Genesis 37:9–11 (NIV)

Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him and said, “What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you?” His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.

Don’t Discount Your Dream

Introduction

There are some stories in the Bible that read like a movie. The life of Joseph is one of those stories. I was thinking about Joseph and I wanted to cast his story. I’ve said this before; some of my favorite movies are by Denzel Washington. He’s the GOAT in my opinion. He is Him, as the teenage boys like to say.

So in this movie about the life of Joseph I thought I would cast Denzel Washington to play the part of Joseph.

Then I kept on ruminating and I decided that Cuba Gooding Jr. would play the role of Ruben, Joseph’s brother. Ruben was never fully against Joseph, but didn’t have the back bone to stand up to his bothers When they tried to kill him.

Tried to kill his brother?!?! I will fully explain in a minute, let me keep on casting this movie.

I thought thatJonathan Majors could play the role of Judah, because Judah is complicated. He’s against his brother, but was looking for the most profitable solution.

As for the rest of them, I thought that Terry Cruz, Michael B Jordan, Mahershala Ali, and Samuel Jackson could play the roles of his other brothers.

And of course, Morgan Freeman would be the actor for Jacob, Joseph’s Dad.

Yes, all of this was playing out in my thoughts when I was preparing to speak about the Dreams of Joseph.

Transition

Before I can preach to you about Joseph, I do need to give you his story that reads like a movie; so here we go…

Text

Joseph is the 11th son to Jacob. Jacob had twelve sons, and their names are Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin.

Now, Joseph’s Dad was father of the year, because he had a favorite son and made sure that everyone knew it.

Joseph was his favorite son and his way of making it known to everyone was to give him a multicolored robe.

Imagine that?

Not only is your Pops going to love you more than your brothers, but he’s also going to leave nothing to the imagination as to who his favorite son was.

When he went to buy clothes for his sons they all went to Ross, but not Joseph. He got on a Gucci robe.

This created a lot of dysfunction in the household. And the greatest of that dysfunction was that Joseph’s brothers HATED HIM.

Not resented him.

They HATED him.

To make things worse for Joseph, he had God-given dreams. I’m not talking about a weird dream that you get because you ate a bad dinner and watched a funky movie before going to bed.

I’m talking about God-dreams.

Now, Joseph is only 17 and he’s also immature, so rather than keep these God-dreams to himself or with people he trusted, he shared them with his brothers.

Do you want to know how that worked out for him?

They HATED HIM MORE.

So, let me quickly work through the rest of his story.

One day Jacob sends Joseph to go and check up on his brothers who were shepherds. The brothers had gone pretty far from their father’s house. When they saw Joseph coming they decided that they would seize this opportunity to kill him.

Yes, that’s how bad they hated him.

One brother, Ruben, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., challenged his brothers and said, let’s just throw him in a pit instead. That sounded like a good idea, so they threw him into a pit.

Now, while the brothers were enjoying the fact that they had thrown their brother into a pit, a group of Ishmaelites traders were on their way to Egypt. So another brother, Judah, played by Jonathan Majors, thought let’s sell Joseph! That’s more profitable for us than simply killing him.

So that’s what they did.

Joseph is sold to the traders who then sell him to a man by the name of Potiphar, who is an Officer of Pharaoh’s personal security. As a slave to Potiphar, Joseph does good. He’s promoted. He’s found favor with Potiphar, but unfortunately for him, he catches the eye of his bosses wife.

Uh-Oh. She’s got the hots for him and he knows that’s a dangerous proposition.

He has to repeatedly deflect her advances, and after this woman caught one too many rejections, she decides to lie and say that Joseph tried to rape her.

That lands Joseph once more in trouble. He’s put in prison and he has no idea if he’ll ever get out due to the severity of the charge and the person making the charges.

While in prison, Joseph once more finds favor with the warden. It was just like he did in Potiphar’s house.

So Joseph has to look over the prisoners now, and by doing this he begins to meet some unlikely characters. When he meets a couple of Pharaoh’s prisoners who start having dreams, Joseph starts interpreting those dreams. This developed a reputation for Joseph as an interpreter of dreams.

This served him well because one day Pharaoh, the leader of this powerful nation, started having dreams and no one could interpret them.

But on one occasion Joseph’s name is dropped and now he is asked to interpret one of Pharaoh’s dreams. He correctly does that, and Joseph is promoted to be one of the most prominent men in all of Egypt.

This was essentially Joseph sitting in the Presidential Cabinet of Pharaoh. This made him wealthy, this gave him authority, and this was the type of opportunity that no one saw coming.

This was the fulfillment of the God-dream that he had all the way back in his father’s home.

And Jospeh lived happily ever after, the end!

You see, I told you his life was like a movie.

So now, let me get into the details of his story.

The Paradox of Success

There is a saying about success that I want to quote to you:

Every overnight success was 10 years in the making.

I think that’s an applicable quote to this series that we are in. We will often see the success of a person and think that it was luck. It was the result of being discovered. They came out of nowhere.

But when you talk to people about their stories, you’ll find out that this was the result of years of hard work. There is another saying, Luck happens when hard work meeting an opportunity.

If I was to ask Joseph this question, “So what was it like getting to the palace?”

I’m sure that he’d process that answer with a lot of pain.

So let’s consider his journey.

The Dream

Joseph had a dream. I think it’s important to start there.

And I want to ask all of you here, do you also have a dream?

If the answer is no, I want you to change that.

I believe that followers of Jesus should live their lives with a “God-sized Dream” in their heart. We should be people of vision. Our dreams should want us to accomplish great things for the Glory or God. We should be people who want more for themselves, and for their children, and for their children’s children.

If you think that’s not Biblical, let me center you on some scriptures:

Proverbs 29:18 (KJV 1900)

Where there is no vision, the people perish…

Proverbs 21:5 NIV

The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.

Habakkuk 2:2 ESV

And the Lord answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.

And then let me hit you with one more about wanting to leave a legacy.

Proverbs 13:22 NIV

A good person leaves an inheritance for their children’s children, but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous.

So what is the significance of a God-sized Dream?

A God-sized Dream is something so big that you can’t accomplish it without God.

If your dream can be done all by yourself, or with a little help from some friends, I am going to lovingly tell you that you need a bigger dream.

What you need is a dream so big that if God doesn’t step into it, it’s never going to happen.

You need a dream where your ability ends, and it will take the power of God to get you to where you want to go. That’s a God-sized dream.

A God-sized dream requires faith.

How many times do we read in the New Testament that Jesus would do a miracle according to their faith. If you aren’t dreaming you aren’t faithing.

I know that word doesn’t exist, but it makes a good point. We put our faith in front of King Jesus every time we tell him we are believing for something so big that others think we are crazy!

That’s why it’s called faith.

A God-sized dream honors God.

How many times would we also see Jesus challenge his followers by asking, where is your faith? God-sized dreams make much about the power of our God. They tell the world that their’s nothing that OUR GOD cannot do!

2 Chronicles 16:9 (ESV)

For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him…

God is searching for someone that he can give strong support to. But if you aren’t asking, he’s not showing up.

God-sized dreams also honor God because they are not about you. We’ve relegated the Lord to a genie in the sky based on the way that we pray. We treat him like a divine wish-grantor, and that is not who he is. He doesn’t live to grant your wishes, he is renewing the earth, he is ushering in His kingdom, and he is happy to give you the desires of your heart when they are in alignment with his plans and purposes for renewal.

A God-sized dream doesn’t quit when it is difficult.

This is perhaps the greatest singular challenge for us, and why so many people take their dreams with them to their graves. They want the God-sized dream with the ease of childlike solutions.

This is why we are drawn to the “hack”.

I want the big result with minimal effort.

I want to do something big in my time, but I want it to be easy.

You want to know where Joseph’s dream led him to?

First the Pit

The pit represents rejection.

Joseph was rejected by his brothers.

His brothers! Not his enemies, his own flesh and blood.

And there are so many people who never accomplish anything of significance because they are afraid of rejection. As if somewhere in our Bibles there’s a verse that says, “those who love the Lord will have it easy.”

I’m sorry to inform you but that verse does not exist.

Can I tell you what the Bible does say about what to expect as followers of Jesus?

James 1:2 (NIV)

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds,

If you want everyone to like you, then you might want to considering selling ice cream. Otherwise, remember you are a Christian. People are not going to like you because they don’t like Jesus. And if our Lord and Savior was rejected, what makes you think that everyone is going to love you?

How do we overcome?

“How you experience the present is dictated by your belief about the future.”

When you have a God-sized dream on the inside of you, you don’t stop because you are rejected. You keep on going because you know that this isn’t for the applause of man, it’s for the glory of God.

There is a hope on the inside of you that should help you push through every difficulty and believe that if God put this dream inside of my heart, I will not quit until I see it happen in my life.

Potiphar’s House

In Potiphar’s house Joseph meets another challenge. This challenge can actually be harder to overcome.

Potiphar’s House represents the challenge of success.

I know you might be thinking, “Pastor, how is success a challenge?”

Let me try and give you some axioms.

Money doesn’t change you, it just exposes who you are. That’s painful, but it’s true. So often people think if I just had more money, and all the while they fail to manage what they already have. If you were given more money, you’d just be mismanaging money at a larger scale.

With success, comes the allure to believe that you are responsible for it.

I did this.

I made this happen.

It was my hustle.

It was my gift.

Those are dangerous places to be.

I think that in some cases God withholds success because it would break you. It would cost you your marriage. It would cost you your children. It would cost you your future.

Solomon was the wisest King of Israel, and yet later in life when success had gone to his head he did things that completely wrecked the entire nation of Israel.

He did not do this in his failure, he did this in his success.

How many successful Pastors have fallen out of ministry because of moral failure? Way too many. Success is nauseating.

And Joseph, because of his success, is being tempted to do something in secret.

No one will know. No one will find out. You deserve this, Joseph. Look at how you have made everything to prosper in Potiphar’s house? This wouldn’t have happened to you if you weren’t.

But, who would he have been in 5 years?

Let me give you a strong caution church. We always think about the potential of our success in five years. We never think about the potential of our failures in five years.

The same way you can put Godly practices into your life that will radically transform you in five years, can also be Godless practices in your life that will catastrophically deform you in five years.

Joseph understood Genesis 39:9

Genesis 39:9 NIV

No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?”

The Prison

We get to the last of Joseph’s stops before he reaches the palace, and that is the prison.

This is the lowest of the lows for Joseph. He is in a prison for a crime he did not commit. Given who is making the allegations, it is not looking good for Joseph.

But it is here in the prison that Joseph learns the final lesson needed before his dreams turn into reality. He learns that the timing of the dreams belong to God.

The prison teaches us to trust God’s timing.

You see, Joseph, in prison learned something. He learned how to interpret other people’s dreams. He learned that God-dreams will also involve an impact on the life of others.

Once again, Joseph begins to ascend in the prison and gains favor in the eyes of the warden. There are a couple of guys that land themselves in prison and Joseph interprets their dreams. Their dreams were less God-dreams, but prophetic dreams. But Joseph makes the statement that the interpretation of the dreams belong to God.

Where do you think he learned that?

Through his own mishandling of his dreams.

God used that experience to renew his heart towards dreams so that he could serve those around him.

But Joseph did try to help himself by asking one of those men to find a way to get him out when they got out. Did that work out for him? Of course not. Because his trust was in a person and not in God.

Joseph would remain in prison two more years before his moment finally came. He was given the chance to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams and this led to his elevation and his position as the second most powerful man in Egypt.

I know that our sermon series is You In 5 Years, but would you be willing to trust God with your dreams if it took you 10 years? 15 years? 20 years?

Joseph’s journey was 13 years… 13 years of being a slave and being in prison.

This is why I said earlier that overnight dreams are usually ten years in the making. Joseph wasn’t an instant success.

Conclusion

As we close this series, I hope that you leave with the desire to dream again.

Dream again.

God has given you life. He has given you breath. He has given you His spirit.

What great thing are you doing for the Kingdom of God?

How are you laying down your wants and your desires to serve first the Kingdom of God?

I want you to start dreaming.

If you’ve delayed your dream, pick it up! Run with it. God is here and he is near to you!