Thank you. The Bible is not full of stories about perfect people who served God by living perfect lives.

In fact, it's quite the opposite.

And today on Truth for Life, we're in the book of Genesis looking at the life of Joseph.

Alistair Begg gives us a brief overview of his messy background before we dive into a study of the trials and triumphs he faced in life.

We'll learn how God uses our trials and our less than perfect families to prepare us for the roles he has planned for us.

He provides for us probably the classic Old Testament illustration of the New Testament truth,

summarized in Romans 8 and 28, all things work together for good, to those who love God,

who are the called according to his purpose. There is perhaps no other character to whom we may

go in the whole of the Old Testament than this character, Joseph, who quite amazingly provides

this awesome summary of this very, very important verse.

Now, what you need to understand in this narrative progression here is that while it is not

chronicled for us with step-by-step and pinpoint accuracy,

it is clear that at points where there is silence, there is a fair progression of time,

at points where it says they stopped, they obviously stopped for a fair length of time,

because you will see that you go between verse 24 in chapter 30 and the verses later on,

and in that you've got the space of 17 years that is all wrapped up in the formative stages

of the life of Joseph. And sometime after he was

born, however short or long, maybe months, maybe years, his father determines that they're going to

move. He was going to have a lot of tearing in his life. He was going to have a lot of times

when he didn't get to say goodbye. He was going to have a lot of times when he didn't get to say goodbye.

He was going to have to learn how to weep, learn how to deal with the pain, learn how to deal

with having his insides ripped out of him. And even in these early circumstances, God was

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