She also worked out a particularly creative plan. I would like to stop to reflect on this stress between considered planning and full-hearted religion. Are they jointly exclusive? Not on your life. Yet to chat to some followers, you may be led straight to think differently. I have counseled with jobless women and men who let me know, “I’m just waiting on the Lord to offer a job.”. “Then I am hoping you do not mind remaining jobless for awhile.”. The old motto of soldiers in the Revolutionary War is applicable to many areas of life : “Trust in Our Lord God, but keep your powder dry. “to explain, place your life in the Savior’s hands, but stay ready.

Do all that you can to prepare yourself for battle, understanding the final result rests with the Lord God. To stroll by religion does not mean you stop thinking. To trust God doesn’t imply becoming slovenly or lazy or apathetic. You and I must trust God for our finances, but that’s no license to spend sillily. You and I ought to trust God for safety in the car, but we are not smart to pass on a blind curve. We trust God for our health, but that doesn’t suggest we are able to chain smoke, stay up 1/2 the night, and subsist on potato chips and Twinkies without effects. Acting sillily or thoughtlessly, expecting God to get you out if things go astray, isn’t religion in the slightest.

Knowledge asserts to do all you are able to in your strength, then trust Him to do what you can’t do, to do what you can’t do.

He knows nothing at all about what’s just occurred in the dungeon and throne room. All he knows is that some young pretender, some foreigner, has maneuvered his way into Pharaoh’s good books. And he’s being told, “Bow your knee to this person. “Who does he think he is? Who did he bribe to get all this? He must know someone. That’s the way it is up there in the court.”. Given that very same situation, we’d possibly think the same. Back in the Vietnam time, we regularly heard the phrase, “Never trust anybody over thirty.”

Today, given the huge segment of aging citizens, we are much more likely to hear, “Never trust anyone under thirty.”. But what we will not see from our limited point of view is what God has been doing on the inside. That employee in the field doesn’t know—doesn’t have the smallest idea—what has gone on before in Joseph’s life, neither is he even aware of his years in the dungeon. He does not know about Joseph’s faithfulness when nobody else was around.

That is how he has come to get the robe, the necklace, and the chariot. That is the reason why others are pronouncing, “Bow the knee.” Joseph himself isn’t asserting that ; others are. I’m wondering what Joseph was thinking at that moment. I suspect he was saying to himself again and again, “Praise be to God.”

I suspect he was counting up all the stuff God had taught him during the past 30 years, things God also wants to educate us. Count on Him to deal with the cupbearers of your life, the people that forget you, the folks that break their guarantees. It’s God’s job to handle the cupbearers of your past. It’s your job to be the kind of servant He has designed you to be. Be loyal in the waiting times of life.