Clough Faith Rest Drill Lesson 1
Today we’re going to sort of transition where our pastor left us with Joseph narratives and move on in preparation for his next series which will be Ephesians. What I want to do this morning is start with Joseph and run through the fact that this man that we’ve heard so much about, and by the way, one of the blessings of what Mike did in working through Joseph’ narrative in the Old Testament is I think you’ll find in your Christian life that when you get in a jam, when the stress level gets pretty high that you can imagine and identify quite easily with those Old Testament stories. They provide some sort of food for your imagination that connects. The New Testament has a lot of promises and doctrine in it and we need those, but the Old Testament stories flush that doctrine out, make it less abstract, make it personal. And we want to remember that this man Joseph is a model of walking by faith. In Judaism Joseph is considered a model of Messiah. Now in Jewish theology the never could quite get together two areas of Messianic anticipation of the Old Testament. On the one hand they saw Joseph as the suffering Messiah; on the other hand they saw David as the reigning Messiah. And it was somewhat of a mystery in the Old Testament, how you could have a suffering Messiah and also a reigning Messiah.
But the important thing for us is they
looked to Joseph as a model. And we want
to do that this morning; we’re going to look at one verse in the New Testament
that speaks about Joseph. Before we get
there let’s review a few facts that we’ve learned about Joseph. Number one, he wasn’t a pastor; he wasn’t a
priest; he wasn’t a professional religious person. Joseph was in politics; Joseph was in
government; Joseph was in the bureaucracy.
He was the number two man in the super power of that time in
history. There’s no question about it,
But one of the greatest disasters of all
time was the famine of Joseph’s time, Joseph’s day. And it always intrigues me when I read
passages like that in the Old Testament that say there’s got to be historical
testimony to this. And I always like to
read and dig out evidences of if that really happened in
Let me read you two passages; these are passages taken from Egyptian literature, not the Bible, there are two passages here from two different men who were ministers under Joseph. These were the guys who were carrying out his tasks. And toward the end of their lives they wrote descriptions of this event in their personal histories. One of them was a man by the name of Amemi: “No one,” he said, “was unhappy in my days,” this is the politician’s memoirs, “No one was unhappy in my days, not even in the years of famine, for I had tilled all the fields in the area of Mau [sp?]” which is a segment along the Nile, “I prolonged the life of its inhabitants and preserved the food which it produced.” Now the key among translators of this text is that verb, “I preserved,” normally they didn’t preserve anything, normally they just distributed the grain but here’s a signal, why is he preserving the food? “No hungry man was in my district; I distributed equally to the widow as to the married woman; I did not prefer the great to the humble in all that I gave away.”
Here’s a report from another person, evidently in Joseph’s bureaucracy. He reports again about this famine time. “I collected corn as a friend of the harvest god. I was watchful at the time of sewing and when the famine arose, lasting many years, I distributed corn to the city each year of the famine.” So what Mike was giving us was part of history that you will not learn in college because in college if you ever do get to the original text you will find that it’s misdated.
We want to approach Joseph through a little
gimmick; we call this the faith rest drill.
We have been going over this in Thursday night Bible class and it’s a
way that pictures our walk by faith.
It’s not original; it’s been around for nearly 40 years taught by a man
in the ministry in
The second step is that you almost have sort of a private prayer meeting in your own soul about that fragment of Scripture, and you’re doing things with it. What are you doing with the promise such as, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are called according to His promise.” “Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.” What happens? Well, you have to unite that verse with your situation because if you don’t you can’t walk by faith. So how do you bring the situation together with the text? I suggest that what we are doing all the time unconsciously here, most of the time, is we’re using the pieces of truth of the Scripture to get a handle to encompass the situation. Now I’ve added something to this faith rest drill compared to how it’s historically been taught; I’ve added this thing called closure. And what do I mean by that? I mean that you do something else. There’s two things here, there’s a positive and a negative, and the negative is to do away and blow away the world alternative to walking by faith, because we have this tendency, we get besieged with it in the media, in our work place, wherever you are, in school, just walking around listening to people, reading stuff, we fill up with the things of the world. So in order to walk by faith not only do we focus on the positive side of the Word of God but we use that positive to negate the pressures that are coming against us.
And number three, we keep at it until we
can truly trust the Lord. I don’t know
how many of you have seen the movie, Perfect
Storm, but as a meteorologist of course I had to see that. And in that film there’s a drama of the air
rescue people going out and trying to rescue these boats and the script writer
of Perfect Storm actually conflated
that picture that you see from true events.
Now I want to go to one of those events in that movie to show you the
importance of a drill, then we’ll go to Joseph, of looking at this as you would
from athletic point of view, from military point of view, the Bible and the New
Testament particularly, utilizes athletic and military metaphors. And there’s a reason for it. One of the events that led to the story of Perfect Storm happened on
So they called off that mission and now
they’re 250 miles off shore
Well the helicopter is even more hairy to
do because the helicopter is in the wash of the C-130’s prop. So now the helicopter is going like this,
he’s got a boom coming out there and he’s trying to put his probe in that
boom. So here they are, trying to get
back to
Right at the time they’re doing this the
wind’s now increased to 70 knots. Now
they’ve got a real problem because now the seas are going to 80 feet; the waves
are a little exaggerated in Perfect Storm
but not quite, there were 80 foot distances between the trough and the
crest. Well this created a problem. These guys are ready to jump and it’s at
Now the co-pilot’s job is to go out; so what the pilot is trying to do is get these guys out of the chopper because he’s got this blade going around and he doesn’t want to chop them up, you can’t just crash the helicopter, it doesn’t work that way, you have to get out of it first. So the co-pilot goes out and he says this: the wind was picking up salt spray, the landing lights are making everything hazy and beyond that it was pitch black so I really couldn’t see any ting at first. Fortunately, my night vision goggles were still attached to my helmet, I wasn’t willing to jump without being able to see so I put the goggles over my eyes, took a deep breath and I jumped. Fortunately when he jumped the wave crest went by and he fell only 15 feet. He hit the water, inflated his life preserver, and now he made this statement and this is the statement I want you to listen to carefully. This is a parallel and analog to what we’re doing with the faith rest drill.
“In the military you train to the point that it gets boring and monotonous but what’s amazing is that when you get into a stressful situation you respond the way you were trained.” Let me read that again, “what’s amazing is that when you get into a stressful situation you respond the way you were trained. It’s almost like you were on automatic and you don’t have to think about what to do next. Once I hit the water the first thing that entered my mind was to consolidate my survival gear and number two to look for survivors.” Lt. Col. Buschor looked for survivors and saved those other two guys while he was swimming in 60 degree temperature for four hours. None of those men died because they were thinking clearly. They had been trained and they drilled; even the helicopter pilot got out after his helicopter went upside down in the water.
So it shows you the effect of training and drill over and over and over and over; you can’t get so much of the Word of God that you can kiss it off; you always want to back to the text, so let’s go to the text; Hebrews 11:22 and we’ll watch how at one point in Joseph’s life he was able to apply the Word in a magnificent way. If you look at this chapter of Hebrews, just observation, always look at the text. How many verses are there in this chapter? Forty verses. If you subtract four because they are introductory verses and you subtract two more because they are concluding verses; that leaves 34 verses in this chapter. Now we believe the Holy Spirit is the author of Scripture through human authors. In this case let’s look at the distribution of Scripture.
Let’s look at the distribution of subject
material and see if this doesn’t tell us something, something about the point
of the author of Hebrews. If you count
the verses up, three verses take history from Adam to Noah. From Abraham to Joseph, fifteen; from Moses
through the conquest there’s nine, and the whole Old Testament, from Judges all
the way to the end, seven. What’s the
emphasis in this chapter? It’s on the
founding family of
Why are Joseph and his fore bearers so important? Let’s look at world history a moment. Let’s look at world history a moment. There are four great events in the Scripture; at the beginning of the text there is creation, the fall, the flood and there’s the covenant. Those are the great events that shaped human history. They are the events that shape where we are today; they are the events that shape the races and the people groups. In Genesis 10-11 there are seventy people groups that come out of this period of history after the flood. So every one of us, we all have family trees and in spite of the fact that the northern Irish can’t get along with the southern Irish, the Palestinians can’t get along with the Jews, and the Thai’s can’t get along with the Vietnamese, and you have these feuds all over the globe, the bottom line—we all got off the same boat.
In Biblical history we all got off the same
boat, we are all from the family of Noah.
And out of this came all the nations of the earth. For a few centuries there was a rapid colonization
of the planet, led by Noah and his sons.
But this rapid colonization culminated in apostasy such as the
And finally what happened is that God called Abraham out. So the first event we have here is the call of Abraham, that’s all we’re worried about this morning. The call of Abraham is a momentous event. Here are the implications o that one event; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob culminating in Joseph. It answers the problem of why there are other religions I the world, but way the Bible insists that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life and no man comes unto the Father but by Him. It answers the question of Paul when he says “there is no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved.” That’s what the sense if of the gospel and every time, and I’m sure you’ve had this some time, in somebody you have talked to, you can feel the hackles when you present the gospel because they say well, that’s bigotry, when you say you’re the only people that’s right. Well, the answer to that goes back to Abraham. There wouldn’t had to have been one unique people called out if the people had adhered to the Noahic Bible that they walked off the boat with. But they didn’t; they apostacized. So God had to start a new thing with Abraham. God began a new work a counter culture.
So now if we look at Hebrews
Now if we figure this out, diagram the
text, and we say when did the Exodus happen, timeline, the Exodus happened over
here, Joseph is over here, how can he remember something that’s future? What is going on here? Is this a mistake in the text because clearly
in verse 22 you notice the Exodus [KJV: “departing of the children of
Turn back to Genesis 50. Let’s take that in context. In Genesis 50:24, here’s what was going
through Joseph’s mind. After all the adventures with his family, after the fact
that he was number two man in the super power country of
Step one, what is it? Grab a portion of Scripture; what was the Scripture he grabbed? Abrahamic Covenant. Go to Genesis 15 for a moment; here’s the exact text that he must have remembered, whether he had the text or whether Isaac kept the shreds of this portion of the Scripture or not, we don’t know where they got the text from, it certainly was not just oral tradition; In Genesis 15:12 God announces in the Abrahamic Covenant, verse 13; in 12 he starts, “And when the sun was going down a deep sleep fell upon Abram….” And verse 13, “And God said unto Abram, Know for certain,” don’t guess, “know for certain” it says, we’ll come back to that, faith is not weak knowledge. “…know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four centuries, [14] But I will judge the nation and afterward they will come out.” See the word “come out?” That’s the Exodus.
So what has Joseph done in his walk with the Lord? Number one, he’s in a situation of dying. What does he do immediately? He runs to a text with which he acts as a lever on that circumstance, now he’s got some firepower, he’s going to deal with his coming death with a text of Scripture. He goes to the plan of God for him and for his family and he begins to apply it because now if you return to Hebrews you’ll see what he did with it. In Hebrews 11:22 is says: “He made mention of the Exodus,” meaning he had grabbed hold of this fragment of Scripture and now he’s going to proceed in the faith rest drill to step two, which is to positively encircle his situation with the content of that and the meaning of that. And what does he do? “He gave orders concerning his bones.”
“He gave orders concerning his bones,” now why that? Anybody ever go to a museum display or read a book about Egyptian history? What always impresses you besides the pyramids? Their tombs. If there’s one people on the face of this planet that were preoccupied with death and the afterlife… [tape turns] … their dogs and cats, they’ve even found mummified crocodiles inside here. These people went ape with this mummification. If somebody had a pet dog they’d mummify it, you know, I want my dog with me after death, so they’d bury the dog with the owner. But all of them would be perfectly embalmed. So we have a group of people thinking in their head about eternity.
I’m going to read a section from Dr. Henry
Frankfort who for many years taught at the
“Come back to
“Thus thou shalt not die abroad, nor shall
the Asiatics bury you; you will not be placed in a sheepskin like the Asiatics,
so come back to
Now in Hebrews
[Can’t understand word] what did he
do? When he gave this command how do you
suppose that his Egyptian buddies took it?
We don’t have that in Scripture, but you know, this created social
ripples; what, the great Joseph doesn’t want to be buried in the great
tombs? Look, I made you second in
command here, and you reject it to go out with those Asiatic people that raise
corn or something in the desert? Why do
you want to do that, we have the grandeur of
Now let’s come back in Hebrews 11:22 to the first phrase that he uses, and this is the heart of it because step three in the faith rest drill is to keep at it until you can rest. Rest doesn’t mean free from pressure physically; rest here is the idea that you know your foundation, you have perfect assurance. This is not a guess, and one of the things we want to hit hard right here and we’ll do this in ensuing Sundays, if you say today, the average person walking around or your neighbor, well I believe that…. What’s the connotation? If you had said “I know that…” such and such is the case, and you say “I believe that…” such and such is the case, what do you do? Are you weakening or strengthening the sense of knowing? You’re weakening it. To the average person faith is a weak form of knowledge. Is that true? Let’s think about it for a moment.
Hebrews 11:22 says “By faith,” all the verses next to it say “by faith,” and the author of Hebrews was very careful at the beginning of this chapter to define what he’s talking about when he uses faith so let’s go back to the beginning of the chapter and ask ourselves, author of Hebrews, will you tell me a little bit about faith. Is it really true that faith is a weak knowledge? And what does he say in Hebrews 11:1, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Do you know what the word “conviction” means there? It means convincing, and how do you convince? By thinking. So is faith weak knowledge? No it isn’t, it’s being logically convinced; faith and knowledge work together in the Scripture. Don’t ever accept that…in the turn of the century liberals took over many of the great denominations, they ruined the seminaries, they took away all the libraries, it was a mess in this country. Very few of you know what really happened, the depression was a disaster in this country but very few of you have ever studied the spiritual depression that happened between 1915 and 1925 in this country. It was a total, complete disaster. And the liberals sold the idea that faith could not be based on evidence and knowledge, and there was one man who wrote a book called Christianity and Liberalism, who also wrote the book What is Faith, J. Gresham Machen, and you read that book and you see how he was defending faith is knowledge. You say well then, why didn’t they use the word “knowledge?” Because when you use the word “faith” you’re not talking about you’re just guessing at this thing. When you use the word “faith” you’re saying I’ve got a personal relationship to the One who is the truth. It’s an expression of relationship with God. That’s what faith means; it doesn’t mean you don’t know He exists.
We have problems with that relationship.
What happened to Adam and Eve five minutes after they ate? What did they do? What does the Bible say they did? They fled;
they fled and hid under the bushes. Now
let’s ask Adam and Eve, you know, we have an interview with Adam and Eve in the
bushes—Adam and Eve, do you know that God exists? Do you really know that? Of course they would know it; how could you
know that Adam and Eve knew God exists?
Well, what are they hiding in the bushes from? Clearly they knew God exist, so to make a
long story short that’s the difference.
Here’s what the Bible says about knowledge of these things. All men know God exists. If you doubt me turn to Romans 1:20 when you
get a chance. All men know God exists. The problem isn’t that we don’t know God
exists; the problem is that we do know that God exists and are desperately
trying to suppress the knowledge. That’s
the Scriptural position.
So faith is not weak knowledge. Notice again, it is “the assurance of things hoped for,” and then it says…and verse 3 is the basis of why we can say that faith is strong knowledge and not weak knowledge. Hebrews 11:3 is very, very important and I want to conclude by drawing your attention to that text. You cannot put your heart into this third verse without rebelling intellectually against about everything you’ve heard in the secular world. If we break down verse 3 it says: “By faith, we understand that the ages of history,” and the idea here is segments of time in history as we move from age to age, “the ages of history were prepared by the Word of God, so that what is seen,” what do scholars study? What is empirically there, architecture, evidences, bones, this, that, coins, pottery, written text, “the things which are seen” of history, “were not made of things which are visible.” Now here’s the secular world view, that we have a set of laws here and they march inexorably forward, the determinist naturalist view of the universe. There’s nothing here about God, it’s all closed. Forget praying, you’re not going to pray, you’re not going to change the value of G, the acceleration of gravity, they say. Axe heads floated in the Old Testament; what happened to G then; Peter walked on water, what was his G. But the idea is that by naturalism all these things are enviable, you can forget prayer, you can forget anything else, all prayer is going to do for you is a psychological bath, it’s a psychological feeling, but to talk to the God of the universe that’s going to alter history… gee, you’re just dealing with an ancient book here.
But look what Hebrews 11:3 says, this is the understanding the Holy Spirit wants for us when we talk about faith, to understand that the causative factors in history is the Word of God, the Word of God, the Word of God, the Word of God, the Word of God, the Word of God, over and over and over and over and over again the Word of God is controlling things. Now every day of my life for the past 40 years I have worked with the most sophisticated mathematical models that man has ever created to forecast the atmosphere. And the whole predication among our models is that the past is the key to the future. But inevitably involved in this elaborate modeling is always a surprise; you can never keep out the surprises, and all of a sudden we get this over here, we get this over there, well you know, I had the physics, I thought, all set up here, what’s going on? Because somebody is tampering with it all the time, in a very sneaky way because it’s hard to see where He’s doing it. Thankfully in the late 20th century in nuclear physics, where we get inside the atom and start looking, now we begin to see, oh, that’s not determinist down there, is it.
So Hebrews 11:3 is a worldview, and Hebrews 11:3 is opposite to everything that the world says. The world will not grant that all of history…and by the way, if these are segments of history, don’t just think of these as segments, that’s your life. Let’s make this your life, your personal life, here’s events in your personal life; those events didn’t happen because a computer back a million years ago programmed it to happen that way. That happened because history is personally being directed. If it weren’t why would we pray? We pray because we don’t think history is the result of a computer, but rather it is personally directed.
So the conclusion of the matter here is in the faith rest drill, and it takes time to do this, and when you’re emotionally upset and under high stress, is not the time to go searching around the Scriptures for a fragment. The time to get the Scripture is when you’re not under stress and have the peace and relative time and opportunity to hear the Word of God, read it, digest it, think about it like you’re doing now because you never know. [Can’t understand name] didn’t know that his neck was going to be broken and it happened in a fraction of a minute. Now just be thankful that he didn’t turn into a quadriplegics; that happened so fast he didn’t have time to think about it. It’s got to go back to what Lt. Col. Buschor said when he said: “In the military you train to the point that it gets boring and monotonous; but what’s amazing is that when you get into a stressful situation you respond the way you were trained.”
Are we being trained to believe the Word of God? Do we take the small trials of life that occur every day and practice using the Word of God, practice trusting the Lord, practice trusting the Lord, practice trusting the Lord, practice trusting the Lord, over and over and over so when the big thing hits, it’s automatic, you trust the Lord with this, Scripture comes to mind, a story comes to mind, something else flashes into existence. I once had a man who was dying of lung cancer and he told me, he says you know, I’ve got peace in this but I’ll tell you why I’ve got peace in this, because 15 and 10 years ago I studied the Scripture; it rooted in me and so when I came to the point of having to deal with this situation and I couldn’t even see the Scripture because I can’t see, the Holy Spirit takes pieces that I learned in years gone by and He circulates them all through my soul and I trust and I have peace.
May God give His peace to us today.