Gen 41:16, Joseph then answered Pharaoh, saying, "It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer." 
Last time, we dealt with the Old Testament examples of Joseph and Daniel who were brought face-to-face with the reality that it is only by the power and the wisdom of God that mankind can do what is right before God. Even the interpretation of these recorded dreams was given by God to these wise men. Their wisdom, their strength, their understanding, their power to endure all was given from God. It was all for His divine plan and purpose to be accomplished through these willing instruments whom God placed within the palaces of the leaders to affect all that God intended. 
It is a very earnest and vital recognition for all Christians to understand that we are not here to do what we think God wants us to do. We are not on this earth to try to impress or to persuade or to show what man can do for God. He does not need our best efforts and our self-made religious temples of goodness and virtue. He simply needs us to be, to be what He has ordained and personally designed as our life. We are singly and fully to desire to please Him with our every action and interaction and then allow the Holy Spirit the freedom and the opportunity to use us as He has so determined. 
My father often encouraged us that we are to be available to God to do what He wants us to do as He sends us forth to do it. When we are so caught up in all the schemes and the designs of our minds with regard to what we think will please God, we often find ourselves too busy and too tired and too involved in this or that operation that we can’t or won’t choose to obey when God tells us to go here or to go there and to do this or to do that. We feel that we are more than doing enough to satisfy God so why would He want us to forsake our efforts to do some other menial or trivial task. With that attitude, we miss the whole picture that what God wants is never menial or trivial, but always of eternal consequence. The same will never be true of our personal efforts and accomplishments. 
What man does will always, always become as dust scattered away by the erosion of time. On the other hand, the entirety of what God does, in Christ Jesus, through those willing and available vessels of His Good News will stand for eternity!
In line with this truth, and in providing encouragement to each one of us, let us now turn our attention to several New Testament examples of the declaration that all the work must be God in action and not the attempts of mankind in any fashion. Our first is recorded in Acts, Chapter 3, as Peter and John were going to the temple to pray. 
Please turn to Acts, Chapter 3 in order to follow along. At the steps of the temple was a man who had been lame from birth and was begging for money. Acts 3:6-8, But Peter said, "I do not possess silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you: In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene — walk!" And seizing him by the right hand, he raised him up; and immediately his feet and his ankles were strengthened. And with a leap, he stood upright and began to walk; and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. 
Please note that Peter and John could very easily have just walked by this lame man since they had nothing of themselves to offer him. He needed money in order to survive and the Apostles had none to offer. But the Holy Spirit moved Peter in such a way as to cause him to declare the name of Jesus Christ to this lame man. That healing then proceeded to be compounded in the fact that the man was walking and leaping and praising God. He was not declaring that Peter was some great man, but focused his attention and his praise upon God by Whom he knew he had been healed.
	Notice that Peter did not claim to have any power in himself. All was done by the power of the name of Jesus Christ as we read in Acts 3:12-16. But when Peter saw this, he replied to the people, "Men of Israel, why do you marvel at this, or why do you gaze at us, as if by our own power or piety we had made him walk? "The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His servant Jesus, the one whom you delivered up, and disowned in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release Him. "But you disowned the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, but put to death the Prince of life, the one whom God raised from the dead, a fact to which we are witnesses. "And on the basis of faith in His name, it is the name of Jesus which has strengthened this man whom you see and know; and the faith which comes through Him has given him this perfect health in the presence of you all. 
	 Not only did the lame man receive the ability to walk, but through that wonderful witness of the power of God, Peter was enabled to speak forth the truth of how this lame man was healed. All the power and the glory was given to God even as the strength and the courage for Peter to so address the crowd was by the authority of the Holy Spirit. He did not sugar coat all that the Jews had done to Christ, but boldly proclaimed that even though they had all participated in the crucifixion of the Son of God, it was the fulfillment of all that was so promised by God through the prophets of old. 
On the steps of the temple, in the glow of the miracle of the lame man’s healing, the Word of God was proclaimed to the multitude of gathered witnesses. Peter declared the resurrection life of Jesus Christ and the course that those people had to take in order to know the One Whom God had pledged. Acts 3:17-26, "And now, brethren, I know that you acted in ignorance, just as your rulers did also. "But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ should suffer, He has thus fulfilled. "Repent therefore and return, that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord; and that He may send Jesus, the Christ appointed for you, whom heaven must receive until the period of restoration of all things about which God spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from ancient time. "Moses said, 'The Lord God shall raise up for you a prophet like me from your brethren; to Him you shall give heed in everything He says to you. 'And it shall be that every soul that does not heed that prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among the people.' "And likewise, all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and his successors onward, also announced these days. "It is you who are the sons of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, 'And in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.' "For you first, God raised up His Servant, and sent Him to bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways." 
As we read in Acts 4, verse 4, But many of those who had heard the message believed; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand. This was the reaction of the gathered Jews to the healing of the lame man and the subsequent proclamation of the healing and eternal life of Jesus Christ. 
At the Gentile city of Lystra, another lame man, who could not walk since birth, was healed by the power of God evidenced through the Apostle Paul. The city became ablaze with excitement and the crowd was rushing to offer sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas, who were seen as gods sent to earth. Here too, as recounted in Acts 14:14-17, the Word was preached to the gathered crowd of witnesses as the power of God was so manifested in that healing. 
Acts 14:14-17, But when the apostles, Barnabas and Paul, heard of it, they tore their robes and rushed out into the crowd, crying out and saying, "Men, why are you doing these things? We are also men of the same nature as you, and preach the gospel to you in order that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and all that is in them. "And in the generations gone by He permitted all the nations to go their own ways; and yet He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good and gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness." 
	Paul and Barnabas were testifying to the fact that the power of God was in evidence in the every day testimony of God’s providential work on this earth. All that was taken for granted in the weather and the seasons was to be seen as the beneficent Hand of God blessing His creation. This was the God Who had healed the lame man, not Paul. This was the One, True, Living Lord God Almighty, Who was to be honored and worshipped, not these mere mortals who were in service of the testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ.  
	Later, in Paul’s letter to the Corinthian Church, he told of his heart and thoughts concerning who he was in the light of Jesus Christ and God’s power to be manifested in such a man. 1 Cor 15:9+10, For I am the least of the apostles, who am not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me. 
All the focus of anything that was accomplished in the amazing ministry of this apostle was due fully to the grace of God in operation. There was no claim to be strong in his ability to present the Lord. There was no assertion that his ministry was effective because Paul was such a gun-ho man on fire to accomplish all that was in his power for the sake of the name of Christ. All he was he was by the grace and the power and the wisdom and the endurance and the mercy and the love of God freely given in Jesus Christ! 
	With this truth, he related to the Corinthian Church how God was effective in them in the testimony of Jesus Christ. He described the absolute difference in the work of man’s hands juxtaposed with the working power of God. 2 Cor 3:2-11, You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, cared for by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. And such confidence we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. But if the ministry of death, in letters engraved on stones, came with glory, so that the sons of Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, fading as it was, how shall the ministry of the Spirit fail to be even more with glory? For if the ministry of condemnation has glory, much more does the ministry of righteousness abound in glory. For indeed what had glory, in this case has no glory on account of the glory that surpasses it. For if that which fades away was with glory, much more that which remains is in glory. 
Then we have the assurance from Brother James with regard to how we are to view all that God showers upon our lives. It is all by His hand in operation, His plan and His purpose being fulfilled. There is no luck or good karma or planets in perfect alignment. Who we are and all that we have we have because God has so blessed and graced us by His Sovereign will and power in operation. It is not even by our own hand.
Consider this right now, this instant. All that we work so hard to accomplish of and for ourselves can be taken away in a moment, in a single act of violence, or temper, or accident, or fire. At the same time, the totality of what we have been given in Jesus Christ, a living and personal relationship with God is forever and forever. James 1:16-18, Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow. In the exercise of His will He brought us forth by the word of truth, so that we might be, as it were, the first fruits among His creatures. 
	Our final passage of encouragement in the reality that we are to trust God to do all that is of any eternal significance in our lives is found in Romans Chapter 8. It is one which should hold a very dear place in each of our hearts and which should be very familiar and comforting in our every day experience on this earth. Rom 8:28, And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. 
	Please notice that both Joseph and Daniel knew the reality of this spiritual fact. When we trace the course of their lives, we see that at every juncture in which they were mistreated and abused by the powers of this realm, God manifested His overruling grace and mercy. He established them into positions that would have been otherwise unattainable. The mighty and supreme hand of God took all the pain and the suffering and the ill-treatment and the evil intentions arrayed against these, His Chosen Ones, and turned it all to God’s own glory. By His Sovereign Omnipotence and Omniscience, His magnificent majesty and His safety was proclaimed and witnessed for His purposes of blessing His people. 
	This is to be the pattern of our lives as we look back to each and every time that we felt that things were being utterly destroyed by the onslaughts of this age. As we ask the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to all that He has done in our lives, we will see, in brilliant clarity, that God was at work, ruling and overruling despite our very best of intentions. Our lives will present a roadmap of just how fully God’s hand has been in operation to bring forth His glory and His grace and His mercy in the every dealing that we have had on this earth. 
Many times we are too caught up in our own efforts of trying to make sense of the immediate that we fail to see the eternal process of God’s Love in operation. This is when we need to seek after God to open our hearts and to open minds and to open eyes to see that He does, in fact, have everything well in hand. As we see that truth, we should be utterly moved to offer Him all thanksgiving and praise and honor in worship to His Holy and Righteous Name. So be it!
Joseph then answered Pharaoh, saying, "It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer." Amen.

	This morning’s benediction is Ps 48:1-3. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, In the city of our God, His holy mountain. Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth, Is Mount Zion in the far north, The city of the great King. God, in her palaces, Has made Himself known as a stronghold. Amen.