strengthened and refined…

if the dream is GOD given, satan doesn’t want you to have it.  if it’s GOD given, GOD wants to test it so it can be strengthened and refined.  from both sides you’re going to get testing of the dream.  dreams will always face tests.  and joseph's faced them.

one is the test of denial.  you’ll face that.  you’ll have people who say, “that’s not GOD’s dream for your life.  where do you get that?”  the test of denial.  someone who just says, “that’s not true.” 

so why do people deny your dreams? 

for one, because they don’t have any dreams of their own.  there are some people who don’t have any dreams and people who do have dreams frighten them.  that’s why joseph’s brothers were so frightened.  they had no GOD given dreams and here’s somebody who did and they realized what that dream meant.  there are some people, when you share a GOD given dream, it scares them to death because they don’t have any dreams of their own. 

a second reason is there are some people who don’t want a GOD given dream.  it’s not that they don’t have a GOD given dream.  it’s that they don’t want a GOD given dream of their own.  the number one reason for this is disappointment. 

when you and i have been disappointed in a dream that we have and someone else comes along and shares a dream, our natural reaction to them is to put down their dream.  why?  because we’ve been hurt.  we’ve been disappointed.  it’s a natural feeling we have in our lives.  we’ve got to watch out for that. 

let’s say you are married and you really want a child but for some reason you can’t have one and you hear that someone else, their GOD given dream for a child had come into their lives, the natural reaction, honestly, is not to rejoice with them.  no. the natural reaction is, “they obviously aren’t as SPIRITual as we are, don’t pray as much as i do.  so why is GOD giving them this dream?”  this happens all the time.  so you and i need to be careful not to quench others dreams when this happens.  and we need to realize that other people who have been disappointed in life will try to quench our GOD given dream. 

that’s why denial comes in.  so often when you share a dream, instead of people being excited about it like you’d expect, they’ll try to quench it.  that’s test number one.

just a thought from the front porch…