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3 Lessons From Joseph

The story of Joseph can teach us important lessons about how to conduct ourselves as men. Here are 3 lessons from Joseph’s interactions in Egypt.

¹⁴Then Pharaoh sent word and called for Joseph, and they hurriedly brought him out of the dungeon; and when he had shaved himself and changed his clothes, he came to Pharaoh. ¹⁵Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I have had a dream, but no one can interpret it; and I have heard ^[h]it said about you, that ^[i]when you hear a dream you can interpret it.” ¹⁶Joseph then answered Pharaoh, saying, “^[j]It has nothing to do with me; God will ^[k]give Pharaoh an answer for his own good.” ¹⁷So Pharaoh said to Joseph, “In my dream, there I was, standing on the bank of the Nile; ¹⁸and behold, seven cows, ^[l]fat and fine-looking came up out of the Nile, and they grazed in the marsh grass. ¹⁹Then behold, seven other cows came up after them, poor and very ^[m]ugly and ^[n]thin, such as I had never seen for ^[o]ugliness in all the land of Egypt; ²⁰and the thin and ugly cows ate the first seven fat cows. ²¹Yet when they had ^[p]devoured them, it could not be ^[q]detected that they had ^[r]devoured them, ^[s]for they were just as ugly as ^[t]before. Then I awoke. ²²I saw also in my dream, and behold, seven ears of grain, full and good, came up on a single stalk; ²³and behold, seven ears, withered, thin, and scorched by the east wind sprouted up after them; ²⁴and the thin ears swallowed the seven good ears. Then I told it to the soothsayer priests, but there was no one who could explain it to me.”

²⁵And Joseph said to Pharaoh, “Pharaoh’s ^[u]dreams are one and the same; God has told to Pharaoh what He is about to do. ²⁶The seven good cows are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years; the ^[v]dreams are one and the same. ²⁷The seven thin and ugly cows that came up after them are seven years, and the seven thin ears scorched by the east wind will be seven years of famine. ^28 [w]It is as I have spoken to Pharaoh: God has shown Pharaoh what He is about to do. ²⁹Behold, seven years of great abundance are coming in all the land of Egypt; ³⁰and after them seven years of famine will ^[x]come, and all the abundance will be forgotten in the land of Egypt, and the famine will ^[y]ravage the land. ³¹So the abundance will be unknown in the land because of that subsequent famine; for it will be very severe. ³²Now as for the repeating of the dream to Pharaoh twice, it means that the matter is confirmed by God, and God will quickly bring it about. ³³So now let Pharaoh look for a man discerning and wise, and appoint him over the land of Egypt. ³⁴Let Pharaoh take action to appoint overseers ^[z]in charge of the land, and let him take a fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt as a tax in the seven years of abundance. ³⁵Then have them collect all the food of these good years that are coming, and store up the grain for food in the cities under Pharaoh’s authority, and have them guard it. ³⁶Let the food be used as a reserve for the land for the seven years of famine which will occur in the land of Egypt, so that the land will not perish during the famine.”

³⁷Now the ^[aa]proposal seemed good ^[ab]to Pharaoh and ^[ac]to all his servants.

Genesis 41: 14-17

1 – Manage your appearance before appearing before people of power and influence.

Notice how Joseph improves the way that he looks before he goes before Pharaoh. How many people do you know who walk around dressed like overgrown ten-year-olds? That is not a good look, and it will not get you where you are trying to go in life.

Joseph realizes the importance of not appearing before Pharaoh looking like he just walked out of the prison holding cell. He shaves and cleans himself up before appearing before royalty.

We could learn to do the same in our lives. Even if we never appear before royalty we could still do much better at dressing with self-respect and acting like professionals. It would certainly not hurt to behave this way.

How many men enter into the worship assembly with no thought to how they dress?

I would argue that it is the majority of men, unfortunately. You can instantly set yourself apart from the men around you simply by taking greater care of your personal appearance.

2 – Give God the credit.

When Pharoh asks Joseph to interpret the dream, he immediately states that the interpretation of dreams belongs to God. He takes no credit for himself, but places the credit where it belongs, with God.

Many times in our life we try to take all the credit for our accomplishments. Perhaps we do achieve something with our own hands and with the sweat of our brows. But we should always acknowledge God’s hand in those matters. If we do not, we are planting seeds of arrogance, which inevitably leads to failures of various kinds.

3 – Maintain humility, but manage power with grace. Do not seek power directly, but be ready to manage it if it comes to you.

Joseph didn’t ask for power, but it came to him nonetheless. You may find yourself in similar circumstances. You may not directly seek out riches and power, but it may come into your possession, and you have to make sure you are the caliber of man who can handle that power. What would you do if the blessings of earth found their way into your hands? Would you forget God or would you be like Job who was faithful to God through wealth, poverty, and wealth again? That should be the ideal to strive toward. What will you do if power or possessions come to you?

I would encourage you to build the character now that can handle power or possession lates in life. Make sure you can mamnange blessings if they come your way.

These are 3 lessons from Joseph. As simple as they are, they are practical. We could learn many more from this man’s life, but this is where we will stop today.

Lay Siege To Hell

Whether you know it or not, every attempt you make it living a faithful Christian Life is an attempt to lay Siege to hell. You are attempting to rob the enemy of souls that you would drag there. This includes your own soul. You are actually planting your machines of War outside the gates of the enemy, and laying Siege to it. Your weapons are for pulling down strongholds.

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not wage battle according to the flesh, ⁴for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but ^[b]divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. ⁵We are destroying arguments and all arrogance raised against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,
2 Corinthians 10:3-5

Why is it important to think like this? Because many in the religious world have made it popular in virtuous to be a pacifist when it comes to the Christian lifestyle. They’re all about softness, and what they trying to pass off as love and kindness, is in actuality weakness and cowardliness.

It is important to think of your life as an assault on the enemy because it Taps into your innate masculine desire for war. It allows you to take advantage of your warlike nature. Many of us will never have to go to war, and will never have to see the fields of combat. And we should be grateful for that every single day. But the reality is that this leaves a portion of our souls untapped. It is that portion that is responsible for allowing us to fight in a war if necessary. What are we supposed to do with that part of our nature as men if we’re not going to war?

What we can do is learn to convert it into energy to help us live a faithful life.

Whenever you are resisting the urges of the flesh you are at War. Whenever you are attempting to follow the precepts, commands, and principles found in the scripture, you are engaged in a violent and bloody spiritual war. You need to think of it this way because it is a war. At the end of time, it will have lasting consequences depending on the way that you fight in this war.

You need to start thinking of every attempt at evangelism that’s a serious blow to the enemy.

Every time you’ve lived according to the principles of scripture you are laying Siege to hell. It is this masculine warlike attitude that will fill you with an indomitable spirit, and Limitless energy. When you begin to think of your lifestyle as more than just being a weak man who doesn’t do anything fun, but instead you are a noble Warrior who is engaged in constant Warfare for the betterment of himself, those around him, and all of those who will be impacted by the way he lives his life, You open the door to infinite power.

So begin to reframe you’re thinking. Think about the war you are engaged in, and that you lay Siege to hell every single day with the way that you act.

With that mentality, you will begin to take everything more seriously and give the mundane activities of life more importance. Things that once seemed small will now have more significance. How do you conduct yourself day today? Do you have integrity in all aspects of your life or just in the big ones that everyone sees?

Those are the serious questions we have to ask ourselves as men. If we are honest with ourselves we fail more often than we would like to admit. But it is through that failure that we were eyes again and again and go back to work. We reset our Siege equipment and engage in Warfare yet again. That is what you must do every day of your life. Convert the weakness that many have made religion into 2 a strength, and a powerful mentality. Lay Siege to hell

Learn to Think for Yourself

When it comes to your life and the eventual destination of your soul, you need to develop the ability to think for yourself. So many people in life and in religion outsource their thinking to someone other than themselves. I am always amazed that people would entrust the eternal destination of their soul to someone else. How much trust must one have in a teacher to allow them to do all their thinking for them with regard to spiritual matters? Why not learn to think for yourself?

But that is sadly how much of the religious world behaves. Even when it comes to their souls, people will outsource their thinking to someone else. They will avoid the difficult labor of thought that comes with making decisions.

So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;
Philippians 2:12

You must learn to think for yourself. There are many ways to do this, try these exercises to begin with.

I – When watching videos online, do not read the comments. Formulate your own thoughts and evaluation of the video without falling into the opinion of the mob.

II – Do not ask what others think before deciding what you think.

This doesn’t mean you cannot change your mind once you hear the other side of the story – but you must be in the habit of relying on your own thinking and consulting your own mind first. Then consult the minds of others after you have formed an initial hypothesis. Have the autonomy to think for yourself, but also the humility to change your opinion if you find a more correct way of thinking. You can adjust your opinion as you gain more facts, but at least develop an initial idea to work off.

III – Do not expect things to be good or bad based on what others say about them.

Understand that you will have your own interpretations and way of valuing each scenario. Do not make a pre-judgment when someone describes a movie, song, or book as “awesome” or “terrible”. Learn to formulate your own judgments only after you have examined the movie/song/book with your rational mind.

You have within you the latent and often untapped ability to think, be creative, and generate unique thoughts. Why waste the incredible capacity of your mind by allowing others to do all your thinking for you?

Besides, those people didn’t even think for themselves either. They inherited the majority of their ideas, swallowed them without question, and proceeded to live their lives based on ideas they do not know are true or false. They have never taken the time to scrutinize them and determine what the real elements of truth are, and what elements of their beliefs need to be done away with.

Thinking is the process of asking and answering questions in your mind.

We avoid thinking by asking others questions instead of ourselves. Get into the habit of asking yourself questions. What you will be surprised to learn is that if you can get into the habit of asking yourself questions, your mind will actually generate answers for you. Sometimes it will do this with no additional work needed on your part. Your mind is so powerful that the unconscious components of it can do work and provide answers to the questions that your conscious mind is asking.

Of course, I’m not asking you to avoid ever asking questions or getting help from others. Of course, we need help from others and we need their expertise from time to time. We would make infinitely more mistakes and lose much more time if we exclusively relied on our own thinking to allow us to reach our goals.

What we are trying to avoid is continually and habitually asking others for help and asking them questions at the expense of thinking for ourselves.

Your reflex reaction to a problem should not be to immediately ask for help without first trying to think through and figure out the situation you are in. Instead of asking ourselves questions and searching for the answers internally, we externalize every single question and never force our minds to generate any answers. This will cause us difficulty later in life because we will never have developed the ability to think rationally.

Begin by employing the handful of strategies suggested in this essay. You will find yourself using mental muscles that you have not used in years. You will learn to think for yourself. We must re-learn to think for ourselves and develop our own thoughts to the fullest.

Work For God – A Technique to Work Harder

Have you ever wanted to work harder but felt like there was some sort of psychological barrier preventing you from doing so? Sometimes we try to train our bodies or do our work, but it feels like we are moving through sludge. We feel like we are trying to sprint in a dream, but are going nowhere. Oftentimes we simply lack the motivation. But one way to begin to combat this is to shift our perspective. We must always remember the fact that we actually work for God. This will help us improve our work ethic.

²³And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, ²⁴knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for^[a] you serve the Lord Christ.
Colossians 3:23-24

The Bible teaches that if we change our focus from working for men to working for God, we can work more “heartily”.

Maybe you are unmotivated to work for your boss, remember that you actually work for God. Make that a constant reminder in your mind. We may not always want to work hard for our bosses if we are unfortunate enough to have them. But if we act as if we are working for God, our work ethic will naturally improve. We will not want to let Him down, so we will give more effort and quality to our work.

The Bible teaches that a way to increase work ethic is to shift your perspective.

Perspective change creates action change as well as emotion change. We usually do not have many huge problems in life. We only think they are huge because we have nothing to compare them to. The second we see someone with a real problem, we are faced with a stark reminder that our situation is not actually that bad. What changes our emotional and mental state in this instance? A change in perspective.

Our problems at work are only difficult until we lose someone we love or contract a life-altering disease. At that moment our previous issues seem petty. So why not shift our perspective now without the horrible event? How much better would your life be if you could constantly be aware of how great you have it?

And I am not trying to minimize the difficulties that many people go through. And at the same time, there is always someone out there with a more serious problem, who is worse off than we are. And that is a reason to be thankful for what we have now and whatever life position we are in.

All that is an example of shifting our perception in order to shift our mindset, and general mental state as well as our emotional state. We can perform the same perspective shift in our work, which is what the Bible is trying to teach us. We are not working for men, we are actually working for God. And if we make that shift, we will find that our mental and emotional state changes as well.

We work for God.

When we realize this and shift our perspective, the following will happen:

We will begin to find a little more energy and zest in our work and life.
What we do with our days will have more meaning, even if we are completing menial tasks.
Our work ethic will linearly and naturally improve.
We will be able to bring more quality to our work without feeling as if we are straining to complete it.
We will become more valuable to those around us.
We will possess a better overall attitude, which is its own reward and is highly rare and valuable in modern times.

Act as if you are working for God.

Whatever you act like, you will eventually become. Act as if you are working for God and eventually you will begin to have a work ethic that reflects that. And it will almost seem as if you did nothing extra to get there. Almost as if it were effortless. But it does take effort and energy to shift your perspective. but perspective, once shifted, will much more easily guide your actions through each day. Take advantage of the way you can guide your mind.

We will often work harder for others than we will for ourselves.

This does not apply to everyone, many people can create massive success only for themselves. Others need help to create more motivation in their lives. Maybe you would work much harder for your family or friends than you would for yourself. Why not combine this with the idea that you are working directly for God? And that you must do this work intensely.

The way we talk to ourselves and represent things in our minds changes the way we can create actions, especially at work. We need to learn that the work we do is important and that we can use changes in internal thoughts to create a better work ethic.

Shift your mentality and begin to work for God.

Be satisfied with the Process

Everyone around you is hyper-focused on results. Now, this attitude can be valuable. It pushes people to achieve and lets us reach our goals. Focusing on results lets us know i we are moving in the right direction, the wrong direction, or no direction. It is valuable to concentrate on results from time to time. But at the end of the day, it is more valuable to focus on the process when our satisfaction with life is concerned.

Where focusing on results becomes a problem is when it robs you of the enjoyment of the process. The process of achieving a goal is pleasure. The process is progress, and progress is a key to human happiness.

When we become single-mindedly focused on results, we can slip into the mindset that we are not allowed to be happy or fulfilled until we produce those results. Until we cross the finish line, we cannot be happy with the race.

People who live like this miss out on much of the juice of life. They miss out on the subtle enjoyment of simply working towards something in a controlled and purposeful manner. They give up hours, days, weeks and sometimes even years of happiness in exchange for one brief moment of happiness. And more often than not, it turns out to be nowhere near as enjoyable as they predicted. Think of many people who go to law or medical school, or sometimes even college or highschool. They sacrifice all sense of enjoyment of the present moment for the idea of some possible enjoyment in the future.

The solution to this is to shift your mentality and allow yourself to be satisfied with the process. Allow yourself to enjoy the simple work towards your goals.

If you can master this, you will find yourself exponentially happier in your life.

Think about your goal, establish it, write it down – decide what you want.
Now put our goal to the side and don’t think about it.
Focus your mind on the process, and on the work that it will take to accomplish your goal. Identify the small steps towards your goal.
List out all the small, individual pleasures of your work that you enjoy – no matter how small, insignificant or ridiculous they seem.
Concentrate on the components of the task you enjoy and allow youself to think about them for a while.
Now put your perspective back into the entire task of working, but continue to resist the urge to look at your goal constantly.

By focusing on the process, you free up your mind from being tied to the future. Instead, you can actually live in the present moment and learn to enjoy it. This will create additional happiness in your life and allow you to be satisfied with your work. Do the above exercise with your day job if you have one. List out all those parts of it that you actually like, even if you dislike th majority of it.

Allow your mind to spend more time focusing on the things you enjoy instead of the things you dislike. You will find yourself happier in life simply by concentrating more on those things you do like as opposed to the things you do not like. As you do this, your attitude will begin to change and you will discover more and more opportunities to enjoy your current work and life.

In all things, learn to shift your thinking away from results and direct them to the process. It will allow you to be satisfied in the present moment and will make you happier.

Many times in the Bible, christ uses various analogies about growth and agriculture. I think this served two purposes. First, it was a relatable way to teach people in an agrarian society. And second, I believe it showed us that God loves things that grow and improve.

Take an example from things that grow, they are not in a rush. They grow at a specific rate of speed, and they grow until they can grow no further. That is how we should be as well.

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37 Now the [aa]proposal seemed good [ab]to Pharaoh and [ac]to all his servants.