Navigating Life Challenges #1 - Navigating Pain
Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund opens Genesis 37:3–11 and the story of Joseph, favored by his father and sold by his own brothers, to show that God's providence is at work even in our most painful seasons. For anyone facing loneliness, betrayal, or broken dreams, this message offers a way to navigate pain by looking above the circumstances to a God who has not let go.
Summary and Application
"What has been most painful in your life over the last season?" That was the question Kurt opened with as Orchard Hill began a new series, Navigating Life's Challenges. For most of us, the answer comes quickly: a diagnosis, a broken or disappointing relationship, a financial strain, a child making choices we wouldn't make, a longing that hasn't been met.
We rightly try to avoid pain, but it finds us anyway. Some of us respond by avoiding risk altogether; others numb it with TV, shopping, or a substance. Then the quiet comes, and the pain is still there.
Kurt suggested there's another way, and he found it in the life of Joseph (Genesis 37–50). Not by treating Joseph like a character in one of Aesop's fables, copying the good and avoiding the bad, but by moving from thinking about Joseph to thinking about God. Joseph's God is our God.
The Circumstances: God's People Have Never Been Exempt
Joseph was the second-youngest of twelve sons and his father's favorite. Jacob gave him an ornate robe, and Joseph twice told his brothers about dreams in which they bowed down to him. It didn't go over well. "His brothers were jealous of him" (Genesis 37:11), and the jealousy escalated fast. When they saw him coming, "they plotted to kill him" (37:18). They mocked his dreams: "Then we'll see what comes of his dreams" (37:20). They threw him into a cistern and then sat down to eat (37:25), a picture of cold indifference. The suggestion to sell him rather than kill him because "he is our brother" (37:27) was pure hypocrisy. And Reuben's attempt to rescue him came too little, too late (37:29).
Kurt walked through the details for a reason. When we're hurting, we tend to believe our circumstances are uniquely hard, and that if God loved us, this wouldn't be happening. But from the earliest pages of Scripture, God's people have never been exempt from hardship. And often the circumstances aren't even the hardest part.
Below the Circumstances: Loneliness, Betrayal, and Broken Dreams
Underneath what happened to Joseph were deeper wounds. There was loneliness: sold to a caravan headed for a foreign land, with a new language and no way home. Kurt recalled someone walking through a divorce who said the hardest part was night, when the quiet is deafening.
There was betrayal. Hurt from a stranger is one thing; hurt from someone close, someone we trusted and sacrificed for, cuts deeper. And there were broken dreams. Joseph believed his dreams came from God (37:5–9). Now, in a cistern, in a caravan, in Potiphar's house, it must have looked like they were gone.
We read Joseph's story knowing that thirteen years later he rises to second-in-command of Egypt. But we don't live our pain with that hindsight. We live it day by day, wondering whether the loneliness will end or the dream will ever come true.
In the Circumstances: Never Compromised, Never Complained
Looking ahead in the story, Kurt pointed out two things Joseph didn't do. First, he never compromised. In Potiphar's house he refused temptation: "How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?" (Genesis 39:9). Later, with the chance to take revenge, he didn't. Pain tempts us to say, "God hasn't come through, so I'll do whatever makes me feel good now." Joseph kept seeking to please God in a place that didn't please him.
Second, as far as we can tell, he never complained. Paul commands, "Do everything without grumbling or arguing" (Philippians 2:14). Kurt described these as two sides of complaining. Grumbling says, "I deserve better." Arguing says, "I know better," as if God has gotten it wrong.
But if we stopped here, we'd just be trying harder to be like Joseph. That kind of resolve, Kurt said, probably lasts until tomorrow.
Above the Circumstances: Trusting God's Providence
What changes how we handle pain is what's above the circumstances: God, and specifically his providence. The Heidelberg Catechism describes providence as God's ever-present power by which all things come to us "not by chance but from his fatherly hand".
That can sound like it makes pain worse. So Kurt offered an illustration: playing chess against a computer set to its highest level. Whatever move you make, it's already ahead of you. The difference is that a chess program is out to beat you. God, if you're his child, is for you. Your mistakes, your good moves, even other people's harmful choices: none of it falls outside his hand.
God used the brothers' malice to put Joseph where he could feed the very family that betrayed him during a famine (Genesis 41–45). And Joseph is more than an inspiring story. He's a prototype of Jesus, who suffered to bring salvation to us. Because of the cross and the resurrection, our worst pain is not the end of the story.
So what if you could look at the most painful thing in your life and say, "I don't know how yet, but God is at work in this"? If you can't get there in your own strength, Kurt said, don't look to your own resources. Look to the cross, the clearest evidence of God's heart toward you.
Questions for Reflection
When you think about what's been most painful lately, which runs deepest beneath it — loneliness, betrayal, or a broken dream — and how has it been shaping the way you see God?
What might it look like this week to live as though God's hand hasn't let go of you, whether in how you respond to your situation or to the people involved in it?
This post was developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence based on the sermon "Navigating Pain" by Dr. Kurt Bjorklund (Genesis 37:3–11, October 18, 2026). While every effort has been made to faithfully represent the content and intent of the original message, readers are encouraged to engage the full sermon audio or transcript for the complete teaching.
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Let's pray together. God, as we're gathered this weekend, we thank you for the ways that you're working in and through Orchard Hill to bring about changed lives. And God, in this moment, we ask that you would work in the lives of each of us who are gathered. God, if I've prepared things that don't reflect your heart, I pray you'd prompt me away from them. And if there are things that would be beneficial in this moment for those of us who are gathered, I pray that you'd prompt me toward those as well, even if it wasn't in my original preparation. And God, we pray this today in Jesus' name. Amen.
Let me ask you this: if you were to look back over the last season of your life, what would you say has been most painful in your life? My guess is that in just asking that question, many of you would very quickly be able to say, "It's been this." Maybe it's been a physical challenge or a sickness for you or somebody close to you. Maybe it's been a disappointment in a relationship. Maybe there's a broken relationship somewhere in your world and you say that has been painful. Maybe the relationship hasn't been broken; it's just been disappointing. Maybe you're sitting right now just feeling like you can't even tell the person next to you some of the hurt that you feel and the lack of connection. Maybe you've hoped for that baby and the monthly pregnancy test comes back with a color that you don't want. Maybe it's been a financial challenge, or a frustration with work, or a child who's made choices that you say, "That just isn't what I need." Or maybe you've felt alone, and the longing for somebody to partner with in your life just hasn't come along. And you say, "This has been hard in my life."
We rightly spend a lot of our lives trying to avoid pain. The reason I say "rightly" is, of course we do. We try to arrange our lives in such a way that we can avoid experiencing pain. And yet pain finds its way into almost every one of our lives, and eventually probably into every one of our lives. So even though we make this effort to avoid pain, it becomes part of our lives. Some of us, as a result, will say, "I'm not going to take any risks. I'm not going to try anything. I'm not going to put myself out there. I'm not going to be in relationships, because I don't want to be hurt." And some of us may choose instead to deal with the pain that we do have by numbing. By numbing, I mean we take on something that will say, "This will make me forget about it for a while." Maybe it's indulgent TV watching, or shopping, or a substance of some kind that we use just to say, "I don't have to think about what's hard in my life right now." And yet when things are quiet and we feel the pain of what we've experienced, sometimes we find that we still spiral a little bit.
But what if there was another way? What if there was a different approach to pain that we could use throughout our lives to navigate the hardships that are somewhat inevitable?
We're starting a series today that we're calling Navigating Life's Challenges, and today we're looking specifically at pain. We're going to be looking at the Old Testament character of Joseph. His life is chronicled for us in Genesis 37 through 50, and we're going to look at some of the most iconic moments in this account and try to learn a little bit about navigating pain.
If you've been around Orchard Hill, you've probably heard me say this, but it is worth saying again: any time we start a series, especially on an Old Testament character, the point of the Old Testament is not to say, "Here's Joseph, so pick out the good things Joseph does and go be like Joseph, or pick out the bad things he does and say, 'Well, don't be like him there.'" What happens if we read the Bible that way? We basically read the Old Testament like one of Aesop's fables, and we say, "Joseph did that right, so do that. Or he did that poorly, so don't do that." What I want to do today is move us from thinking about Joseph to thinking about God. Because Joseph's God can be your God. Joseph's God is your God, because it's the God of the universe. And if you learn how to relate to God by looking at Joseph's story, then you can learn to navigate pain.
So today we're going to do this by looking first at the circumstances that we read about in Genesis 37 that were painful for Joseph. We're going to look at what was below the circumstances. Then we'll look at what happened in the circumstances, and ultimately at what takes place above the circumstances.
The Circumstances
Here's where we'll start: the circumstances. The story is pretty straightforward. We read it in Genesis 37, and what we see is that Joseph was one of twelve sons, and he was the second to last. There were multiple wives and women involved. That's a whole other message; we'll have Pastor Brady deal with that at some point. But the issue here was that Joseph was the son of one of Jacob's (or Israel's, same name in the text) favorite wives, so Joseph was his favorite son, even though there was another one behind him, and Jacob favored him. And Joseph maybe didn't have awareness of how this made his brothers feel. So he had this dream, and he went and told his brothers. The dream was, "All of you will one day bow down to me." If you've ever had brothers or siblings and you've tried this, "I'm going to be greater than all of you; you're going to bow down to me," that probably doesn't go over super well. And after the first dream, he has a second one and does it again. He tells them the whole thing. On top of this, his dad gives him a coat that was very ornate, that basically set him apart from his brothers. So his brothers are annoyed.
In the text, we see several things that are part of this. In verse 11, we see that his brothers were jealous of him. The text just says the brothers looked at him and said, "I don't like the status that you have. I don't like your coat. I don't care much for you at all."
Then in verse 18, we're told that they plotted his death. Their jealousy moved from "We don't like the status that you have" to "Let's kill you." That's a quick elevation. Verse 18 says it this way: "But they saw him at a distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him." His dad had said, "Go check on your brothers. They're out tending the flock." So he had a more cushy role, and he was sent out to check. As they saw him coming, they said, "I don't like that guy. Let's take his life."
Then in verse 20, we see that there is probably some mocking. It says, "Come now, let's kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we'll see what comes of his dreams." Can't you almost hear it? "Let's see what happens to you, dreamer boy. You're in the cistern. We're in charge. You're not. How's that bowing down?" That's probably what was happening.
Then in verse 25, we see cold indifference. It says, "As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt." Why do I say that's cold indifference? Just imagine for a moment that you're one of the brothers here. You have a brother. Your brother comes. You don't like him, and you're plotting to kill him. That's your plan. You throw him in a cistern. And what does the text say? They sat down to eat. I don't know about you, but sitting down to eat while you're planning to off your brother feels a little cold. That's what they were doing. "Would you pass the lamb chop?" while their brother's about to be killed.
And then there's hypocrisy in verse 27. It says, "Come, let's sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother." The reason I say this is hypocrisy is that if he's your brother, you don't sell him into slavery, never to be seen again, and fake his death to your dad. And yet that's what they do.
Then Reuben comes along, in verse 29, and I would say this is too little, too late. When Reuben returned to the cistern and saw that Joseph was not there (so now he's been sold; he's on his way to Egypt in this caravan), it says he tore his clothes and went back to his brothers and said, "The boy isn't there! Where can I turn now?" So Reuben, whether this was well intentioned or not, even his attempt to intervene was too little, too late.
I walk through all of this because here's the tendency that maybe you have, that I have: when we experience pain, we often think, "My circumstances are uniquely challenging and hard." Anybody know what I'm talking about? I'm not suggesting that your situation is not uniquely challenging and hard. Whatever you're walking through is hard. But here's what I want you to see: God's people, from the earliest pages of the Bible, were never exempt from hard situations. So when we say, "This is so hard. Nobody has experienced it like me. If God loved me, he wouldn't..." God's people have always experienced hardship. But in many ways, this isn't the hardest part.
Below the Circumstances
This is where we need to move below the circumstances. I would suggest that what's below the circumstances, first, is loneliness. The text doesn't say this explicitly, but imagine again that you're sold, you're in a caravan going to Egypt, you're going to live in a foreign land, with a new language and new everything in your life, and no chance to go back. You'd probably feel a little lonely. I remember years ago talking to somebody who was walking through a divorce, and this person simply said, "You know, the hardest part is at night when it's quiet, because the quiet is deafening." Loneliness, on top of everything else, can drive pain deeper and deeper.
For Joseph, there was probably betrayal. Obviously, his brothers sold him, so that's where I'm getting this. It's one thing to have somebody at a distance do something hurtful to us, but some of the hardest pain that we walk through is when somebody close to us, somebody we trusted, somebody we have given to, somebody we've cared about, somebody we've sacrificed for, turns on us in some way. For Joseph, this was certainly true.
And then there are broken dreams. Literally, he had a dream that one day he would rule and that his brothers would bow down to him, and he saw this as something from God. And here he is in the cistern, in the caravan, in Potiphar's house. In all of it, he had to have this moment of saying, "My dreams are gone. What I hope for is not going to happen."
Whatever it is that you're walking through, whatever I walk through, those things can be hard. But it's often what's below the circumstances, whether it be loneliness, betrayal, or broken dreams. For Joseph, the text doesn't say this, but there was probably desperation, despair: "My life as I know it is done."
As you and I hear this story, we have an advantage over Joseph as he lived it, in the sense that we've seen the musical, right? Or you've read the text, whichever it is. What I mean is that you know Joseph goes to Potiphar's house, he goes to prison, and then one day this whole dream thing comes true because there's a famine in the land. He rises to become second in command of the land of Egypt. He provides food for the entire region and takes everyone's real estate. Which is why, again, you can't say that you just do what Joseph did, because that wasn't cool. But he provides. So you have this perspective to be able to say, "I know it isn't as bad as it looks." But here's what's hard when you and I walk through something: we don't have the luxury of saying, "In thirteen years, this is going to turn around." We live through it day by day, saying, "I don't know. Will the loneliness end? Will the feeling of betrayal get any better? Will the dream come true?"
In the Circumstances
That leads us to what happened in the circumstances. In this instance, I'm going to say that there were two things, and this is more by omission in the text than by statement. We have to keep reading through the text, so I'm going to jump ahead a little bit.
The first thing is that Joseph never compromised. When he had the chance in Potiphar's house to turn on Potiphar and meet some of his own desires, he didn't do it. He said, "How can I do this great evil and sin against God?" When he had a chance to take revenge on his brothers, or on the cupbearer who didn't tell Pharaoh about him, he didn't take revenge. He didn't compromise. One of our great temptations when we're in pain is to say, "I need to feel good. I need to feel good now. And since God hasn't been good to me in this area of my life, I'm just going to do what I think is going to make me feel good." Joseph was willing to say, "I'm still going to please God even when I'm in a place that isn't pleasing to me."
But not only did he not compromise, he also never complained, as far as we can tell. You might hear me saying, in essence, "Okay, so just don't complain." But I think we need to understand a little about what complaining is. In Philippians chapter 2, in this New Testament letter, there is a direct command. Here, what we have is a statement about Joseph; there, a command. Verse 14: "Do everything without grumbling or arguing." You may hear that and say, "Okay, grumbling, arguing. He's saying the same thing. It's two words that mean essentially the same thing: don't complain." But I think they're actually two elements of what it is when we complain. They're two different, unique words in the original language, and here's what I think they ultimately mean. When it says don't grumble, that is the version of saying, "I deserve better. This isn't what I deserve." Part of complaining is a mindset that says, "God has done me wrong. I deserve something better than what I'm getting." The other element is the word "arguing." It means to dispute, and the idea is to say, "I know better." So on one hand, complaining is saying, "I deserve better." On the other hand, it's saying, "I know better. God's got this messed up somewhere here. He didn't come through the way that I know he should." That's what it is to complain. But we don't see any evidence of this in Joseph.
As I mentioned, if we wanted to read this and say, "So Joseph is our model," we could stop right here. I could say, "So go home and be like Joseph. Don't compromise, don't complain. Whatever you're walking through, that's the answer." And here's what would happen: you'd walk out and say, "Okay, I'm going to try hard not to compromise, not to complain," and it would probably last till tomorrow. Because if it's out of our own strength, we just try to muster it.
Above the Circumstances
This is why I say we want to ultimately look above the circumstances, because it's what's above the circumstances that helps us say, "I can address pain differently in my life." And what's above the circumstances is God, and more specifically, it's his providence.
Joseph had this dream, and he believed this dream was God saying, "One day you will rule; your brothers will bow to you." And we know, because we've read the story and you've seen the musical, that he actually gets to the point where his brothers come and he feeds them, gives them food, because he's the one who's able to do this in this environment. So we know that it works out. But in the middle of it, he had this choice to say, "Do I believe that God's hand is on me when I'm in the cistern, when I'm in the caravan, when I'm in prison, when I'm in a foreign land, and in every situation in between?" What it requires is a belief that even in our darkest moments, God's hand has not abandoned us, that God is still sovereign, that his providence is still in action.
Here's how the Heidelberg Catechism defines providence. It says, "Providence is the ever-present almighty power of God by which he upholds heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that blade and leaf, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty, all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but from his fatherly hand." The reason I read this from the Heidelberg Catechism, from generations ago, is to say this is what Christians have always believed about God: that there aren't accidents, that God's hand is orchestrating things. At first, when you hear that, you may say, "That actually makes my pain worse, because now I feel like somehow God had a hand in it."
But maybe a better way to think about this, and this is from a book I read about this passage, is to think about it a little like computer chess. I'm not much of a chess player, but because I'm not much of a chess player, this illustration works. If you play chess against a computer and you put the slider up high enough, do you know what happens? Whatever move you make, it almost doesn't matter, because it will crush you. At some point it just says, "You may think you're ahead of me, but I'm ahead of you." And I'm bringing this to my end. Where this doesn't work is that computer chess is malevolent. It's out to get you. But God, if you're his child, is for you. Therefore, whatever it is that you choose, whether it's a mistake, whether it's somebody else's choice, whether you make a wrong move or a good move, God is orchestrating everything to an end. That's what Providence means, and what it means to believe in Providence.
In fact, Helen Keller, who was noted for being blind and challenged in many ways, but was a follower of Christ, once wrote this: "When one door closes, another opens. But often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that God [has opened]."
What God was doing was orchestrating his ends through the bad choices of the brothers. Here's what this means for you, and maybe for me: the worst things in your life, the most painful things, even the things other people have done that have been painful, are not outside of God's hand. If you can look above the circumstances and believe that, then you're able to say, "Even when I'm in this place that's painful, that's hard, God has not abandoned me here."
God's not done with Joseph. He was put in this place so that he would rise to power in Egypt and become the one who would say, through another dream, "I saw that there will be seven years of abundance and then seven lean years. I'm going to take all of the resources from these abundant years and use them to provide in the lean years." His brothers and his father all benefited, because they needed food too. They came. So God used the very act of malicious hatred from his brothers to bring about their salvation. God used what was most painful in a powerful way in Joseph's life.
You may say, "That's nice in a Bible story, that's a good thing. But where I'm living, I don't see it." Here's what I think is most helpful: to recognize that Joseph in this instance isn't just a story. He's really a prototype of Jesus Christ. Joseph suffered in order to deliver his brothers, to bring salvation to them. Jesus suffered to bring salvation to you and me. What this ultimately means is that you can say, "Even if I'm in a place today that is devastating, that's full of pain, I can say, because of Jesus' death and resurrection, because he went to the cross, one day I will have ultimate restoration because of what Jesus has done."
I asked you at the beginning, what has been most painful in your life? What if you were able to reframe that and say, "I don't know how yet, but God is orchestrating something in this that is for my good"? You may not see it all here today. You may not even see it in this life. But what if you were able to say, "God is at work"? Will you trust God's hand?
Or maybe all you've seen is pain. If it's hard for you to do that, the place to look is not to your own resources, not to "be like Joseph." It's to Jesus. It's to the cross. It's to saying, "What God did through Jesus Christ is evidence of his heart for me, for you. And therefore I can say, whatever hardship exists, it's not the end of the story." If we can find that, that's our other way to address pain in our lives.
Let's pray together. God, I ask in this moment for each of us that we could bring what is most painful to you. I ask that you would meet us in our pain and lift us in our pain so that we would be able to see above the circumstances. God, I assume that today there are some of us who are gathered who are saying, "I don't even know if there is a God, if God is good, if Jesus is the answer." I pray even in this moment that there would at least be a hope that it's true, and a willingness to investigate that. Maybe for some, even in this moment, there would be a willingness to say, "I can see how what Joseph did is a precursor to what Jesus Christ has done for me," and that there would be an acknowledgment of our need and a step to say, "I'm going to trust an eternal God with my life rather than my own ability to navigate it." God, we can do that by acknowledging our sin, trusting Jesus, and taking a step toward you in faith. God, we pray this today in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Be blessed as you go this week.
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Disclaimer: This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI from an audio recording of the message. It has been lightly edited for grammar and readability, with filler words removed, and may contain errors or inaccuracies. It may not perfectly reflect the speaker's exact words. Please refer to the original recording for the authoritative version.
