someone else taking credit…

there is another way to picture how you and i can live the dream even when we don’t see it.  when i say live the dream, another picture in joseph's life is…

-you succeed in potiphar’s house.  succeed in the house of potiphar, his slave owner.  here’s joseph, this great leader.  GOD’s given him some great gifts and abilities and he’s given him a great dream and he’s working in the house of potiphar making his master very successful. 

if you have a GOD given dream, on your way towards that dream, you’ll meet some people who’ll hitch their wagon to your dream.  they’re even going to take the credit for some of the things that happened in your life because of your GOD given dream.  you can count on that.  potiphar did.  he got a lot of blessings from a man named joseph using him as a slave.  and there are going to be few people who try to use your dream.  what do you do about that?  do you just stop dreaming?  no.  you do what joseph did.  you keep serving HIM.  you don’t worry about them. 

you do what paul did.  he had a GOD given dream to share the gospel with everyone.  in philippians he tells us there are people who are jealous of that and tried to make fun of him and his preaching.  he said, “i don’t care about that. only that in every way whether in pretence or in truth CHRIST is proclaim.”  he forgot about those people who were trying to take credit for his dreams.  you and i need to, too.  forget about it.  GOD can take care about that.

when someone else tries to take credit for the dream, there’s a test.  and the test is this: who’s dream is it?  if it’s your dream – if you and i have started to take possession of it – there’s going to be a lot of anger.  but when i recognize it’s GOD’s dream i realize GOD can take care of them.  HE can take care of them real well!  HE knows exactly what to do to those trying to take credit for HIS dream.  that’s the test.

just a thought from the front porch…

life can really be fair…

so how do you recognize a schemer? (genesis 29-30) you learn something from jacob’s marriage and from his children and from his flocks. 

1.  schemers often fall victim to other schemers.  often.  why?  because you’re always looking for an angle and you find someone else looking for an angle and you get a wrong angle somehow.  you’re trying to take advantage of them and they take advantage of you.  it’s the trap of the con man. 

2.  they’re often trapped by their own schemes.  he had this great scheme to marry rachel and then to marry leah and all of a sudden he’s trapped in this family who’s in constant conflict.  

3.  schemers often take the credit that is the LORD’s.  he had all these great ideas and these blessings came his way but instead of giving GOD the credit he gave his scheme the credit. 

i wonder if jacob ever had a light dawn, where he could see himself and his problems.  he is tricked by a father into believing that an older daughter is actually a younger daughter. 

do you think he remembered when he tricked his father into believing that a younger son was an older son?  you remember that he stole his older brother’s blessing by fooling his old father that he was his older brother.  do you think that dawned on him?  they’re trapped by their own scams.

do you think that as he saw his wives fighting over him – and one night they were fighting so much they got some plants from the field they thought were aphrodisiacs and were fighting over these plants, which one would have the right plant to go in and entice jacob.  do you think as he saw them fighting over a plant that they could use to entice him to cause a birth, he might have thought of the day he used a bean soup to entice his brother out of a birthright?  

do you think that jacob as he looked into leah’s eyes and he saw as she must have felt because she was rejected by jacob, her own husband for the younger sister, do you think it dawned on him what it felt like for him as a child to look into his father’s eyes and to feel that rejection? 

we can all relate to this because we all know what it’s like to take the hurts that we felt in our own lives and whether we know it or not begin to inflict them on others – our husbands, our wives, our kids, our friends.  none of us want to do that but unless we let go of our schemes we’re doomed to doing that.  we’re doomed to the life of a schemer.  we’re doomed to a life of a jacob. 

just a thought from the front porch…