Joseph had to wait 13 years to understand God’s plan for his life. During those years, he endured challenging experiences that could have shaken his faith and caused him to lose sight of any hope that God really cared about him, much less had something good in mind for his life.

But neither God nor Joseph wavered.

We will learn some lessons from Joseph this week:

God has a plan for our lives, and he has a much better view from above.

God is always with us, working even when we wait in what seem the darkest of moments or the longest of times.

God can take your history no matter what it is, and only he can shape your destiny to make you the right person in the right place to accomplish his right purpose.

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Before we get to our last message in this series, I want to tell you about the series we’re starting next week called, “Jesus Breaks the Rules.”

Jesus was always getting in trouble for breaking the rules.

Ironically, religion is associated with rules and Jesus with religion, but he gets in way more trouble for breaking rules than he does for making them.

So what rules did he break?

Well, you’ll have to be here for this series to find out. We’ll look at four rules Jesus broke and specifically why he did it for you and me.

In addition to the invite cards you received on your way in, we’ve designed a web page with general information about this series. You can share it on social media or send an email to a friend as an invitation.

Please take some time this week to consider who you’ll be praying for, inviting and/or bringing with you next Sunday.

Alright, we’ve been learning in this series that God is much more concerned about who we are than what we do or where we go.

God would much rather be a sculptor in our lives — shaping us and molding us — than a traffic cop standing at the intersection of our lives, pointing this way or that way.

We’ve been learning that what God is doing in us while we wait is more important than what we’re waiting for.

These are some of the foundational principles we’ve been talking about in this series, so if this is your first week hearing this series, you might want to go back and listen to the previous messages.

Well, today we’re going to look at the life of Joseph and learn some lessons from him about waiting on God.

As a teenager, Joseph got a pretty clear picture of what his future would be.

But he had to wait for it.

In that wait, he was faced with all kinds of temptation to focus on the problems that were right in front of his face.

We’re going to be flying through these chapters, so when you get home you might want to read in the Book of Genesis from chapter 37 right through to the end.

There are several key principles that I want to point out from Joseph’s life as it relates to waiting on God.

Principle #1 is this:

God has a plan for our lives and he has a much better view from above.

Recently, I had a night where I couldn’t sleep and was troubled by all kinds of thoughts, “what if” kinds of thoughts.

What if I don’t get what I think I so desperately need?

What if some things don’t turn out the way that I desperately want them to turn out?

What if some things don’t change the way that I think they’ve got to change?

These were kind of frantic voices inside of me. There was an appearance of truth to them – bad things can happen – but they didn’t lead to life.

I was reading in Mark 4 where Jesus and his friends are in the boat, and there’s this storm all around them. They get real frantic and panicky.

Do you remember what Jesus is doing in the boat? He’s sleeping.

They wake him up, and he just says to them, “Be still.” He says to the storm, “Be still,” and everything becomes still.

And it struck me – there’s an aspect of life that Jesus did not experience.

Jesus had pretty much every human emotion: sorrow, joy, pain. He was tired, he was angry, he was hopeful and so on.

But there’s one aspect of our lives that God never experiences. God is never frantic. God never panics. God is