THE BIG IDEA: To review people in the Bible that God called and used in His service to make Him great among men.
BIBLE FACT: God uses His own sovereignty to process and to call whom He wills into His employment to represent and to serve Him.
How God Chooses His Servant
God takes the person (Divine invitation)
God breaks the person (Divine motivation)
God makes the person (Divine dedication)
God blesses the person (Divine inspiration)
God uses the person (Divine exaltation)
Joseph: God’s greatest trusted servant leader
(Discovering & Developing The Servant Leader In You)
The Power of Purpose
Taken from the Reader’s Digest we have the following:
“One morning I watched a couple of cowpunchers going out to bring in a wild steer from his range in the mountains. They took along one of those shaggy little gray donkeys—a burro. Now a big three-year-old steer that’s been running loose in the timber is a tough customer to handle. But those cowboys had the technique. They got a rope on the steer and then they tied him neck and neck, right up close, to the burro.
“When they let go, that burro had a bad time. The steer threw him all over the place. He banged him against trees, rocks, into bushes. Time after time they both went down. But there was one great difference between the burro and the steer. The burro had an idea. He wanted to go home. And no matter how often the steer threw him, every time the burro got to his feet he took a step nearer the corral. This went on and on. After about a week the burro showed up at the ranch headquarters. He had with him the tamest and sorriest looking steer you ever saw. (Arthur Kudner, in The Atlantic Monthly).”
If one were expected to point out the morals in this story he might observe that much beef, brains, gifts, or education amount to little unless there is some worth-while and well-established purpose in control of the large resources.
Then, of course, that burro, lacking much in size and weight, put all he had in one direction and kept on doing it. And as surely as you live, some men and women who have been, figuratively speaking, no bigger than the burro, have obtained their own purposes and the purposes of God in their lives because of what pull they had always in one direction.
So, it is not so much your size but your eternally determined direction that counts. —The Free Methodist.
Joseph: God’s greatest trusted servant leader (Discovering & Developing The Servant Leader In You)
I. Joseph served from Potiphar to prison; vv.19-23
A. Joseph earned the MVP Award in prison
II. Joseph meets the butler and the baker to get to his blessing; Genesis 40:3,4
A. Joseph faces the final exam for his ultimate test of functional marketability.
B. Marketability is when/how the final value of the profit is determined:
- Three factors of marketability (real estate):
- control (beyond & within), condition & competition
C. What Joseph did within his purpose became his marketable value and profit (dreams); vv.8-13 (butler), vv.16-22 (baker)
D. NO GOOD DEED EVER GOES UNPUNISHED; v.23
- Don’t forget that the coat haters and the liars are a part of the upper storyline; Romans 8:28