus name, amen. I had sent for a book and I got that book in the mail. It’s a book on a commentary that I’ve never read on the Book of Revelation. And I intended in my heart for the past two weeks to preach out of Revelation every night. But somehow I’m on the wrong end of the book. I got reading in the Book of Genesis and the Lord kept putting these little thoughts in my mind. And when he does that, they go from my mind to my heart and then I have to preach them. And there is a little thought here that interests me. It’s found in verse six, this little phrase the land of Egypt is before thee. The land of Egypt is before thee. Now, if you study your Bible and think about Egypt egypt the name and the nation, the history of it, how it’s portrayed in the Bible. Egypt represents everything that is wrong with the world. Egypt represents sorrow. Egypt represents Abominations. It represents idolatry. It represents captivity and bondage. It represents everything that’s wrong, everything that you and I are against everything that the Bible is against. And yet here in Genesis, chapter number 47 we find the people of God leaving the Promised Land, the land of Canaan and going to Egypt. I read in chapter number 46, verses three and four the Lord said to Jacob and he said, I am God, the God of thy father. Fear not to go down into Egypt for I will there make of thee a great nation. I will go down with thee into Egypt. I will also surely bring thee up again and Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes. So the Lord has told Jacob to leave the promised land. There is a famine in Canaan. You know the story how Joseph has been raised to the prime minister of Egypt and there is corn in Egypt. And God tells Jacob to leave the land of promise and to go down to Egypt. I remember that Abram got in trouble doing that leaving the land of Promise and going down to Egypt. I remember that Lot got in trouble because he looked at Sodom and Gamora in the well watered plain and he said it was like the land of Egypt and like coming unto Zords. So there’s always seems to be trouble going down to Egypt. And yet God tells Jacob here that it is a necessity that the children of God go down and dwell in Egypt. I want to say this to you tonight. It is a necessity that you and I, who are the children of God deal with Egypt. Now, Egypt represents the world and everything that’s wrong with the world. And you and I would look around at the world and say I don’t want to be a part of that. I don’t want to be involved with that. I don’t want to be connected with that. But if you and I don’t do something with Egypt and with the world the world’s going to die and go to hell. And so we cannot shut ourselves away tonight. We must deal with Egypt. I remember I heard a funny story about a fellow who went to a monastery which is kind of like the way most of us would like to live. We like to shut ourselves up in a monastery and never have anything to do with the world. And they brought this fella in and they put him in the monastery and the fellow in charge of it said, now you can say two words. He said, you stay here a year. You can say two words. And so he stayed there a year and he brought him in at the end of the year and he said, all right, you can say your two words. He said food bad. They sent him back to his room. He stayed there two years or another year when the year was over, the fella said, now you can say two more words. He said, Bed hard, sent him back to his room and he stayed a year and he came back, he could say two more words. He said, I quit. And the fellow looked at him, said, I’m not surprised. You haven’t done anything since you’ve been here except complain. But we want to sometimes shut ourselves off. We want to be isolationist. We want to say, well, I don’t want to have anything to do with the world. And I understand the idea of separation and I understand all of that, but you and I must live in Egypt in a sense, in the world, be in the world, but not of the world. So God is going to send he’s going to send Jacob and the people of God down to Egypt. They’re going to live amongst this worldly crowd, this crowd filled with idolaters. And sometimes when we look at the world, we’re fearful of it. We look out in the world and we say to ourselves, I don’t want to get involved in that. I don’t know. I don’t want to be tainted by that. I don’t know if I can handle that. The world Egypt represents everything that we fear and everything we don’t want to be involved in. But I want you to notice what God does with the people of Israel while they’re in Egypt. There are three things and all I want to do tonight. I want to encourage you and encourage myself that we should be involved in the world, involved in a way to bring the knowledge of Christ to the world, that we shouldn’t shut ourselves away from the world, that we should not fear the world, that we should not be isolationist. I want us to see what God did for Israel here as he sent them down to Egypt. Here’s the first thing I want you to notice. In Egypt, god had a place for Jacob. He had a place for him. The Bible said that they lived in the land of Goshen, the land of Egypt. Verse six is before thee. Now watch this in the best of the land, make thy father and brethren to dwell in the land of Goshen, let them dwell. And if thou knowest any men of activity among them, make them rulers over my cattle. So when they came down to Egypt, god did not leave them floundering out in this society, but God had a special place for them. And I thought to myself, that’s the way it is in the world that we live. We must spend time in Egypt. But God has a place for us, a dwelling place, and it’s right here, right down at the house of God. He has prepared a place for us where we can be refreshed, where we can live and then go out in the world and do the work of God. I’ll tell you what goshen is and what the Church is. It is a place of pleasantness. The Bible said, in the best of the land, make thy father and brethren to dwell. I want to say this to your friend. The Church is the best place you’ll ever get involved with. The people of God are the best people you ever be involved in. And when we come david said this. I was glad when they said unto me, let us go out into the house of the Lord and I like to come to the house of God. You know what it does? It gets me prepared to go back out into Egypt and go out in the world. We’ll come in here in the man of God. We’ll preach the word of God to us. We’ll sing the songs of Zion. We’ll enjoy the fellowship of believers. And then we’ll go back out in the world and work our jobs and do the things we’re supposed to do to try and tell the world about Christ. But we have a place in this world called the house of God. Goshen is a place of pleasantness. It’s a place of proximity. Joseph had said this to Jacob before they came up to the land of Egypt. He said in Genesis 45, and thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen and thou shalt be near unto me. You know who Joseph represents in this story? You know who? He’s a type of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he said, I’ll tell you what. When you get into Goshen, you’ll be close to where I am. Can I tell you? Somewhere two or three are gathered together. There am I in the midst of them. When you come down the House of God, you want to get close to the Lord. I’ll tell you where you can get close to it. Right down here amongst the people of God. You can pray together, you can sing together, you can rejoice together. We can study together, and we can get ourselves prepared for what has to go on out there in Egypt. It’s a place of pleasantness, a place of proximity, and it’s a place of protection. In Exodus, chapter eight, the Bible says, godsend and I will sever in that day the land of Goshen in which my people dwell that no swarms of flies shall be there to the end that thou mayest know that I am the Lord in the midst of the earth. Only in the land of Goshen, where the children of Israel were, there was no Hail in verse number 26. And what he’s saying is, I’m separating that place. I’m going to put my hand on that place. I’m going to protect that place. I’m glad for the church. I’m glad it’s a place where God’s hand is and God’s protection is. You say, Preacher, when I get out in Egypt and I get out in the world, I tell you, there are attacks, there are difficulties, well, I’ll tell you what you do. Come down the house of God and rejoice in the fellowship of believers and the good presence of God. Where would we be tonight without the church? Goshen reminds me of the church in Egypt. God had a place for Jacob. But then here’s the second thing. In Egypt, god had a prince for Jacob. It interests me that when Jacob comes to Egypt, a place of idolatry, a place of wickedness, a place of immorality Potipher’s wife teaches us that when he came to Egypt, pharaoh had an interest in him. Pharaoh was interested in Jacob, getting what he needed. You know, it seems to be a pattern in the Bible that when you go out and do the work of God and get involved in the world in this sense, trying to be right with God and a testimony to the world, god has men. They’re not always Godly men. They’re not always Christian men. They’re not always spiritual people. But somehow God moves on their heart that they take an interest saying virtual. I don’t know about that. Well, let’s ask a couple of people. Let’s ask Joseph. Joseph is down there fulfilling the will of God in his life. He gets thrown in the prison. And what does the Bible say? God gave him favor with the keeper of the prison fires. I know the keeper of the prison didn’t believe in God. Not the God of Joseph. Not the God of Jacob. But God is bigger than whether he believed or not. Even if we deny him, he cannot deny himself. And so God worked on the heart of that keeper of the prison and gave Joseph favor. And it looks to me like Joseph ended up with more freedom in the prison than his brothers had outside the prison. Let’s ask Daniel. Carried off into Babylon, and there’s that prince of the eunuchs. And the Bible said that God brought Daniel into tender favor with the prince of the eunuchs until it almost looks like the prince of the eunuchs who answers to the king has suddenly sided with the Hebrew slaves against his own king. God knows how to do that. Send the people by that we need to help us. I thought about Paul in the centurion in the New Testament. That Roman centurion found out Paul was a Roman, put guards around him, kept him safe. That’s an unlikely duo right there. That’s an unlikely pair. Here in Egypt, God had a prince for Jacob. There was a pharaoh. Pharaoh was a man prepared. God had prepared him through the life of Joseph and the testimony of Joseph for the day when the people of God came. And I want to tell you for safe, preacher, I don’t know if I get involved out in the world trying to do the work of God, there’ll be folks that are against me. Yeah, there will be. There’ll be enemies. There are always enemies. But God has a way of bringing up men and women and others, some that don’t even know God, that stand with you and stand behind you and help you in the things of God. I think about over the years, men that have helped me, businessmen and other men that have helped me along the way that God prepared their hearts. I thought about my father in law. My father in law worked for Row International. He was in the music business. Preacher what kind of music business? He built Jukeboxes and they built Jukeboxes and Dollar Bill changers. And Papa had worked there 30 years and they went on strike. And God had been dealing with our hearts about going out and doing what we’re doing, singing and preaching. And Pop had been doing it sometimes on weekends, I don’t know how long, since the girls were little, they started with Pop and NAN and the three girls and instruments and a bass guitar and a bass amp and a Volkswagen Beetle. You figure out how they did that. But he’d been working and God had been dealing with our hearts about going out on the road and doing something popping. Been working there 30 years and all of a sudden they went on strike. So they got a new contract. When they got a new contract, there was a clause in the contract that he was not expecting. There was a clause that every person that worked there, that had worked there for ten years or more was to be allowed to take a year off, a year sabbatical for missionary work. And when they came back, they would lose anything that they had. They’d be at the same rate of pay in the same position. He said, Preacher, how did that happen? Well, one of those fellows that was a boss there was a Mormon, and so he worked that all out. You said, Preacher, what was that? That was God working behind the scenes with an unlikely ally, an unlikely fellow that would help him along the way men prepared. And I thought about this. You say, Preacher, I want to do the work of God, but I don’t know how it can work out. Well, God will work it out. You don’t have to work it out. God will work it out. I remember Brother Billy, I’ve got a little outline here, but I’m not going to pay attention to it. I remember Brother Billy, Billy Kelly saying one time, he said, working for the Lord, I have lived for 40 years hand to mouth. And I looked at him, he said, God’s, hand to my mouth. God’s been feeding me all along the way. I wish I had time to tell you today about the things that God has done along the way in my life. I’m trying to do the work of God. You say, Preacher, I don’t know if I’ll make it all be faithful to God, do like Jacob did, go where god tells you to go and God will take care of you. And you don’t have to be an evangelist for that to happen. You don’t have to be a pastor for that to happen. All you have to be is in the will of God. And God will send you a support and heal provide for you from the most unlikely places, the most unexpected places. It’ll all come from God. But to be surprised whose hands it comes through. I was passing a little church up and I’m off the outline now, so just forget about it. I was passing a little church up in Michigan. It was the poorest county in the state of Michigan. We had folks that worked all week and they’d take a paycheck home. $20. $30 would be what they’d take home. And those folks would come and after they tied the support admissions, I’d come to my mailbox and I’d open up an envelope with my name on it and there’d be a check in there for $2. A check in there for $5. You said, Preacher, that’s not much money. That’s a lot of money when all you was taking home was $30 or $40. And they would do that because they wanted the work of God to go on. I remember when Rachel was born, there was a mistake on our insurance and we didn’t get on insurance. All of a sudden, we’re going to have a baby. And there were some complications and it couldn’t be just the normal thing. We had to have some special things go on. And so it was going to be a big bill. I mean, a big bill, and a lot bigger than I was able to handle. And so I was at the mailbox one day and I was talking to this fell and I pulled out this check, and I was talking to him and I said, you know how you do? You hold that. I knew it was a check in there. You hold it up to the light and see what it is. And I could see a two on there. And I thought, well, this is one of those $2 checks for one of my members. So I just kept on talking to the fellow and I ripped the end open and I pulled it out. When I pulled out and looked at it, I stopped in mid sentence. It wasn’t $2. It wasn’t $20. It wasn’t $200. It’s $2,000. It was a cashier’s check. You said, Preacher, where did it come from? Well, I don’t know who delivered it, but I know who sent it. Amen. God. I sent that thing along. God took care of that. I could go through tech. Can I tell you another one? I’ll tell you, one day, Sherry and I, we were just getting started. We didn’t have any children. We were in the trailer. We were down at Billy Kelly’s camp meeting. The camp meeting was over. Brother Kelly didn’t know this, but we didn’t have we had about $0.10. We had a little gas in the truck. We didn’t have anything to eat. In fact, we’ve been eating grilled cheese sandwiches every meal for two weeks. I’m talking about breakfast, lunch and supper. And the only reason we’ve eaten that is because there was a millionaire that came to camp meeting. You remember when the government was giving out those blocks of cheese and that millionaire gave us a block of cheese. I don’t know why he had it, but he gave us that. So we’re having grilled cheese at now, I like grilled cheese sandwiches, but if you eat them breakfast, lunch and supper for two weeks, when you close your eyes at night, they’ll start chasing you around in your sleep. Remember that little Pacman game? Yeah. Imagine a grilled cheese chasing you like that. So I’m just praying. I’m just praying, Lord, a little bit of meat. Just a little meat. Just a little so there was a fellow on the radio, his name was Kyle Story, his old bluegrass picker. And every afternoon at 01:00 on the Greek radio station he had the old time Preacher’s Gospel Bluegrass Hour. He played gospel bluegrass. So I tuned it in on the radio. I didn’t have a cell phone, I didn’t have Internet. Nobody had ever heard of that. Then al Gore not invented it. So I turned on the radio and I listened to old Jack Storey. And he said or Carl’s Story was his name. Jack Storey is a preacher. He said well, he said, we’re going to have a little contest. I’m going to play a song, and if you be the fifth caller and tell me who this is in this song, said, you’ll win a prize. He didn’t say what the prize was. Well, I’d been trying to learn to play the fiddle. And there was a fella, Kenny Baker, who was a fiddler, who used to play with Bill Monroe and all these other fellas, and I’d been listened to a tape of him play, trying to learn those licks on the fiddle. So when the song started, it was just the fiddler and man, I recognized it right off. It was Kenny Baker. I’d been listening to him. And so I got on the phone. I didn’t have a phone in the trailer. I ran over to Miss Judy Smith’s house that lived next door. I said, I got to borrow your phone. She said okay. I called the radio station. I called and I was the fifth caller and I won. And I went back to the trailer, and sitting in the trailer, an old Carl store comes on. He said, well, we’ve had a winner. He talks like he’d known me all his life. He said old Brian McBride called us. He’s from Bean. Blossom, Indiana. He said, we’re going to have to give a little commercial. He said, we’re going to be up there in the festival this year. And he said he’d been the fifth caller and he’s won a chicken dinner at Bojangles. And you know what we did? We didn’t have enough gas to get lost and no money to buy gas. So I called the station. I found out where it was because I couldn’t get lost. I couldn’t afford to. I drove to the station, gotten a certificate, went to the Bowl Jungles. We got a three piece chicken dinner with rice and cajun gravy and some kind of beans and biscuits. I’m telling you, we went home and shouted her out and had a time. Carl Storey didn’t know I was in the work of the Lord. I don’t know if Carl Storey even knew the Lord, but I’ll tell you, God put him in there and let me have a little chicken. And I’ve often thought, if God cares whether I eat chicken or cheese, imagine how he cares about the big things in life, the real trials. Can I tell you another one? Rachel just been born. And she’d been born and she had some difficulty, and so she’s in the hospital. She’s a typical preacher’s kid. She’s born 126 in the afternoon. And so I missed the morning service and the evening service. I had this little Volkswagen Rabbit. And I got in that Rabbit on Monday and I was headed up as about, I don’t know, mom was an hour and a half or something like that up to the hospital where Rachel was, where Mama was. And so I headed up there and I’m going up State Route 40. State Route 40 between Alligan and Papa. I know you don’t know where that is, but I’m going up 40 and I’m driving along in that little Volkswagen Rabbit. And all of a sudden it quit. And I just kind of just kind of drifted over to the side. And I was sitting there cursing German engineering. Not cursing, really, but having disparaging thoughts anyway. And then I looked at the fuel gauge and I found it wasn’t the Germans, it was the Irish that were to blame. I’d let the thing run out of gas. So I’m standing there, leaning against the car, and this I don’t remember if it was a Cadillac or Lincoln. It was the biggest car I’d ever seen pulled up and stopped and I could just see through those tinted windows. I saw this man do this and the window started coming. And that impressed me because all my windows went down like this. That window went down and he looked and he said, you got trouble? I said, yes, sir, I’m out of gas. He said, hop in. I got in. He said, I don’t know. I don’t know my way around here. Is there a gas station? I said up here in Allegon. It’s about 10 miles. He said okay. So I’m looking at him, he’s driving. I’m thinking to myself, I need to talk to this man about. The Lord. And then I’m thinking to myself, if he gets mad, I’ll be walking.
So I got all my courage up and I eased into it. So how do you ease into it? I didn’t start preaching on hell. I said, do you go to church? He said, I do. I said, well, that’s good. I felt a little better, I got a little more courage. I said, Are you a born again believer? He said, I am. Said, I’m born again. I said that’s wonderful. We talked a little bit. I told him what I was doing out there. And I said to him, what are you doing out here? You don’t even know where you are. He said, Well, I live in Indiana. I have businesses in Michigan. And he said, Every couple of weeks I have to drive from Indiana up to Michigan. I said, I always come up I come up 94, Interstate 94, and hit Interstate 31 to go north. But he said, Today I was praying and the Lord when I got to exit 60, the Lord said, Get off here. He said, I’ve never gone this way. I don’t even know where this goes. He said, I didn’t know why the Lord wanted me to get up. Well, I knew why, because the preacher had run out of gas. So he took me up. He took me up to Allegand. I didn’t have a gas can. He bought me a gas can, he filled it with gas. He drove me back to the car. I put the gas in the car. I went to hand him the gas can. He said no. He said you keep it. You seem like the type might need it again.
And then as he turned away, he stopped and he got his wallet out and he pulled out a piece of money and he hand it to me. He said, Buy that little girl something from me. I’m just telling you, if you and I will just go where God tells us to go, do what God tells us to do. Be what God tells us to be. God will send somebody along. Just like God had pharaoh already. Who would have expected Pharaoh to do that? God had him prepared. I’ll give you the third thing and I’ll be done. God had a place for Jacob. God had a prince for Jacob. And in Egypt, God had a purpose for Jacob. I want you to think about Jacob. There’s something said twice in our text, verse number seven, chapter 47. And Joseph brought in Jacob’s father and set him before Pharaoh. Now watch this. And Jacob. Blessed Pharaoh. And then in verse ten, when it’s all said and done, this meeting. And Jacob. Blessed Pharaoh. You know, in the book of Hebrews, the Bible said that the less is blessed of the greater. Now, if you and I were to look at this, we would think Pharaoh was the greater he is for all practical purposes, the king of the world. And here we have this old shepherd. I like to picture this in my mind. I got an outline, but again, I’m going to ignore it. I like to picture Jacob limping into the palace because you remember what happened to him. He’d wrestled with Jesus and he touched his thigh and the sinews had shriveled up and he was a limper. From that time forward, I like to think about him limping into that palace and I don’t know what all was going on. But if you read, if you study about Egypt, they worshiped one fella I read said they had 80 million gods. I don’t know how in the world you could do that, but they worship the river, they worship the sun, they worship the eagle, they worship the cows, they worship the flies, they worship the frogs, they worship the Nile. They worshiped it all. And I could imagine Jacob coming in and limping past the idols. And those idols have eyes, they have mouths, they may have hands. But every time Jacob takes a step on that shriveled up thigh of his, every step says, there’s a real God. There’s a real God. Yes, sir. That’s why I’m walking the way I’m walking. Because there’s a real God that can touch you and change the way you walk. He’s not just an idol. He’s not made of clay. He’s not made of gold. He’s not made of silver. He’s not made of bronze. He’s a real god. He could touch you and change what you are. And I think God would send Jacob down there to have a profession before Pharaoh that there is a God who is real. There is a God who can touch you. There is a God who can change your life. Didn’t he do that for you? Didn’t he change the way you walked when he touched you? Well, he didn’t make a limper out of you, but he sure made a leaner out of you. You’ve been leaning on him ever since, and you’re not the same as you were. And when people see you, they used to know you like you were saying, you don’t walk like you used to walk anymore. How come? Because there’s a real guy, when he touches you are not the same. He wanted Jacob to come and give Pharaoh a testimony of the reality of a real god. And not only that, but he wanted Jacob to remind him that life is a pilgrimage. In verse nine, Pharaoh says, how old art thou? I think he asked that because of the way Jacob looked looked at him and said how old he must be. How old are you? Here’s Jacob’s answer. And Jacob, son of Pharaoh. The days of the years of my pilgrimage are 130 years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life then and have not attained. In the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage. Now here’s a man seated on the throne. He has all of the world, the known world, at his disposal. He has everything, humanly speaking, a man can want. And Jacob says to him, this man who’s enjoying all the pleasures of the treasures of Egypt, jacob says to him, I want you to know I’m just passing through here. I want you to know this is not the best place I’m going to be. I want you to know this is just a stop and overplay on the journey. I want you to know I’m on a pilgrimage. I want you to know, as the Hebrew writer said, I desire a better country, a heavenly one, made without hand. Can you see? Can you just see? Can you just see Pharaoh saying, passing through? Look at all I’ve got. And Jacob would say, everything you got is not a thing compared to where I’m headed, friend. I’m on a pilgrimage. I’m on a journey. This world is not my home. I’m just passing through. Wouldn’t it be good if that world out there, that Egypt out there, would see us and hear us say, this is not our home. We’re just passing through. We got our affection set on another country. We got a far away looking our eyes. We desire a better world, heavenly. Then he wanted to bless Pharaoh. You know what God wants us to be in Egypt, a blessing to Egypt. Now, they think we’re a curse, but we’re the only hope they have. And we need to tell them what Jesus has done for us. And tell them about the God of Israel, the God of Jacob, the God of Joseph, because that’s how we bless them. I was preaching up in a tent and I’m about done, I think bad. When you leave the outline, you don’t know where you’re supposed to quit. I was preaching up in a tent meeting in Lavonia, Michigan. And before I got there, I don’t know, a couple of months before I got there, one of the men got pretty sick. He was in the hospital. He was in intensive care. And they brought in a specialist. I call him a hot shot, a young doctor, highly trained to deal with this man. And in the waiting room, the church folks would come in the waiting room and gather around and pray. So every time that young doctor would come to go to the hospital, he’d pass that waiting room. There would be people round the clock from the church. In that way, I’m praying. So God raised that man up, the man that was sick. And one night, I’m getting ready to preach and I look in the back and I see this well dressed, nicelooking young fella come in. Never seen him before. I preached in that tent meeting for years. He’s sitting in the back and the preacher leaned over to me and he said, that’s that doctor I’ve been telling you about that’s that young doctor said I invited him to take me and I didn’t think he’d ever come, but he came. So I got up and preached that night. When I got in and preached, it was Friday night. It’s the last night of the meeting, and it’s always this way. In the last night of the meeting, you have the invitation and then Brother Jason Kenric will get up and he’ll start giving instructions. Fold up the chairs and do this and take this down. We’re going to take the tent down. We’re going to take the all this stuff. So I’m up on the platform. I’m putting instruments away and I look over and here’s that doctor talking to the preacher. And in a little while, I saw them come up on the platform. There was a bench up there. And I saw kneel down by the bench and I saw the preacher open his Bible. I saw them bow their heads. When they got down, they got up and Pastor Brown said to me, brother Brian, come over here, would you? I said, yes, sir. He said, Doc, tell him what just happened. And the doctor said, I just got saved. That doctor had come up to him after the invitation and said this to him. He told me later, he said that man was preaching about being saved. But he said what he said about being saved and what I’ve always thought about being saved are not the same thing. And he said I need what he was talking about. And here’s what I thought. Ain’t no telling how many years that doctor has been to school, how many degrees he has. I imagine he’s got all kinds of letters behind his name. And Preacher Brown, Steve Brown is a wonderful man. Loves God, been to Bible college, probably has a Bachelor of Religious education. I don’t know. Far as I know, he’s not a doctor or a master’s degree or anything. And what you might think is you might look at that doctor, that highly educated doctor, and look at that preacher and say, that doctor could be a blessing to that preacher. But that’s not the way it was. Absolutely. Brother Brown had a degree that that doctor did not have. Amen. It came from heaven. And he didn’t get blessed by the doctor. He blessed the doctor. I want you to remember something, friend. When you’re in Egypt, out here in this world, don’t you ever get intimidated. Yes, sir. Because somebody thinks they know this and can do that and do the other thing. God sent you down there, down to Egypt that you might bless them because you have something they need. You need Christ. So I’ll put it to you this way. The whole land of Egypt, that’s what Pharaoh said. The whole land of Egypt is before you. The whole land of Egypt is before us tonight. Let’s do something about it. Let’s bow our heads a moment. Father, we love you and we thank you for loving us. We thank you for the sermon we’ve already heard. Thank you for the privilege to preach a little bit ourselves. And I pray you’d help us tonight to get a vision of what we could do in Egypt, to want to go and be a blessing like Jacob was. And, Lord, you’ll take care of us and guide us and go with us along the way. I pray you’ll help us tonight. Help some young person tonight just to surrender themselves some middle age, some old person. Don’t matter, Lord, all of us just to say, Lord, use me for your honor and glory. Help us. I pray because, Lord, if we know you, we know more than the world knows, and we know something they need to know. So you help us tonight, whatever they need, I pray you help us. In Jesus name, amen. Amen, brother. Amen.