Hey Carpool Crew! I'm Pastor Justin, and today we're starting a brand-new five-episode journey with someone you've definitely heard of: Joseph. You know him from the coat. Maybe you've seen the storybook with the colorful sleeves. Maybe you've heard about the dreams. But Joseph's real story? It's way deeper, way braver, and way more surprising than you might think. We're going to follow him from age seventeen all the way to grown-up Joseph standing in front of a king. Five episodes. One incredible life. And along the way, you're going to see God do something that takes more than twenty years to fully unfold. Today is Episode 1. The backstory. The setup. The part of Joseph's life where everything looks impossible and nothing makes sense. So let me ask you a question first. Have you ever had a moment where the people closest to you, the people who are supposed to know you best, just didn't get you? Maybe you tried to share something you were excited about and they laughed it off. Maybe you tried to talk about something God put on your heart and your own family rolled their eyes. Maybe you've felt that lonely thing where you're standing right next to people who love you and yet, somehow, you feel completely alone. If that's ever happened to you, you're going to like Joseph. Here's the scene. Joseph is seventeen years old. His family is huge. He has eleven brothers. Eleven. Picture that for a second. Eleven brothers all sharing the chore list. Joseph is one of the youngest, and his dad, Jacob, plays favorites in a way that today would absolutely get him a stern conversation from a parenting book. Genesis 37 tells us that Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons. And to make sure everyone knew it, he gave Joseph this special robe. Now, when you hear the storybook version, you picture a tie-dye coat with rainbow sleeves. The Hebrew word actually points to something more like a long ornamental tunic, the kind a wealthy person might wear, the kind that signaled, "I don't have to do hard work outside in the field today." It was basically a wearable announcement that Joseph was the favorite. Imagine your dad showing up at family movie night and giving one kid a brand-new pair of fancy sneakers and the rest of you a pair of socks. You can already feel the tension. The brothers hated it. The Bible doesn't dance around it. Genesis 37:4 says they couldn't even speak peacefully to him. That's how thick the air was at the dinner table. And then Joseph has a dream. Listen to Genesis 37:5. "Then Joseph had a dream. When he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more." Read that one more time. The word "more" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Things were already tense. Then this dream shows up. Here's what Joseph dreamed. He's out in the field with his brothers and they're all binding sheaves of wheat. And in the dream, his sheaf stands up tall, and all his brothers' sheaves bow down to it. He wakes up, comes to breakfast, and tells everybody. Bad call, Joseph. The brothers say something like, "Are you really going to rule over us? Are you really going to be in charge?" And the Bible says they hated him even more. That's twice in just a few verses. The hatred is stacking up. Then Joseph has a second dream. The sun, the moon, and eleven stars bow down to him. And this time he tells his dad and his brothers. Even his dad rebukes him. "What is this dream you had? Are your mom and I and your brothers really supposed to come bow to you?" The dream is bold. The reaction is sharp. And right there in the family living room, Joseph is being told the same thing in two different ways. By his brothers it sounds like, "Who do you think you are?" By his dad it sounds like, "Slow down, son. Don't get full of yourself." Now I want to pause and ask something honest. Was Joseph being arrogant, or was he being obedient? The Bible doesn't actually call him out for telling the dreams. It doesn't say he was bragging. It just records what happened. And here's a really important truth that I don't want you to miss. Sometimes God tells you something true about who you are or where He's taking you, and the people in your life are not ready to hear it. That doesn't make you arrogant. That doesn't make God's word to you wrong. It just means God is doing something in you that doesn't fit yet. Joseph had a dream from God. And the people who were supposed to celebrate it instead resented it. Quick context, because this matters. In the ancient world, dreams were taken very seriously. People believed dreams could be a real way that God communicated. So when Joseph shared his dream, his brothers weren't dismissing it as random brain pictures. They were taking it seriously. And that's part of why they hated it. They believed it might come true. And they wanted no part of bowing to their little brother. Now here's where the story gets dark, and I'm going to tell you the truth even though it's hard. The brothers are out in a field a few days' walk from home, taking care of the family flocks. Jacob sends Joseph out to check on them. Joseph wears the favorite-kid robe out to the field, which, looking back, was probably not a wise outfit choice for that meeting. When the brothers see Joseph coming in the distance, they start plotting. They actually say to each other, "Here comes the dreamer. Let's kill him and throw him in a pit and tell our dad a wild animal got him. Then we'll see what becomes of his dreams." That last line is sharp. It's mocking. It's saying, "Let's see how that God-stuff works out for you now." The oldest brother, Reuben, talks them down from killing him. They settle for throwing him in an empty cistern, which is a deep dry hole in the ground used to collect rainwater. Joseph is down there in the dark, alone, while his brothers sit and eat lunch nearby. Then a caravan of traders comes through, headed to Egypt. Another brother, Judah, comes up with the plan. "Why kill him? Let's sell him." And they pull Joseph up out of the cistern and sell him for twenty pieces of silver to a group of traders headed south. Twenty pieces of silver. That was the going price for a young slave in that time period. His brothers priced him at zero kindness, zero loyalty, zero family. Then they take Joseph's robe, kill a young goat, and dip the robe in the blood. They bring it home to Jacob and let their dad assume the worst. And Jacob, that grieving father, weeps like he can't be comforted. Imagine being Joseph in that moment. He's seventeen. He just lost his family, his home, his name, and his future in a single afternoon. He is being marched south on a road he didn't choose, toward a country he doesn't know, owned by people he just met. And every step further from home, he could be replaying that breakfast where he told his brothers what he saw in his dream. Every step, he could be wondering if the dream was even real. Every step, he could be saying to himself, "What just happened to me?" And here is the part of the story I really want you to hear today. God didn't take the dream back. The brothers hated the dream. The dad rebuked the dream. Joseph got betrayed because of the dream. And the dream still stood. Genesis 37 closes with Joseph being sold to a man in Egypt named Potiphar, but the dream is still alive in him. Years are about to pass. Hard, lonely, unfair years. We'll get into those next time. But the dream God planted in Joseph at seventeen does not disappear just because the people closest to Joseph didn't believe it. Here's the One Thing for today. Sometimes the people closest to you won't understand what God is doing in your life. Stay rooted in who God says you are. Carpool Crew, hear me on this one. When God tells you something true about who you are, you don't have to convince everyone in your life that it's true. You don't have to make your sister get it. You don't have to make your friends get it. You don't even, sometimes, have to make your parents get it. You just have to keep believing what God said and keep living like it's true. Maybe today the thing on your heart is, "I want to follow Jesus, but my friends don't really care about that." Maybe today it's, "I think God might want to use me to help people, but my brother says that's stupid." Maybe today it's, "I feel like God is preparing me for something, but I can't even talk about it without someone making fun of me." Stay rooted. The dream God gives you doesn't need a vote. God's already cast His. Thanks for riding along today on Carpooling with Heroes of the Bible! Next time, we'll follow Joseph into Egypt, into a stranger's house, into a life he never picked. And we're going to see what happens when everything around you changes but the God who's with you doesn't. I'm Pastor Justin. I'll see you tomorrow.
