and I'm

and If we were given the choice, most of us would prefer to avoid suffering and hardship, wouldn't we?

Today on Truth for Life, Alice Durbeg examines three conversations that reveal how God works providentially through the trials of life,

whether worldwide or in a personal way, to draw us closer to himself.

Let's open our Bibles to Genesis chapter 42.

What we have recorded for us here by Moses is a narrative which builds itself around three separate conversations.

The first is brief between Jacob and his sons.

The second is longer involving Joseph and his brothers.

And the third is again somewhat brief,

which takes place between the brothers in isolation,

at least physically, it would appear, from Joseph himself.

And so I want simply to draw our thinking in that way this morning.

Noticing, first of all, the conversation recorded for us there in the opening two verses,

which is a dialogue involving Jacob and his sons. Now, the context in which the conversation takes

place we don't need to wonder

at. We don't need to guess. We're told that the pressing urgency of this particular family

and indeed of their nation, and beyond that, the then-known world, was this matter of famine.

Scenes that many of us have only observed from afar in the kindness and

providence of God, and yet scenes which others throughout the world have in our lifetime faced

with regularity were the experience of these dwellers in Canaan. And this particular gentleman, by the name of Jacob,

had now, along with others in his country, reached the point where the considerations of food

were no longer a matter of passing indifference, but were a pressing urgency. If they got food,

...