We have in our reading today the children of Israel’s second trip to Egypt to purchase grain from the second-in-command to Pharaoh, who is actually their long-lost brother Joseph. Last week we explored the first interaction between the brothers from the perspective of Joseph, who, over the past 20 years in Egypt had come to a mature understanding of God’s providence. This mature understanding of God and his ways enabled Joseph to keep his composure when he had to be wanting payback against his brothers who had sold him into slavery decades ago. Joseph did not take immediate retribution for his brothers’ many sins against him, but allowed God time to work in their lives. Yet he did not immediately entrust himself back to his brothers who had hurt him, but tested them to see if they truly had changed.
And that’s the question that lingers over these chapters, have the brothers changed? More broadly, do people change? How do people change? What does it take before people actually change? I have a five year old, meaning, we watch Frozen. A lot. And they sing a song, the wise rock dwarf people, the fixer-upper song, and there’s a line in it that drives my wife crazy, We’re not saying you can change him/’Cause people don’t really change. But that’s not true, is it? People do change. People change all the time, and while sometimes people may change for mysterious reasons, sometimes we can see patterns in the whys and the hows of personal transformation. It is good news, that people change. Its good for us, because we know we need it. It’s good for us, because we are impacted by the people around us, and their growth is often good, good for us, good for them, good for our relationships.
Do you have a friend, a co-worker, maybe a spouse or a family member who is a bit of a train wreck? They make bad decisions that lead to worse decisions. They are always in a crisis, they call you up again at 3AM to pick them up from somewhere they shouldn’t be. You know who I am talking about? If you don’t, it might be you :).
It’s exhausting being a friend or a family member of a train wreck. The closer your relationship, the more exhausting it is. Because the truth is that we’re not created to observe human relationships like train wrecks, detached and uninvolved. We’re tied to these people that God has placed in our lives. We don’t just watch them crash, at times we feel that we’re crashing with them - that perhaps “train wreck” is not that adequate a picture, its more like a shipwreck and we are in the boat with them, and if they go down, we go down together.
In Acts 27, the apostle Paul actually has this experience of being tied to the ill-fated decisions of those he is travelling to Rome with. They literally ship wreck. And the big theme of this chapter is that God has providentially placed Paul on this ship with these men - 276 of them - to warn them of their danger and to proclaim the hope that he has in god to them. They do in fact go through the crash together, but through it all, they also reach the other side together. As we work through this chapter, we see precisely why Paul is on this boat, and may it encourage you as you at time question, when your friend or family member is crashing again, why am I here? What am I to do?
In Acts chapter 19, the Apostle Paul comes to Ephesus, and encounters two groups of people who are trying to life some pale imitation of the Christian faith, for they each only possess and practice half of the gospel, to their frustration and indeed to their destruction. One group has heard the word of repentance, but knows nothing of the Spirit-empowered life. The other group tries to imitate the power of the Spirit, but has not first submitted to the word of repentance. the word of repentance which we proclaim, and the power of the Spirit in which we proclaim it are inseparable - two sides of the same coin.
Acts 2:42 speaks to the community we long for, but does this in a surprising way. Not by focusing on building better community. in order to get to the community we long for we need to understand the nature of conversion. Only the truly converted individual finds in the church the community he longs for. Genuine Conversion Forms Genuine Community.
