I'm I'm When life becomes difficult, do you focus on your circumstances, on yourself, or do you focus on God?

What about when life is easy and you're prospering? Does your focus change then? Today on Truth for

Life, Alistair Begg teaches how a God-centered life protects us from pride as well as despair.

Here, as the story develops in Chapter 41, we have this quite amazing and dramatic change

in the circumstances of Joseph.

In just a moment in time, his whole life is turned the right way up.

He has been a slave, and now he is entrusted to the position

of the palace. And Joseph serves as a clear reminder to us of the fact that life is marked by

a series of ups and downs. For all of us, that is true, and yet in each of our lives, it will not necessarily

be so that the highs are as high and the lows are as low as those which we see here in the

unfolding of the life of Joseph. Certainly in the story so far, we have seen that he has been in some

unbelievable spots, and in it all, he has

shown himself to be someone who recognizes that whether he has despised one day or exalted

on the next day, he realizes that he is a man of frailty and that his security is to be found in God himself. We do not

find coming from the lips of Joseph any proud assertions about what he is going to be and what

he is going to do. Yes, we recall his dreams in which he reported that which he found to be

in the watches of the night, an experience

for him.

But subsequent to that, there is no sense in which he is marking out his own destiny.

And in this respect, he would be well prepared to bow underneath the words of James,

the brother of Jesus, who in writing in his letter in chapter

four says to his readers, why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life?

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