The Power of Setting Your Dreams

I think all of us are prone to doing something at night besides sleeping, and that is we all have dreams. You wake up in the morning and sometimes you've had a dream that's quite vivid. You remember it quite well. Maybe you even have a dream that'll awaken you in the night. Sometimes you wake up from the dream and you knew you dreamed, but you can't remember exactly what it was all about. The whole study of psychology and science and trying to figure out dreams and all is an interesting study in itself, but I think that's something we all have done and do in various ways, depending upon what we were thinking about when we went to bed, what we may have last watched, or whatever is interesting to think about what triggers dreams. A lot of people have recurring dreams, and I have a recurring dream that it seems to, I don't know, every month or two it will come on. The dream is that I've got a sermon to give, and I don't know what I'm going to talk about. I haven't written it out, and the hours are ticking closer and closer to the time of the services, and it's usually like at the Feast of Tabernacles. Hundreds of people, and I don't know what I'm going to talk about, and I can't figure it out. That's the dream. Now, there's a variation to that dream, and that is I'm standing before a group of people with nothing to say, and I don't have any clothes on. That's another variation of that dream. I understand from talking to people that running around without any clothes is kind of a common thing that people will dream about, running down the street, walking into a meeting, or whatever.

So some of you are laughing, you know what I'm talking about. That's quite a common thing. But we all have dreams, and that is a part of life. That's not necessarily the dreams that I want to talk about today, because there are other types of dreams that we might have. When I was a kid, I used to dream a lot. I would dream about being something, and I would watch a cowboy movie, I would watch a police drama, and I'd become a detective.

I remember one time I even had made up a little packet. I somehow got a little plastic packet of a wallet of some sort, and I made a police badge, and I put that in there, and I had my own card made up, and I'd walk around flashing it to people, because, you know, I thought also that was neat. Pull it out of my pocket and flash my badge to somebody. I would watch Walter Cronkite do the news, and I'd go back in the bedroom and pull a table out in the newspapers and sit there and pretend I was a newsreader and read news and do things like that. You did whatever you did, because you had a dream that you wanted to be somebody.

Maybe as a nurse, maybe as a teacher, maybe as a cook or a cowboy or a fireman or a policeman or anything that we had seen about that week, that's what we became, a superhero. We put a cape on and fly through the house. My son, Ryan, would fly through the house and be Superman, and one time he was jumping around and he broke an ankle, or a bone, I think his bone in his foot, it didn't break his ankle, but he did break a bone in his foot. And that's what life is like. We dream about being something and we think about it in our own imagination.

And I think it's healthy, and I think that is good to do, because it does stimulate the imagination to be able to do something like that. You know, all of us have watched some Disney movie or Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color years ago. Most of us have been to Disneyland or Disney World umpteen times, and we know the whole Disney enterprise. But one of the things that we don't always realize is what created Disney Entertainment, and especially Disneyland in the 1950s. Walt Disney was a dreamer. He dreamed up this idea of a mouse that talked, called him Mortimer, and he eventually became Mickey. But it started in his mind. He had this imagination, and he drew it, and it became that. And then he drew other characters, you know, Goofy and all the other various things that became the Disney menagerie of characters. When he finally got things really rolling and he had his own studio for producing his cartoons and ultimately Disneyland, he assembled a group of highly talented artists and people, and he put them all in this room, and they began thinking up the ideas that primarily came out of Walt Disney's mind, and they made it reality. But the one thing that he called these men, they were not engineers necessarily, or necessarily artists, he called them Imagineers. Imagineers. Because they would imagine something, and then they would make it happen. And that's why when you go to see Pirates of the Caribbean, it's a small world, or any of those attractions at Disneyland or Disney World, Space Mountain, the Matterhorn, and all of that, understand that especially the older ones that date back to the time of Walt Disney, essentially began in the mind of one man. He imagined it, and then he put his team of people together to make it happen. And we go and pay our, you know, hundred dollars a pop to go through all of those things now and today, but that's how it happened. And that was the genesis of so much of what we see as the Disney Entertainment Empire today. An imagination that came into reality. That was a dream, if you will. It was a dream that became reality. I talk about the dreams that we had as a kid, and sometimes life becomes along and reality 101 hits us in the head, and a strange thing happens, we stop dreaming. Some adult will tell us, hey, you know, cut it out. You'll never be that. You can't do that. You're your so-and-so son. Or you're so-and-so. You're from this part of town. Or you're from this or that. You can't do this. Maybe it's another adult.

Maybe it's a teacher. Maybe it's parents, in some cases. Maybe it's just, you know, the world in general. Maybe, you know, things happen. Life happens. We make certain decisions, we have to scramble to get a job. And instead of becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a movie star or a nurse or whatever, we become something else just to pay the bills. And life happens.

We stop imagining, and we stop dreaming. There's a poem that I ran across a number of years ago by a poet that nobody reads anymore. His name was John Greenleaf Whittier. He wrote a poem called Maud Muller. Maud Muller was the name of the poem, and Maud Muller was a country girl who, in the poem, walked out in front of her dad's poor country farmhouse one day, and there was a well in front. And she went out to get a bucket of water for the family's daily needs, and down the road came riding a young man who was from the city.

And he stopped by the well because he saw beautiful Maud Muller, the farmer's daughter, and asked for a cup of water. And she gave him a cup of water, and their eyes met, and there was something, as the movie says, magic that happened. But Maud Muller was a farmer's daughter, and the man on the horse was from a rich family in town, and they had to leave.

And he goes on, and she goes back to her life, he goes on to his life, he becomes a, grows up and becomes a judge, and she marries another boy from the country, and they have their family.

He marries some socialite woman in town. And as the poem goes along, at the very end of the poem, in their old age, they're both setting one in their poor farmhouse, the other in their mansion in town, setting by the fire, and thinking about that day when they both met in front of the well, and their eyes met, and the beauty of youth and what might have been. And the poem ends like this. It says, God pity them both, and pity us all, who vainly the dreams of youth recall. For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, that it might have been.

Maud Muller by John Greenleaf Whittier. Before I start sounding like Garrison Keeler, I'd better move on. But the poem has its point. The poem has its point about dreams. And that's what I want to talk about today. Not the dreams we have at night, but the dreams that we can have and that we should have as part of life. This is a reprise of a sermon that I've given in the past. I think I've given it here. I've made this presentation at Ambassador Bible Center years back. And the idea is not original. Some of you will remember a sermon, essentially, along the same lines given a number of years ago by our good friend John Robinson about dreams. And I remember when John gave it, John got the idea from someone else and he turned it into a sermon. It caught my imagination as it did his and several others.

And I've taken it and put my own twist to it and carried it further. And as a result of the trip that I just made to the Grand Canyon, which was a dream that I've had for a number of years, being able to fulfill it, it's inspired me to pull the notes out and to go back into this topic and to bring it to our attention because I think it is a good topic in many ways for us to think about.

Because it is a spiritual topic. It is something from the Bible. Because when we look in the Bible, I think all of us realize there are stories of dreams in the Bible. We all can remember Nebuchadnezzar's dream of this big giant image that he had.

And his astrologers and magicians could not give him the interpretation of the dream when he woke up. And he finally got found Daniel, and Daniel told him what it was all about. And then as the book of Daniel goes on, Daniel had his own dreams that God gave to him. And he told those dreams as well. There are several other instances of dreams in the Bible or visions. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 11 that he had a vision of what appears to be the throne of God, that God gave to him.

Peter, John, and James were taken with Jesus up into a mount where Jesus was transfigured. And they saw a vision, which in that sense maybe wasn't technically a dream, but it was a vision of something beyond this world that they were privileged to see. And Pharaoh had a dream when he tried to take Abraham's wife, Sarah. Remember? And Pharaoh went to Abraham and said, she told me she wasn't your sister. And I had this dream that I better not be doing anything with her because she is your wife. And Abraham had to learn a lesson there.

Probably one of the, you know, number one or two terms of impact, dreams that we remember in the Bible, are the dreams in the life of Joseph. And on those dreams that I'd like to focus for the remainder of my time here in my sermon, and go back to that story of the dream that Joseph had, because Joseph's dream, I think, more fits what I want to talk about and the point that I want to make regarding our own dreams and accomplishing, even no matter how old we are, some of the dreams of our life.

And a dream is more than a goal. A dream is more than just necessarily, you know, making something, putting it on a list and saying, getting it done by the end of the day or the end of the week. Those are things, steps and goals that you do as well. But a dream is something a little different. I'll try to explain that as we go along.

And I think that Joseph's visionary dream that he had that set the course of his whole life is very instructive and helpful for us to lift our life into a level of existence and accomplishment and living that I think is very healthy and very important for us for our dream, ultimately, of God's kingdom. But even for the dreams of the goals of our own life that we might want to do to help us live a life that is fulfilled, meaningful and exemplary.

So let's go back to Joseph's dream in Genesis, chapter 37, and look at some of the highlights of it and understand it from that perspective because I think Joseph's dream is unique and it's a little closer to what I'm talking about in terms of the dreams that we should have. And let me say at the beginning that I know that Joseph and his dream in a sense we would say that it was something God gave him. And God gave him the gift to interpret the dreams as well. But, and if you and I sit down and make a list of a dream, something we'd like to accomplish, be, or become, that it might be more our own will and from us.

And yet, on the other hand, the dream that Joseph had framed his whole life. And some of the dreams that we might have can frame our own life as well, and especially the ultimate dream or vision of the Kingdom of God. But let's look at this dream and let's understand it and let's put ourselves into the story from the perspective of projecting our life onto a big screen. This is about as big a screen as we have right here, this white screen that we project pictures onto.

But let's look at our life as, in a sense, a big white canvas and we can put it, we can project what we want to do in our life onto something bigger than what has been given to us. Joseph, it says, in my Bible, I have a King James Bible at the beginning, at the heading of chapter 37, says, Joseph dreams of greatness. Greatness. Becoming something. Doing something. And we know that Joseph was the next to the youngest son of Jacob by his favorite wife, Rebecca. Or, I'm sorry, Rachel.

And he was also the favorite son of Jacob in his old age. It says that he was in the land of Canaan, chapter 37, verse 1. Joseph was 17 years old when he was at this point feeding the flocks of his father. We're told in verse 3 that Jacob, or Israel, loved Joseph more than all of his children because when he was, he was the son of his old age and he made him a tunic of many colors. Of course, this has been made into a fabulous Broadway musical and movie, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which many of us have seen, I'm sure. And yet, we see that Jacob is showing favoritism toward his son, Joseph.

And that's always a problem in any relationships, especially family relationships, when the parents favor one child over the other. Because his brothers saw this and they hated him, it says in verse 4, and they could not speak peaceably to him. In verse 5, it says, Joseph had a dream. And so, at night, we can imagine, when we fell asleep, this was probably when he had the dream, but from the way the story unfolds, we know that this was not just any dream and that it came from God. And that we acknowledge up front that it was a dream that plotted his, but it was a dream that plotted his whole life. And again, in the sense that you and I can also have a dream, we can imagine our life as being something, being somewhere, accomplishing something, and that dream can become a reality. In Joseph's case, this dream became a reality. Now, it was given to him by God, but you know what?

Joseph still had to make decisions and choices for it to become a reality. That's where we can all relate to a dream or a vivid imagination that we might have, because you can dream anything. And Joseph could have had this dream, God would have given it, did give it to him, and Joseph could have made a decision to just ignore it and made a choice to walk away from it by his life. But he didn't. This dream framed his whole life. In a sense, you and I have been given the dream of God's kingdom, the vision of eternal life and the family of God and the kingdom of God, and we're told to seek that first. Matthew 5 and verse 33.

And we have a choice as God gives us that dream, whether we will walk toward it, make choices that keep us walking and moving in that direction, or we can walk away from it.

So just like Joseph, we have the same choice. Now, in this dream, he came and he told it to his brothers, and they hated him even more for it. He said to them, Here's this dream that I have dreamed. And he goes on, he said in verse 7, We were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright, and indeed your sheaves stood all around and bowed down to my sheaf. And his brothers said to him, Shall you indeed reign over us, or shall you indeed have dominion over us? They hated him even more for his dreams and for his words. So it was quite a vivid dream that he could remember. Remember, I said, we all know this, some dreams we just struggle to remember. But there are some dreams you do remember. I can remember our dreams. I remember a dream that I had 14 years ago.

I can still remember it. But I couldn't tell you a dream I had last night, if I did dream.

Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. Just some dreams they stayed with you. And this one stayed with Joseph. And then he dreamed another dream in verse 9, and he came and told it to his brothers and said, Look, I have dreamed another dream, and this time the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars bowed down to me. So Joseph moved from the fields to the galaxies. He said, the sun, moon, and stars bowed down to me. To me. That's a little egotistical but in bold. He told it to his father and his brothers, and his father rebuked him and said, What's this dream that you've dreamed? And again, parents sometimes can discourage dreaming. And that's sad when another adult does that. And Joseph or Jacob was on the verge of doing this by rebuking him and saying, What is this? Your brother and I and your brothers are going to bow down to the earth before you by this. Maybe after the first one, Jacob said, It's interesting. He came back a second time and he told the story again and he saw that the strife was building up with his other brothers, the envy there. Verse 11, it says that his brothers envied him, but his father kept the matter in mind. Jacob didn't totally forget it. I get the sense that he was trying to keep the peace here and saw that this could get out of line. But he probably walked away puzzled in his mind thinking, What does this mean? What exactly is taking place? And so the story goes on.

Remember Joseph is 17 when he had this dream. His brothers didn't bow down to him immediately because we know as the story goes on, Joseph was sold into slavery. As you go through chapter 37, you find that Joseph was sent out one day to take some things to his brothers as they were out tending the flocks. They saw him coming and they said, Oh, here comes that dreamer of dreams. You know, let's kill him. Nice family relationship going on right there.

Let's kill him. But Reuben, the oldest brother, was Reuben the oldest or the second oldest?

He says, Ah, no, let's just throw him in a pit. Let's just throw him in a pit, which they do.

And while they're eating their meal and thinking about what to do and continuing to go on, here comes a convoy of camel traders. Keep in mind that in Canaan, where Jacob was, they were on the main interstate highway of the ancient world, what was called the Via Maris that came from Mesopotamia down through Canaan and on down into Egypt. And so camel caravans were coming and going on a regular basis. And, you know, this was kind of like the junction of Interstate 65 and Interstate 70 down in Indianapolis, where we all come together. We got truck stops because truckers are moving and they need gas and they need fuel and they need to shower and shave. And these guys were right there and they saw this and they saw an opportunity.

They said, let's sell him to these Midianite traders. So they hauled him out of the pit, took his coat off of him, sold him, and Jacob is tied onto the back of a smelly camel.

How many of you have ever been up close to a camel? They stink. They are nasty, trust me.

He's tied onto it, guessed his will, maybe slung over the back of it to where he's having to smell the rump of that camel as they're trotting off down through the desert. And his brothers take the coat and they've got to now continue the story, figure out how they're going to explain back home to Dad this. They kill an animal, smear some blood on it, and they take the coat back to Jacob and say, hey, a wild animal came and chewed him all up. Now you've got to realize that they must have really told a story that was really gruesome because all they had was this coat of many colors.

Now, you know, usually, you know, even at some point in a kill like that, there's something left over. There's a bone, there's a hip joint, but they had to have made up a story that it was a whole pack of lions that ate it all the way down and even to the blood. And it's possible. That's possible. When we were in South Africa in 2000, we went on a safari through the Kruger Game Park, and we happened to hear about a lion kill of a baby giraffe. Now, even a baby giraffe is higher than, taller than any of us, but we quickly got down the roads and it was kind of a parking lot. There were about another dozen cars that were trying to get in, inch and around, where these four lions, two male and two female, were sitting there feasting on a baby giraffe that they had pulled down in the road there and drug off just into the ditch line. And I mean, we were as close as I am from Mrs. Moss to those lions with the car windows about a half road down.

Most amazing thing in the world. And these four lions were just laying there in the hot midday sun of Kruger Park, gnawing away on this giraffe. They'd already devoured the head and the neck, and there was the rump and some of the other parts there. And we went on our way. After 30 minutes, we stayed there and washed it. I filmed it and then we moved on. The next day, we said, let's go back and see if there's anything left to that giraffe. And we drove back to the same spot and we could barely find it. We had to drive by it a few times. There wasn't anything left.

We finally identified it. There was a little bit of blood, just a little bit of blood.

They had eaten everything. And what the lions hadn't eaten, the hyenas had come in after dark, and they finished off the bones. And hyenas have jaws and teeth that would take care of a pit bull.

And they had gnawed it all down, and there was nothing left. So the point of the story is to realize that Joseph's brothers could have really told a big story, that nothing was left of him except this coat. Because I've wondered sometimes, you know, how, what could they have, you know, surely they could have brought back a hand, a thumb, but that's what happens in the wild.

And they left this as the story of Joseph's life, and he goes on. Joseph is sold into slavery.

Now, again, you know the story. We're not going to go through all the details of it, but chapter 39, he's sold as a slave in Egypt. He's sent down, and he is purchased by a man named Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard, an Egyptian. He buys him, and it says that God was with Joseph. And he was a successful man, and he was in the house of his master, the Egyptian. And his master saw that the Lord was with him, and that the Lord had made all that he did to prosper in his hand. Now, how does a man see that God's with someone? By the way, that man conducts himself. His language, his bearing, the fruit of his life. He was able to witness that Joseph was not your typical run-of-the-mill slave that you bought in those days.

He was a little bit different from the others, because slavery was a it was a practice there that, you know, and it was all types of slavery, you know, that was done, and people were bought and sold. And this was, however, a different man. He had a different background. He wasn't intended to be a slave. And God was with him, and Potiphar saw this, and he made him over his whole house. In other words, he became the kind of the chief of staff and the headmaster of his home, and the home would have included quite a number of furnishings and grounds and other servants in the house. And Joseph then is made overseer of his house in verse 4 of chapter 39 and all that he put under his authority. And from that time that he was made overseer of the house of all that he had, the Lord blessed the Egyptians' house for Joseph's sake. The blessing of the Lord was on all that he had in the house and in the field. The blessing that came to others, in this case Potiphar, because of Joseph's example and the promise and the bearing and all that he was, it was a type of the subsequent blessings that would come from Joseph's descendants. All the way down into our day, the modern world, the descendants of Joseph in Ephraim and Manasseh, America and Great Britain, has endured to this day. And the world has been blessed in many ways because of the blessings God has given to our two nations. That's another another story. But we see it right here and in the genesis of it, literally, of Joseph's example and what it meant to the house of Potiphar. Well, Potiphar was an important man and he didn't have the time as he had travels and campaigns to wage and other business for the pharaoh and the government to go on and he was gone a lot, which left his wife at home. And she got bored and one day she saw this man, Joseph, and she decided that it was a little bit hot and she had a scratch and it needed to be etched. And she was a cat on a hot tin roof. And so she tried to seduce him.

And you know the story there. He had the character to say no. A remarkable story in itself of human relationships and just the ability of a young man to say no, because Joseph's in his 20s at this point and he's virile and the juices are flowing. And who would have known? He could reason.

But he said no and she then becomes a woman spurned and so then she has her own issues.

She grabs as a part of his clothing and then frames him, tells a lie, Joseph is thrown into prison as the story comes to a conclusion here in chapter 39. And in prison, after a period of time, he languishes and there are other prisoners, particularly from Pharaoh's house, a baker and a butler. And these guys have dreams and Joseph interprets those dreams and they're eventually released and Joseph says, remember me, you come into your kingdom. And one of them gets killed, is that the baker is eventually hanged and the butler forgets about Joseph until in chapter 41, Pharaoh has a dream. God's moving it through all of this and he is working and Pharaoh then has a dream because they're coming to a point in time where there's going to be a famine in the land and events are going to change and Pharaoh has dreams and none of his wise men can interpret the dream for him. So in chapter 41, we find where it is remembered that there's this man in prison who has the ability to interpret dreams and the butler remembers that, tells Pharaoh, Pharaoh brings him out, brings him before him and he tells him the dream. And in verse 15 of chapter 41, Pharaoh said to Joseph, I had a dream and there is no one who can interpret it, but I have heard it said of you that you can understand a dream to interpret it. Joseph answered in Pharaoh and he said, it is not in me. God will give Pharaoh an answer of peace. Now this is another point for us to pause and to think again about Joseph and his life. Joseph at this point is 30 years old.

He's 13 years into being a slave, having been sold at age 17 by his brothers. He's 30 years of age at this point when he's brought out of prison and this date comes to pass. They clean him up, give him a haircut, put on some fresh clothes and Ralph Lauren perfume and he's looking really good as he comes before Pharaoh. And this is quite, this is an amazing story. This is one of the most interesting stories in the Bible. I guess it's along with Daniel, I always tend to have certain favorites, I guess. And this is one of them because of the, and it's a timeless universal story that so many people have worked off of as well. And Joseph is brought before Pharaoh and he, you have to understand and to appreciate what he says here in verse 6. He says, it's not in me.

It's not about me. I'm not the wisest, smartest guy. He said, God gave me this gift.

To be able to interpret dreams. He will give Pharaoh an answer of peace.

And Joseph could have been tempted to say, you know, to, by this point in time, forgotten God and began to think, you know, that dream I had back when I was 17 about everybody bowing down to me, that was a bunch of bunk. That dream about the kingdom of God, living forever in the kingdom of God that I heard about when I was a kid. That's a bunch of bunk. I got betrayed by those closest to me, my own family. My life didn't turn out the way it was promised or the way I thought it would turn out. I wound up in the back of a smelly camel. Maybe he didn't at that point, but and he didn't, but who knows what went through his mind. And then he comes down and he fortune turns around. He is made, he's given the keys to the Porsche in Potiphar's house.

And he rises back up by his abilities. And he could have thought, oh, you know, God's brought me out of this. But then all of a sudden he gets framed again and thrown back in prison, twice slammed against the mat. And he's forgotten there. And you get into a prison.

That's pretty bad. Go visit a prison and spend an hour visiting somebody, just going through the process of going into prison. And that's bad in itself. I cannot, and I don't want to certainly ever have to experience it, I cannot fully appreciate what a prisoner has to live through.

We have to go down to Pendleton prison here to visit the member that we have in there.

I used to visit in the women's prison that regularly down in Indianapolis. And, you know, just to get into it as an ordeal to imagine their life today is unimaginable. A prison, and that's a prison in the United States penal system, which is bad enough. But, hey, it's probably better than what Joseph had in Egypt at this time or other places in the world today where people languish in prison. A dark hole, no rights, not even the rights that a prisoner may be granted under our own penal system, forgotten, moldy food, and personal hygiene.

Forget it. And a week goes by, a month goes by, you forget what time it is, you forget what month it is, you forget what season it is. And, literally, you've seen some of these stories of prisoners. They have to make markings on the wall to remember certain things, just to keep track of time. I could well imagine a person forgetting God. You're either going to forget God completely, or you're going to get close to God. And Joseph comes out, and the day he's put before Pharaoh, he still remembers God. And he gives God the credit. He said, God has given me this this ability here. And that's a very important thing because for Joseph, the dream is still alive.

He has not forgotten the dream. It is still what frames his life. And so, Pharaoh tells Joseph his dream. He said in verse 17, I stood on the bank of the river. Suddenly seven cows came up out of the river, fine looking and fat, and they fed in the meadow. And behold, seven other cows came up, poor, very ugly and gaunt, such ugliness as I have never seen in all the land of Egypt. And the gaunt and the ugly cows ate up the first seven the fat cows. And when they'd eaten them up, no one would have known they'd eaten them, for they were just as ugly at the beginning. So eating the good-looking cows didn't make them any prettier in that case. And then I saw in my dream, and suddenly seven heads came out of one stalk, full and good. And behold, seven heads withered thin and blighted by the east wind, sprang up after them, and the thin heads devoured the seven good heads. And he said, nobody could explain this to me. Joseph said to Pharaoh in verse 25, the dreams of Joseph are one, God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do. The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good heads are seven years, the dreams are one. And the seventh thin and ugly cows which came up after them are seven years, the seven empty heads blighted by the east wind are seven years of famine.

This is the thing which I have spoken to Pharaoh. God has shown Pharaoh what he's about to do. And again, Joseph said, you know, he's not reveling in his own wisdom, in his own abilities to interpret dreams. He's giving God the credit. That's an important principle in our life that we can never forget that we cannot be swollen by our own pride of who we are, our own intelligence, what we think we've accomplished, that we forget God. Joseph didn't. He gave God the credit, and he says, God has shown you, Pharaoh, what he's about to do. You're going to have seven years of plenty, and then there are going to be seven years of famine to come on the land. And the dream was repeated twice, he says, because it's established by God, as if God sometimes gives emphasis, double emphasis, as to what he's going to do, and it was going to shortly come to pass.

And Joseph gives him instructions on how to handle it. He said, let the Pharaoh appoint officers over the land to collect a fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt in the seven plentiful years, and let them gather all the food of those good years that are coming and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities. Then that food shall be as a reserve for the land, and for the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt, that the land may not perish during the famine. Joseph, here in these few verses, outlines a major governmental program that creates a bureaucracy to save the land. It is a combination of a Department of Agriculture, a Department of Economics, and a Homeland Security, because you've got agriculture you've got to start taking care of, and you've got to start gathering up 20% of that every year, and putting it into storehouses that you build and you maintain for the future.

And then you've got to realize that there's also a security issue here, too, because food is wealth and power, and when a famine comes and people don't have food, they riot. Just this spring, we've had riots in places like Egypt and other parts of the world where they have not had rice and wheat and corn because of the commodities crisis that has hit certain areas, and they've literally rioted and people have died. While we still can go to Sam's or Costco or Kroger and get what we need, we pay a little bit more for it, but we can still get it at this point, for the most sakes. People riot. So there had to be a security. So you have to realize this was an elaborate system that had to be set up over the seven good years, and then to be maintained in place for the seven lean years as people are struggling. And it was not just in Egypt this affected other countries, as the story goes on, because remember Joseph's brothers come down from the land of Canaan. So the famine went beyond the land of Egypt. Egypt was the breadbasket of the world at that time and subsequent generations at the time of the Roman Empire. The Romans wanted Egypt because it was the granary of the empire. They were able to grow all the crops that for especially in the time of Rome kept Rome going. So it was then a very productive land. Still is in many ways, but this was a major project that had to take place. Joseph then has made the second in command, and he administers all of this. And as the story goes on in chapter 42 and 43, you know the brothers of Joseph come down to buy land or buy grain because they're experiencing shortages. And Joseph knows who they are. They don't know who he is. And he plays this cat and mouse game with them until it comes down into chapter 45. And he builds and builds to this with his playing games with his own younger brother, Benjamin. And he can't contain himself any longer. And he reveals himself to his brothers and he says, I am Joseph, verse 3 of chapter 45.

And he says, does my father still live? That in itself is a whole series of stories and episodes in the life of Joseph because he wanted to know after all those years was his father still alive.

Was his father still living? And he tells them that he is the one. And he says to them, look, what you did to me was by the will of God. He says, don't worry, I'm not going to throw you in prison and you're not going to suffer like I did. What you did further the will of God.

And that's the remarkable part of the story here in verse 8. Joseph says to them, it was not you who sent me here but God, and he has made me a father to Pharaoh and Lord of all his house and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt. Joseph, at some point, realized that all that had happened to him. I realize he's in his late 30s, maybe 40 years of age at this point, depending on how far into the time of famine to plot this. He's in his middle-age years. And Joseph, at some point, he came and he came to this realization. He said, so now it was it's not you who sent me here but God. I've tried to wonder when did Joseph put all the pieces of his life together and realized that it was God who engineered everything. And he was able then to forgive his brothers, to forgive Mrs. Potiphar, to forgive Potiphar, to forgive the baker and the butler, and all the others who had mistreated him. We all want to get even. We want revenge. Somebody slights us.

I read a book this year that I'd wanted to read for years, The Count of Monte Cristo.

How many of you have seen the movie The Count of Monte Cristo? How many of you have read the book The Count of Monte Cristo? Ah, good. Two of us and two and a half. It's about 1,500 pages.

It's not one you just read in one setting. And I said, I want to read that book. And I read it all.

And it's better than the movie and it's different from the more recent movie. Forget it. I mean, it's colorful and beautiful people but they twisted the story around, changed it. But essentially it's the story of a man who was falsely accused and he was thrown into prison, Edmond Dantes, a Frenchman, thrown in the Chateau d'if. And he languishes there. And then he meets another prisoner, the abbey Ferrer, who has access to a huge, huge, huge fortune. The abbey dies, but he leaves Edmond Dantes with the knowledge of where that fortune is. And it's like 14 years that they're together in the prison. And he affects an escape. Edmond Dantes goes to the cave where the fortune is and he does a whole transformation in his life and he becomes the Count of Monte Cristo.

And then he begins to plot revenge upon the five or six, there's more in the book, men who framed him and threw him in prison. And he spends years laying the groundwork for it and then he knocks him off one by one. And in the end, the one thing that he wants, which was the girl that he was denied, he can't get. That's the way the book ends. The most recent movie, he gets the woman and that's not true. Sorry to disappoint you on that one. But he uses his wealth to get revenge in the story, The Count of Monte Cristo. It's a story, Monte Cristo, the mountain of Christ, it's a Christ story. Joseph's story, on the other hand, he uses his wealth to save people.

He doesn't use his wealth to get revenge. He uses what God has given to him to save people. That's the story of Joseph. That's the important one to remember. And he does not get revenge upon his brothers when he could have. He pardons them. He gives mercy to them. And he realizes that it is God that has done this. Now, at some point in all those years, maybe it was in the prison, maybe it was when he was finally Pharaoh second in command, Joseph realizes that God has been working in his life. That dream that he had all along is true and God has worked all these things out. And that, my friends, is a life lesson I present to every one of us that we hopefully will learn at some point in our life. Where you come to realize that God is working in your life, and that all that we have been through and all that we have done, all the detours that we've had to take, maybe because of our choices, maybe because of circumstances beyond our control, but if we remain in the faith and we remain faithful to God, we give God the credit, we see God's hand in our life, we understand the dream God has given to us of his kingdom is the dream of life, then we will understand that God has worked with us and he's been with us through all the episodes of our life, and he has engineered this and he has brought us to this point. I had to come to that point after a number of years. Some of you don't realize, those of you that have been here in Fort Wayne since we were here and been longer, but in 1983 when we moved here to Fort Wayne, we did not want to come to Fort Wayne.

I didn't even, I knew Fort Wayne was here. I used to listen to Wo-Wo radio station for years. I knew Wo-Wo, the famous fire escape, Bodhi, the world famous janitor, and all those things that you heard about.

But I was happy in Tennessee. We had a new home, kids, nice little school out in the country, just bought our first home, had two nice congregations. I was in my briar patch, you know, life was good. And then one day I get a phone call and say, we're sending you to Fort Wayne. I said, why? I hadn't been there that long.

No, we're sending you to Fort Wayne. Yes, sir. So we come to Fort Wayne and we enjoyed Fort Wayne.

We've enjoyed Indiana. I've lived here longer than ever before. We came to Indiana because somebody wanted the congregations, the nice little congregations in middle Tennessee that I had.

Somebody said, I want those. And they said to the boss, make this happen, make it so. And the boss made it so. So we moved in the middle of winter, left the house, took me eight, nine months to sell it at a loss. Okay, you know, those things happen. And then I stood over that for a long, long time.

Never told you that, those of you that were here during those years, I don't think.

It wasn't our choice. I think we threw ourselves into it. We enjoyed it. And at some point over the years, we realized, yeah, somebody wanted our congregation. Some man engineered it.

But in the end, Debbie and I came to realize God put us here. God wanted us here. And this is where we came. And I had to remember reading this one day and realizing, yeah, that's right.

It wasn't my brothers that sold me into Fort Wayne.

It was God. And you realize these, when you come to that in your life and in your circumstances, you're God-centered. You're centered on God in your life. And you can keep moving on.

And to this day, we've always said we'd love to go back to Tennessee.

Probably will never happen. But we'd go back to North Carolina. North Carolina was another situation where we had to move totally out of control. We had a nice little apartment.

I could still be in North Carolina today. But that happens. You realize that God isn't actually working in your life. And that's what it means to walk with God. That's what it means to trust and have faith in God. Joseph understood that. And as a result of that, Joseph's dream came to pass in his life. And his brothers did bow down to him. In God's time and in God's way, and at a time when Joseph was, in a sense, acting as a savior for Egypt and for the purpose and the plan of God, and fulfilled a very key role. The dream Joseph had then was an overarching dream for his whole life that framed his whole life. And he made the right choices along the way.

He resisted temptation. He resisted bitterness. He didn't envy like his brothers did.

And in the end, he could see God working in his life. And that's how it happens. And Joseph's dream became a reality. And he had a unique role to play in the plan of God. God had put the idea into his mind and it became his purpose and his goal in life that oversaw and overshadowed everything else. God's given us a dream, the overarching dream of his kingdom. And in a sense, it is a dream. It's a vision. It's a promise. It's a truth. It's a hope. But it molds and shapes our existence. The vision of the kingdom of God has shaped every aspect of my life.

It has shaped every major decision I've made in my life. It is what I am and who I am because of that dream that God has put in my mind. It's defined my life. And in many ways, it's been a very large life. It's given definition and clarity. The vision of God's kingdom has helped me define a large and exciting life that's had accomplishment and meaning and purpose and it's not over.

You and I are preparing for a role in God's kingdom as a king and a priest. And if we really believe that, we will translate into our life a life of not only a life of faith, but also a life of accomplishment in preparation for that world to come. Because this future reality of God's kingdom really should fire us with an ambition to use our life and our days and our years with passion, with meaning. And I think that to do so, it begins with having dreams.

Sure, the overall dream of the kingdom, but other dreams. And no matter how old you are, no matter how young you are, it's not too late to dream. To recapture a spark of ambition in life and to make life work at a high level. And to dream and to create a list of dreams that represent more than just goals of saving $100 or you know, getting an A on the test or finishing, you know, this degree necessarily. Those are goals and those are all important things and part of life as well. But the difference between a dream and a goal is a dream is a little bit higher in some applications than necessarily a goal.

The idea behind a dream is to think big. If you could do something, if you could have anything, if you could be anything, if you could... what would it be? What would it include?

If you could be, do, have, go anywhere or do anything in your life, if you were assured of success, if you had unlimited time, talent, unlimited money, knowledge, confidence, support from your family, sabbatical from your job, paid sabbatical. What would you do with your life?

What would you do with your life? That's the challenge. I say, and others have said before me, write it down. Make a list. Make a dream list. Make a list of dreams like that that can become a blueprint for your life. There's a movie out this year that talks about the same idea. It's called The Bucket List. How many of you have seen The Bucket List? It's out in DVD now. Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman play these two old coots. We wind up together in a hospital room because he both have terminal cancer. The Nicholson character is a wealthy, wealthy owner of the hospital and multiple other hospitals. The Morgan Freeman character is a mechanic. He spent his whole life as a mechanic. They both diagnosed with cancer and they brought together there.

Morgan Freeman begins to make his dream list because he realizes he's got just a short time to live. He starts one day on a piece of yellow legal paper, writing down things he wants to do.

Then at some point he gets a bit discouraged. He crumples it up, throws it on the floor.

Nicholson picks it up and says, what is this? He says, it's a bucket list. Things that you want to do before you kick the bucket. That's the idea behind The Bucket List. In the rest of the movie, Nicholson gets fired with imagination and he's got all the money. They start off on a three, four, five month trip to do all the things on The Bucket List. See this, go there, and they go to the Himalayas, they go to the pyramids. They're sitting on top of one of the pyramids and they do all of these things. There's also some spiritual goals and spiritual matters on the list as well. It's an interesting story. It's a good story. I recommend the movie to anyone to go and rent it, get it on DVD, sit down and watch it. Maybe it will inspire you to make your own bucket list or dream list, whatever you want to call it. I, when John Robinson gave this sermon years ago, I created my dream list. Here's mine. I created it several years ago, several of the things I've checked off. One thing I just recently checked off was hiking rim to rim on the Grand Canyon. Twelve years ago, I wrote that down on this list. I said, I want to hike rim to rim before I take up the rocking chair. After I hiked rim to rim, I needed a rocking chair.

But I crossed it off. There are a few other things that I've crossed off as well.

There are several things that are still yet to be accomplished, God willing.

I've got things of travel. I've got things about education. I've got spiritual things that I want to do. Certain things I'd like to have. Acquisitions. Things about my family. Certain financial goals. After coming back a couple weeks ago, I pulled this out of my file and blew the dust off of it. And I wrote down a few other things. I've still got some places I'd like to go, but the things that I added to it this time aren't those big grand adventures.

They're a little bit more substantial, I think. They're not just about me. That if I get to do, will impact a lot of people. But it's part of my dream list. And it's not done. I'll add some more things to it. I'll keep it going. How about you? I encourage you to write it down. There's something about writing something down. Even if it's just your grocery list, you don't forget it. I cannot remember if I've got more than one item to get at Kroger. I cannot remember it without a list.

I carry my cell phone so I can call back home.

And there's something about writing it down. You remember it. It's a form of commitment. It does project you into the future. And everyone who even talks about the subject always makes the point. They say, write it down. Write it down. Don't just think about it. Don't just wish it, but write it down. Tuck it in the back of your Bible, put it in the back of your notebook, put it on the kitchen refrigerator with a magnet. Wherever you put those things.

And make that list. That if you had unlimited money, support, opportunity, what would you like to do? What would you like to have? What would you like to be?

And I encourage you not to just make it a trip to the Grand Canyon like mine, but put down something that would impact many other people. Put down something that you know you really need to do.

In the bucket list, it was to, I think, see something really, really inspiring and beautiful, but there was also another point that they made to put down to, that dealt with reconciliation with another person. Do those things. Make that list. Some of the things you put down may seem unattainable or impossible, but gradually opportunities come your way, and things become possibilities. And I think that if we live our life around our dreams, we can live our life.

Like it was meant to be. On a larger scale than what someone else defines for us, or what circumstances and chance have created for us, we can define a lot of our life. God works off of a blueprint. We're told that in Hebrews 9 that the temple, the tabernacle that was built by Moses, was a copy of things made in the heavens. The things that we even build and do and are in this life is a copy of what God wants to do with us for all eternity in his family.

God wants us to walk on the high places of the earth. If we can dream, if we can learn to take life and live it fully, if we can move through the adversity, if we can learn through a lifetime, if we can keep our eyes on the vision of eternal life, then I think we can truly make life work at a very high level and fulfill our ultimate destiny of being part of God's family. But in the meantime, we can also experience that life in the spirit and in the intent that God imagines.

So that at the end of our life, we won't have to have the sad words said about us, the saddest words of tongue or pen it might have been. We can say it was.