The Importance of U

Matthew 1: 20 NIV

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

What Makes You Important?

Recently I came to the church office and discovered a woman sleeping on the concrete behind the sanctuary.  She was wrapped in a pure white comforter and had boxes and papers and the remains of her meal scattered around her.  She looked up at me as I went to unlock the kitchen in the back building and she asked me if I remembered her.  It is funny as I get older how often people recognize me but I can’t recall having met them.  After talking a while, I realized that it was not Alzheimer’s that led to my inability to remember her but the fact that we really had never met.  She was young and beautiful, maybe late twenties, early thirties, deeply tanned with bright green eyes and an easy smile.  It was not long though before I began to see what a broken soul she was.  Her past clearly had traumatized her and she was bitter and angry.  Gina kept talking about the demon possessed police who were following her and trying to trap her as well as evil forces that were trying to destroy her.  She was clearly a meth addict, but worse, deranged and emotionally unstable.  I brought her something to eat, gave her access to the bathroom and spent some time listening to her rants and then praying for her to have God’s peace.  After Gina left, I wondered what God wanted to do with her.  Did He have plans for her still?  Was she too wrecked to be reclaimed by God?  As Gina limped away, her damaged leg seemed to offer hope to me that if a doctor could fix her leg, surely God could remake her broken heart.  Perhaps He has plans for her that she can still fulfill?

You too are damaged in many ways, some visible but others hidden even from you.  You care about how your life is going, what it is and what will become of it despite the broken parts of you.  If you didn’t, it would probably be because you are at some level feeling hopeless.  Maybe it matters to you what God wants to do with you.  Perhaps you have thought about His plans for you and how you fit into the bigger scheme of life.  How ready are you for Christ to jump into your conscious thinking and redirect you, shift dramatically the direction you are going?  Do you believe that God has plans for you and that you play a part in what He wants to do?  Are you willing to go where He leads, do what He tells you to do?

Not long ago I spent some time pondering just how immense it was for Joseph, who was engaged to Mary, the mother of Jesus to agree with the Lord’s plan for him.  When Joseph heard from his fiancée that she was pregnant but not with his child, he immediately assumed that she had cheated on him.  Because Joseph her husband was a righteous man and did not want to expose her (his fiancée, Mary) to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly. (Matthew 1:19 NIV)  However, God intervened and sent an angel to Joseph during a dream.  But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:20 NIV)

You have the benefit of being able to look back on all of this through history, knowing the supernatural circumstances of this pregnancy.  Joseph had none of our tools to process what Mary had just told him.  In addition, the vision of the angel was one embedded in a dream and we all know how convoluted and distorted dreams are.  Dreams are not very trustworthy and you cannot be sure what to do with them. Some most interesting conclusions can be drawn from this short description of how God got across to Joseph His plans for him.  Why don’t you consider each of these point by point?

Joseph was afraid, really afraid of the news that Mary was pregnant.  His plan to divorce her quietly was born out of a desperate situation.  How do you divorce someone quietly when you both are from a small village where everyone knows everyone else and weddings are community events that take in the entire town practically?  He would have had to spend months and more likely years to get to the place where he could even wed Mary.  He would not have on the spur of the moment proposed to her; she was his most important investment in life.  It would have scared Joseph to death to contemplate tossing all of that aside and quietly walk away from this marriage without being able to explain the reason behind his decision.  Worse than that however was staying with Mary and having to wait nine months for her baby to be born, knowing the child might not look like either one of them.  How could he explain what had happened to her?

Second, it really was God who was speaking to Joseph in the dream, despite how hard it would have been for him to believe.  The tension would have been difficult to resolve; how to know for certain He had heard from God and it was not just the wild nature of his imagination that put together his dream.  Perhaps he wanted the Lord so badly to intervene and guide him that he concocted in the depths of his unconsciousness a “God moment”.  Plenty of crazy people think they have heard from God…or Moses…or Adam…  Joseph could have lost his mind in his grief over his fiancée’s pregnancy and the dream may just have been an emotional coping device.  It was an act of great faith for Joseph to decide his dream really had come from God.

Third, it was Joseph that God wanted to act as the father of His child.  No one else was selected.  Joseph alone was chosen for this great task of raising and caring for Jesus.  When Joseph looked at himself and pondered the immensity of what stood before him, he could not hunt about for someone to take his place.  He alone had been given the charge and it was his duty to live up to the Lord’s expectations.  No one could take his place.

Fourth, Joseph was a part of God’s prearranged plan.  There was a history to what He was called to do.  At some point, the Lord picked out Joseph and arranged circumstances so that he would be a perfect fit for what the Lord wanted him to do.  After Joseph accepted his part in God’s plan, there was an entire chain of events that would follow that would be directly connected to Joseph and what he did.   This was not an arbitrary determination on God’s part that Joseph might work out as Jesus’ father.  He thought through it all before He contacted Joseph and was all in on being there for Joseph as he fulfilled the task given him.

Fifth, Joseph was a very ordinary human being.  There are no unique qualities described in the text telling us about him.  We know nothing about his intellect, his talents, his athleticism or even his age or how he looked. We could never have known it was him if Joseph walked up to us on the street because we have nothing in the Biblical record to make us recognize him.  His skill set and talent base are irrelevant to the story.   God picked Joseph out to raise His Son and that is all we can say about why He did so.  It would be nonsensical for us to think God did not have good reasons for choosing Joseph, we just don’t know what they were and Joseph most likely did not know either.

You also fit into what God is doing and you too have been selected by Him for something…most likely an entire list of somethings. Why He has chosen you we cannot say.  What your qualifications are for the challenge is irrelevant to you.  This is not something God just on the spur of the moment considered but from eternity He has been thinking of you for this.  No one else is fit for what He has for you or He would have called that person instead.  But how can you know it is God who has given you the responsibility laid in front of you?  You just must!  At some point you have to resolve the tension between believing that God is directing your life and not believing it.  You might be afraid of what is before you, completely befuddled by what you have to do but at some level that only you and God can access you know it is God pointing the way.  No one else may see what you see or grasp what you know is true but you do know God has something for you to do and it is no one else He has to do it.  What might it be?  None of us here know but you will know and you must not talk yourself out of knowing you know.  The Bible clearly tells us the way God has His people do things, how they are to act when faced with the challenges before them.  It is not a matter of how to do what He wants you to do; it is whether you will do what He is showing you to do in the way He has said to do it.

In some way, you fit perfectly into the plan God has for this world and He is certain you can live up to the challenge.  He knows your capabilities, your strengths and weaknesses and He has thought through what He can do with you and through you if you will just accept His challenge.  You cannot know what value there is to what you do nor can you see all the ramifications of following Him.  All you can know and this is the most certain fact you can ever come to discover.  God will connect you to Himself and together you will form a union that is as binding and full of love and joy as the union the Father has with the Son.  Are you willing to be united with Christ in His plan for you?  Are you willing to let Him work through you that you might be joined to Him in His plan for the world?  What do you say to God when He lifts your head up and points out to you the way that you are to go?

Poor Me

Numbers 20:2-5 NIV

 Now there was no water for the community, and the people gathered in opposition to Moses and Aaron.  They quarreled with Moses and said, "If only we had died when our brothers fell dead before the Lord!  Why did you bring the Lord's community into this desert, that we and our livestock should die here?  Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to this terrible place? It has no grain or figs, grapevines or pomegranates. And there is no water to drink!"

Have You Been Given a Fair Deal?

During one of my trips to Russia, I was shocked to discover as I was about to board the plane back to the U.S. that I didn’t have my ticket with me.  This of course was not the end of the world.  The airline could simply look on the computer and find that I had purchased the ticket for that flight and reissue me a ticket and boarding pass.  That is what I thought would happen.  Apparently the Russian airline did not keep records of tickets issued in a data base and I was going to have to purchase a new ticket if I was going to board the plane.  Terribly annoyed, I gathered my luggage and trudged over to the customer relations window and waited to meet with a service representative.  By the time someone was able to speak with me, I missed my flight.  What was worse, the airline people said they could not find any record of me buying a ticket with them and that if I wanted to fly out of Moscow, I would have to purchase a new ticket.  What was I to do?  It seemed incredibly unfair for me to have to pay for a ticket I had already bought so I sat in the airport and stewed, waiting for someone with more authority than the ticket clerks to help me.  In the meantime, all the other flights leaving Moscow for London where I was to transfer were booked.  I began to feel sorry for myself.  “Why did I have to pay extra money to fly home?”  “Why wasn’t God helping me?”  “How come I had to miss my flight?”  “What sort of airline treats its customers so unfairly?”  I finally called the school where I had spent two weeks lecturing and complained to the director about my terrible situation.  He told me to hire a cab and come back to the school and figure out what to do there.  Now I had to spend fifty dollars for a cab ride back to Moscow.  What a joke!  What a waste of money!  I just knew the cab driver would overcharge me too!  Where was I supposed to stay when I got back to Moscow?  What would I have to pay for a hotel room?  Why did this have to happen to me?  It wasn’t right that I sacrificed so much to come and teach in Russia and then to have to put up with this.

Have you ever felt sorry for yourself?  Of course you have!  You have been mistreated and misunderstood.  You haven’t had enough money to get what you wanted or take the sort of trip you would like to take.  So-called friends have ignored you and taken advantage of your kindness.  You don’t get paid what you deserve.  Everyone else gets to relax while you have to keep working.  Why did you have to get sick now?  How come your car had to break down where it did?  Why did you have to get hit or your house robbed?  The work you do isn’t appreciated.  There is so much that isn’t fair in life!  How come God doesn’t take better care of you?

Perhaps you can relate to Ahab and his attempt to buy a field near his house.  He went to the owner of the field with a quite reasonable proposal.  Ahab said to Naboth, "Let me have your vineyard to use for a vegetable garden, since it is close to my palace. In exchange I will give you a better vineyard or, if you prefer, I will pay you whatever it is worth." (1 Kings 21:2 NIV) Ahab, although king of the land, did not use his political power to force Naboth to sell to him.  He nicely and respectfully tried to work out a deal with him.  However, to King Ahab’s surprise and dismay, Naboth refused to sell the land.  When nothing Ahab said could convince Naboth to sell his vineyard, King Ahab literally went back home to his bedroom and sulked.  Ahab’s wife later found him in his bed, refusing to eat because he felt so sorry for himself.

This is a brilliant example of how self-pity operates.  Almost always it is a product of lust.  Many mistakenly think of lust as merely some sort of misguided sexual desire but it is much more than that.  Lust as we see it in the Bible is the wreckage of desire.  “I want this now and I must have it.”  It could be anything that becomes an object of lust.  I want someone to respect me.  I want to be appreciated in this home.  I want that job.  I want a better income.  I want to buy that car.  Desires are built into you by God and they are important to your personality.  However, a corrupted desire is rooted in the unwillingness to wait for God to satisfy the desire His way.  When King Saul tried to kill David because of his jealousy over David’s popularity, his longing to kill David flowed out of his lust for respect.  Jacob lusted after his brother Esau’s place in the family and betrayed his father and his brother by trying to wrest it away from Esau by deceit.

When a lust is not fulfilled, when we don’t get what we want and we are not willing to wait for God to satisfy the desire we have in His way within His time frame, self-pity is the result.  I want this and I want it now.  If I don’t get it, I feel sorry for myself and become either angry or depressed.   She must love me.  He must treat me fairly.  They must respect me.  I deserve to have a better salary.  Lust, the unwillingness to let God work things out for me so that my desire can be fulfilled in the way He wants, leads to self-pity which can disconnect me from God and replace God’s joy and peace with misery.  The great sin of Job’s friends was that they pushed him into self-pity.  Rather than encouraging Job to patiently wait for God to sort things out for him, they prodded Job to become dissatisfied with God by insisting the Lord was punishing him for sins he knew he had not committed.  The more they accused Job of hidden wickedness, the more Job’s dissatisfaction with God grew.

The great lie of Satan which he first tried with Eve is that God is not good enough to make your life right.  This festering discontent with the Lord bubbles up into bitterness, frustration and depression.  It saps us of our moral strength and incites rebellion against God.  Listen to how Satan sowed the seed of discontent in Eve.  "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman.  "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."  (Genesis 3:4-5 NIV)  “God is keeping you from something good and it is not fair the way He is holding you back.”  Lust refuses to accept God’s plan for how to have one’s needs met.  Self-pity is our response to a lust that poisons our heart before we engage in outright rebellion against God.

There are two principles that every single person must be taught and if they are embraced, the peace of God can be attained.  The first is: God is in complete control of your circumstances.  Satan isn’t.  Luck isn’t.  Others around you are not.  God is in complete control of your circumstances.  The second is:  If you are in love with God, then every circumstance in life is good for you.  Why would you feel sorry for yourself if you know that God, who loves you with unlimited affection, is in charge of your life and will make it perfect in every way if you just trust Him?  Consider how Joseph from the Old Testament long ago discovered that these two principles were true.

When he was seventeen, Joseph’s brothers, out of jealousy, (or more precisely because of lust) sold him into slavery.  For twelve years his life wasted away first as a slave and later it got even worse after he was unjustly sent to prison.  Everything that happened to Joseph was unfair, at least from a human standpoint.  He did not deserve to be a slave and certainly it was not right for him to be in jail.  But you must remember and it needs to be certain in your mind, God is in complete control of your circumstances and everything that happens to you will make your life better.  At the age of twenty-eight, the Lord put Joseph to the test.  Into the prison where Joseph languished came two former employees of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.  One was Pharaoh’s chief baker and the other his cupbearer.  Both were sent to prison because of Pharaoh’s dissatisfaction with them.  On the same night, each had a dream that baffled and troubled him.  Joseph asked them to tell him their dreams because as Joseph put it, “Do not interpretations belong to God?”  After Joseph explained to the cupbearer what the Lord was telling him through his dream, Joseph asked him to try to get Pharaoh to release him from prison.  He added this bit of commentary about why he was in jail.  For I was forcibly carried off from the land of the Hebrews, and even here I have done nothing to deserve being put in a dungeon." (Genesis 40:15 NIV)

In this one simple statement, Joseph showed that he had not yet learned to live by the two principles.  He did not believe it was God who brought him to prison and he did not see any good coming out of it.  As a result, Joseph had sunk into self-pity.  What Joseph did not realize and perhaps could not know was that the Lord was preparing him for the great task that only someone with tremendous humility and unbending loyalty to God could perform.  To make such a person, the Lord had to put him through slavery and unjust imprisonment and in it all learn to trust the Lord and stay loyal to Him no matter what.  Joseph was being prepared to become second in command of Egypt and bring the knowledge of God to that pagan nation.  All arrogance and self-pity and lust had to be squeezed out of Joseph before the Lord could entrust him with this responsibility.   Finally, after two more years in jail, Joseph was ready to trust God in any and every circumstance and believe that no matter what he faced, the Lord was good.  How do we know Joseph learned that the two principles were true?  When Joseph was finally freed by Pharaoh and Pharaoh put him in charge of running the country, his brothers who had sold him into slavery came to Joseph begging for food to feed their starving families.  Rather than making his brothers pay for what they had done to him, he reassured them that he did not blame them for selling him into slavery but rather was thankful God let him go through what he did.  "So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.” (Genesis 45: 8 NIV)  Later, after their father died, Joseph reassured his brothers once more that God put him in Egypt for good both for him and many others including his brothers and their families.  But Joseph said to them, "Don't be afraid. Am I in the place of God?  You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” (Genesis 50:19-20 NIV)

How much happier and more peaceful we would be if we could just see things like Joseph did.  Everyone around us would be uplifted by our approach to  life.  We would be encouragers rather than discouragers.  We would lift up the spirits of those who are feeling down and be like a breath of fresh air everywhere we go.  There is no reason to feel sorry for yourself if you know that Christ is in charge of your life.  If Christ could take the brutal beatings and barbaric crucifixion He suffered and turn it into salvation for you and the rest of the world, then He can and will work out everything we face with perfect care.

Salvation Doing

Matthew 19:16-17 NIV

 Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"  "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. "There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments."

How Is Your Salvation Coming Along?

The other day I took our dog Salsa out to run around and sniff things.  I usually don’t make her go on a leash.  I like for her to have freedom to use her mind and to act upon the external stimuli she discovers.  Dogs need the opportunity to think in new settings and explore.  No one else in the family can let her go off leash in the neighborhood because I am the only one who has absolute control over her.  When I call to her, no matter how far away she has wandered, if she can hear me, she will come running.  Sometimes I can tell she doesn’t want to come and her mind is trying to decide if she will keep up her sniffing where she is or return to me.  Rarely does she hesitate for long.  As I stood outside and watched Salsa wander about, suddenly her head jerked up to attention, her nostrils flared and in a split second she shot off into the street.  We live on the corner of two busy neighborhood streets that have significant blind spots.  Cars shoot through the intersection with almost no warning and there are no stop signs to slow them.  Suddenly Salsa was in the middle of the intersection going full bore after a squirrel.  I yelled for Salsa to stop but her mind was settled and she ignored my shout.  My screams to come back had no impact on her.  Salsa chased the squirrel madly through the street and to the foot of a tree where the squirrel escaped her fury.  It was only after she was foiled that the dog returned to me, obedient once again.  I learned something about Salsa that day.  She will obey me up to the point that some desire more powerful than her wish to please me comes to her.  Salsa is still obedient; it is though, to something other than me.

Obedience is fickle not just when it comes to dogs but to people also.  There are powerful forces that impact the direction obedience takes.  Of course, people are much more sophisticated than dogs and our rules of obedience more complicated but there is a pattern we find when it comes to obedience that may be important to explore.  Why is it that a man who loves his wife will leave her for someone else even though he knows the damage it will cause and how many people he respects will be upset with him for leaving her?  How come a patient will decide not to take the medication given her despite the authority of the doctor and her knowledge medicin?  Why do children disobey their parents even if they might face dire consequences for their actions and how do you explain speeding on the freeway when tickets are so expensive and the hassle of traffic school so aversive?  What is it about disobedience that makes it such a universal habit of people?  Why do we chase squirrels into busy intersections?  Today we weill deal with part of the answer to this question.

Perhaps you, like me, find it interesting Jesus’ response to the young man who asked Him how to gain eternal life.  "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. "There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments." (Matthew 19:17 NIV)  The Lord connects surprisingly life with obedience to the commandments of God.  This is particularly disconcerting given what we think we know about eternal life based on the promises found in the Bible; that it is a free gift of God that comes to us through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16 NIV) (John 3:16  For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-10 NIV) But here in Jesus’ reply it seems that obedience to the commandments of God is required for eternal life which is the opposite of what we have all been taught!  The confusion is understandable but not necessary.  Let us look a bit more closely at this terse response of the Lord to the young man wanting to know about eternal life.

It is helpful if we consider the tenses of the verbs in this passage.  Literally the Greek text reads, “If you want into life to enter, keep the commandments!”  “If you want” is in the present tense which indicates continuous action.  In other words He is telling us, “If you continually want eternal life” or “If you always want to have eternal life” or “If eternal life is forever on your mind”, then He says, “to enter, keep the commandments.”   The second and third parts of this are tricky and it takes careful thinking to see this clearly.  “To enter” is in the aorist tense which describes a moment in time rather than continuous action.  The same is true of the command of Jesus, “Keep the commandments!”  This also is in the aorist tense and indicates a moment in time.  Now that we have gotten the technical part of the Greek language out of the way, let us examine the gist of Jesus’ words.

Eternal life is continuous and we have it as a result of the gift of God dying to take away our sin and being raised to life that we through His life might have the same eternal life as God.  Now the point Christ makes is this.  Eternal life is worked into us by God as a gift.  It is worked out of us by us in our doing.  Through Christ we always have eternal life but it is experienced in moments in time as we live out in practical and real ways the life God gives us.  How do we live out the eternal life we have in Christ?  Jesus said we do it by keeping the commandments.    The Apostle Paul put it this way.  “As you have always obeyed…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you…” (Philippians 2: 12-13 NIV) In other words, God gives you salvation.  You work out that salvation in your everyday life by doing what God tells you to do.  The reason you can obey Him and work out the salvation you possess is because it is God who is working in you in all you do as you obey Him.  Let us use an everyday example to illustrate this.

Suppose you want to make your favorite dinner and in doing so there are specific ingredients and spices and types of dishes you like the most.  You prefer it all cooked in a certain way but for some reason you have forgotten all this and now are dependent on someone else to guide you through it.  Of course it would be wise to carefully take into consideration everything that guide has to tell you for it is in your best interests to follow to the letter what you are told.  In our case, we have lost our memory or our sense of everything that makes eternal life, life.  We don’t know what it is because Sin has warped our grasp of it.  The Lord however does know what that life is and how it is put together and so He has given us commands that make that life come together in a practical way.  That is what the commands of God are, the way of Life…the way of the Eternal Life.

Without spending any time reflecting right now on what those commands that make eternal life real life are, we can take a moment to consider a case study on the application of obeying the commands of God and seeing life come out of it.  The fiancé of Mary, the mother of Jesus was described by Matthew, one of Jesus’ Disciples as a “righteous man”!  (Matthew 1: 19)  What does that mean?  It means he obeyed the commands of God.  Now what did Joseph know of God, eternal life and all God wanted to make of him?  Not very much probably!  But he was about to discover a great deal about God’s life with him.  He may not have been the first man ever to find out before he got married that his fiancé was pregnant with someone else’s child but he certainly was given the most unusual explanation for it.  Mary of course “was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:18 NIV)  This would have seemed like utter nonsense to Joseph but he was a “righteous man” and so he decided in his best sense of what the scriptures taught of how to live and conduct one’s business that he would quietly divorce Mary rather than make all sorts of public accusations and bring her up to local authorities for stoning.  He could have done this of course and certainly none of his friends would have faulted him for it but he knew about love and mercy and he knew about the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

It was in Joseph’s righteousness that God, opened up to Joseph His plan for Joseph and Joseph’s fiance.  It came in a dream.  But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." (Matthew 1:20-21 NIV)  We mustn’t succumb to the temptation to quickly run right through all that happens here because the account is so familiar to us.  It is a perfect lesson on the value of obedience.  Joseph had a dream…all of us have had dreams and nearly all of the dreams we have we give little if any notice.  They are generally an absurd tangle of material coming out of our unconscious.  In Joseph’s case…at least this time, a dream was a revelation of God to him.  Any of us, with only the information Joseph had in his grasp, would not have faulted Joseph if he had ignored the dream and proceeded with his plan to quietly divorce Mary.  Joseph though was a righteous man and careful to do what God said to do.  He was determined to keep the commands of God and this, He realized, was a command of God.  It was a strange command and one that on the surface appeared to be asking too much of Joseph but it was a command nonetheless and so he did it.  He obeyed.  When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.  But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus. (Matthew 1:24-25 NIV)

Not long after that Joseph had another dream and God opened Himself up to Joseph even more of his plans and told Joseph that he needed to take his young family to Egypt because King Herod was going to try and kill the baby Jesus.  What did Joseph gain in all these “obeyings”?  Jesus defined eternal life in a way we don’t often consider.  Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. John 17:3 NIV Eternal life is continual intimate knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ.  In our case study, Joseph did what God told him to do (i.e. followed a command), and the Lord revealed more of Himself to Joseph.  If eternal life is knowing God more and more as we go along, and if in obeying the Lord’s commands for us, we dive deeper and deeper into eternal life, then the reward for doing what God tells us to do is that we grow closer to Jesus.  Consider this as you take one of God’s commands to obey.  “God is love.”  Thus, the command you are given is given to you because of God’s love and when you obey it, the outcome of obeying will be something due to God’s love for you and in obeying you are filled even more with His love than you were before.  Go to God and ask Him to show you a command He wants you to obey.  He will reveal something to you.  Don’t hesitate, do what He tells you to do.  It may not seem practical, the command.  It may even seem to be mean for God to make the requirement.  But if you do the command, if you obey God in it, you will like Joseph, discover that God’s love for you is greater and more wonderful than you ever knew before.