You Are Favoured

Do you actually believe God likes you? Not loves-you-because-He-has-to. Likes you. Favours you. That was the question underneath the first of Pastor Josh's three messages at Heartbeat's 2026 camp, opening Genesis 37 with all three campuses under one roof. The Full Life: His Story series has walked through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and camp brings us to Joseph: Full Life in Christ, through the life of a dreamer. Night one had a title he made everyone repeat: you are favoured.

Favour produces freedom

Genesis 37 opens with a father playing favourites. Jacob loved Joseph more than all his sons, the child of his old age and of the wife he actually chose, and he made it visible with a robe of many colours. Verse 4 records the cost: when his brothers saw it, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him. Pastor Josh drew one line through that scene and it carried the whole night. Favour and favouritism are not the same thing.

See, favour produces freedom. But favouritism produces hatred.

He has watched both play out for decades. People who grew up knowing they were loved carry a freedom into every room; they can go out, fail, and come back, because underneath is a foundation that says somebody would die for me. People who felt like the second favourite carry that wound into every adult relationship. He told of a woman shaped for years by the certainty that her sister was the loved one; her mother, astonished, insisted she had loved her the same. The perception alone did the damage. And it eventually touches how we relate to God. If the parents who were supposed to love me didn't, why would God? So he pleaded with parents: say I love you constantly. It shapes children deeper than you think.

Unearned, unmerited

So what is favour? Pastor Josh reached for Hong Myung Bo, currently one of the most criticised men in Korea. When the national team wins, he is suddenly a genius; one loss later, his reputation is gone. His value floats on his latest result. That is how the world hands out love, and most of us have quietly signed the contract. He redrew his ASIA diagram: achievement produces significance, significance produces identity, identity produces approval and acceptance. Be somebody, then you will be loved. Favour runs the circle in reverse.

Favour is this undeserved, unearned, unmerited grace upon the person.

The Bible keeps making the same point. When the angel greets Mary in Luke 1:28, "highly favoured" is the grace word. Ephesians 2 says God loved us when we were dead in trespasses, children of wrath, before we did a single thing for him. And Romans 8 stacks it up: those he predestined he called, justified, glorified. Which part of that chain did you contribute? If God is for us, who can be against us? Pastor Josh said this is where he could drop the mic, because there is no logical basis left for a Christian to sit there believing they are unfavoured. The only thing in the way is a heart that cannot take it in.

A dream or the dream

Why does this passage matter for dreaming? Because Joseph, the favoured son, is the dreamer, and his brothers hated him even more for his dreams. Wounded people cannot celebrate someone else's dream; Joseph's tactless retelling just rubbed salt into wounds their father's favouritism had already opened. Some of us sit exactly there: everybody has a dream but not me, and if I were really favoured, why this family, why this face, why not that job.

Then he asked why God so often works through dreams at all. A dream is the one place where you are not in control, and it is a place of rest. Grinding for approval, Hong Myung Bo style, is a restless life; that is not a dream, it is a wish list. Favour operates in the space where you finally stop controlling. And there is a difference between a dream and the dream. The house, the two kids, the Tesla: Pastor Josh has that life at fifty-something, and he was blunt that if that were all there is, this life is not worth living. Joseph's dream was not his own ambition. Nobody understood it for twenty years, until a slave-turned-prisoner-turned-ruler could say to the brothers who sold him, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. A family walked into Egypt and a nation walked out, the nation the Saviour of the world would come from. That is the dream, and Sunday's session picks the thread up.

Show me your love

The most personal stretch of the night was testimony. Pastor Josh grew up in a poor family, father mostly absent, no memory of verbal affirmation. He was a churchgoing kid who could recite the gospel but privately could not sing Give Me Jesus and mean it. So one day he decided to settle it, went alone into a prayer mountain cave in the Korean winter, and spent the night repeating one phrase: show me your love. No voice, no writing on the wall, just a sore forehead and a foggy morning. And the quiet sense of God saying he had loved him before he ever walked into the cave. Is that good enough? Can you trust me that I love you? The biblical word for grasping grace like that is faith. Not achievement, not appearance, just sitting where you are and letting God whisper that his love does not depend on your résumé or anyone's opinion, including your own.

He admitted this is no one-off transaction. Every week before preaching he still fights insecurity in front of what he called 150 judges who have heard all his jokes; what steadies him is the favour of God, not confidence in the sermon. And to those who have told him lately that they do not feel loved by this church, he did not soften it: no pastor, no spouse, no parent can fill that hollowness. Only the God who says you are my favourite can, and until that lands, we will keep blaming the church or the marriage, like Joseph's brothers did.

Give God a chance

The sermon finished early on purpose, because this camp is built around prayer, and Friday night's response ran for the better part of an hour. The invitation was searching.

Your biggest issue is not lack of information. Your biggest issue is lack of encounter.

Pastor Josh met Jesus at a camp like this one, not through the preacher but in a moment of crying out. So the challenge for the weekend, and for anyone watching from home, is the one he gave before the message even began: why don't you give God a chance? Sit where you are, or stand, or kneel, and wrestle like Jacob with the thing you actually cannot believe, that God chose to love you before you did anything. Ask him to make Romans 8 personal. Then start dreaming God's dream, the one bigger than you can design or fulfil. Saturday night's message takes it further: you are victorious. But it all starts here. Turn to someone near you and say it from your heart: you are God's favourite.