F4F | The Story of Joseph is NOT About God Giving You Dreams

Fighting for the Faith

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Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith. My name is Chris Roseborough. I am your servant in Jesus Christ.

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This is the channel that compares what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God. So I've made a little bit of a decision.

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I've been, you know, kind of thinking about what are we gonna do, you know, next videos and things like this. And what

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I wanted to do is today I'm gonna pick somebody that I've never reviewed before, ever, and so I've got like no emotional investment in this at all.

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I couldn't tell you anything about the person that we're going to be listening to, but I can tell you that the sermon he's preaching is a twisting of God's Word.

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And so this gives us an opportunity to take a look at the message itself, which is very popular, and see what is wrong with it and why it doesn't actually...

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it doesn't fit into the category of rightly handling the Word of Truth. Instead, it ends up breaking another commandment.

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Remember, we talked about the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me.

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Another commandment is you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. And when a pastor or a preacher makes promises for God that God has not made, then what ends up happening is that he is breaking that commandment, and it's a form of blasphemy.

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But it's a very famous and well -worn trope, at least at this point, in the annals of Narcissus.

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And so what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be looking at the story of Joseph, but rather than teaching on it in an extended teaching like I've done in the past, although we're gonna spend a lot of time in that story, what we're gonna do is we're gonna break down what exactly is going wrong with this sermon in real time so that you can see how this

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Bible -twisting technique called Narcissus works, so that if your pastor is engaging in it, you can politely and firmly push back on him and tell him that he's not rightly handling

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God's Word. And if you won't turn around and rightly handle God's Word, then find the door and then go and find a church that rightly handles

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God's Word. So you get the idea. So let me whirl up the desktop here and, you know,

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I wanted to show that. Yeah, that's one of my favorite photos. Shot that in New Mexico. Anyway, coming back.

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I'm distracting myself already. So where we're gonna go, we're gonna go to a place called the Healing Place Church, and the vision -casting leader there, which is a problem, is named

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Mike Heyman, and let me do this. I'm gonna open this up in a new tab, and I just want to see what it says about this place.

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So, a vibrant community of believers whose heart is to be a healing place for a hurting world.

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I mean, it sounds like a positive thing, but in order to heal a broken world, you need to do it with truth, not with lies or errors or false doctrine.

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So, and then let's find out where they're at. Let's see here. I'm gonna copy this, and I'll throw that in here, and let, well, oops, something says, all right, so let's go to their main page.

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Where are they located? All right, hang on a second here. Let me go forward. About.

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So let's see where they're, where they actually are located. Grow, expect, tiny little letters.

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I could barely read this. 225 area code. Huh. All right.

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Give, about, connect, locations here, which I should have gone there. All right, so they seem to be in the

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US South primarily, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So, I mean, this is all

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I know about them. Legitimately, this is all I know, and so we're gonna just take a look at the message itself.

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We're not gonna listen in its entirety, and what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to turn the subtitles on, and I'm also going to increase the speed just a little bit, because we really legitimately have a long way to go in the sermon.

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And of course, you'll know I've got my Bible ready, and we'll just kind of do the stream of conscience and kind of walk you through, like, you know, if this isn't your pastor, it's not my pastor.

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I'm a pastor, by the way. And so, we'll just take a look at the actual message itself and see where this thing goes off the rails.

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So, here we go. So, here's their music. Also, if you have your

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Bibles, turn to Genesis chapter 37. Genesis chapter 37. And we are gonna kick off a study on the life of Joseph.

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I love the Bible from cover to cover, but perhaps one of my favorite characters to study, to learn from in the

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Old Testament, is the story of Joseph. And I felt like this would be a great follow -up conversation to what we discussed last week, when we said, perhaps the

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Lord, whatever it takes. We talked about vision, we talked about commitment. This is a study on the life of Joseph.

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Alright, so already we got a little bit of a problem, because, you know, they talk about vision. So, he's a vision -casting leader, and that is a huge problem.

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Nowhere in Scripture does it say that pastors are to cast vision. In fact, Jesus is the head of the church, and all churches have the same commission.

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We have been committed by Christ to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

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Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching all that Christ has commanded. So, he's shown, you know, a favorable disposition towards the story of Joseph here.

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And again, I kind of made everything a little bit bigger as we listen in.

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In fact, I might even speed it up now just another notch, just because we have so much ground to cover, and see where this goes.

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Next three Sundays, we'll look at dreams, we'll look at drama, and we'll look at destiny. Dreams and drama and destiny.

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He likes alliteration, but is the story of Joseph about dreams, drama, and destiny?

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And so, it makes me wonder if he's one of these fellows that teaches the dream destiny thingy doctrine.

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You know, that Christianity is all about hearing the voice of God so that he can whisper into your ears and let you know what your destiny is, right?

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Destiny, destiny, no escaping that for me. This is not a biblical doctrine.

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This is something that is a form of ear scratching. The very thing that Paul warns about in 2nd

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Timothy chapter 4. Dreams, drama, and destiny. Today, I want to drill down on the topic of dreams. Dreams.

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Just some quick facts about dreams. How many of you you have a lot of dreams? How many of you can't remember half of what you dream?

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You know, studies say that 12 % of people dream only in black and white, only in black and white. 12 % of you.

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I dream in color. When you have dreams, is it in black and white or color? Yeah, most of us are dreaming in color. They tell us that you can't read or tell time in your dreams.

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All right, so this is kind of useless information because the story of Joseph, although it involves two dreams, they are prophetic dreams.

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In fact, I would say that there's more than two dreams involved. If you got Joseph's two, you have the baker and the cupbearer.

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There's two more. Then you have the two dreams of Pharaoh. But those are all prophetic dreams.

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God is speaking to those people and letting them know what is coming in the future in those prophetic dreams.

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So we got a problem here because he's just talking about dreams in general. So you and I, we dream three to seven times a night, and I don't normally remember my dreams all that often.

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And nowhere are we told to expect in Scripture that that's God's primary way of communicating with any of us or that our dreams actually are communications from God.

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That doesn't mean that God can't do that. It's just that the story of Joseph isn't about that.

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Interesting fact. You ever dream that you were reading something? You can't read anything or tell time. It's like you lose a sense of time.

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They say the average person spends six years of their life dreaming. Six years. Some of you need to wake up. Most people have four to seven dreams every night, but they just don't remember them.

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They tell us that dreams are responsible for many of the great things that we enjoy, inventions that we appreciate today. Dreams are responsible for the so -and -so.

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All right, so the setup is wrong. What he should be doing is reading the biblical text and then walking back through it exegetically and teaching us what the proper sense of the story is about and what it all, at the end of the day, means.

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So he's not doing that. Now here's kind of a governing principle, and let me let me pull up a

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New Testament text, Gospel of John chapter 5. Gospel of John chapter 5, and Jesus is going to say something here that I think is worth our attention, okay?

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And that is that Jesus is going to make it clear that the

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Scriptures are about Him. The Scriptures are about Christ.

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They're not about me. They're not about you, unless we are talking about ourselves being the bad guys who've joined with the devil and have rebelled against God and sinned, and we are in need of a

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Savior. And the question is, what do we need to be saved from?

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Answer, well, each and every one of us has a sword of Damocles sitting over our head, the very wrath of God that we've earned by our rebellion against God.

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And so, when we read the Scriptures and we read ourselves into the

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Scriptures, then we've got a real problem. And hang on a second here. Here it is.

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John chapter 5 verse 39. Listen to what Jesus says to those who are

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His detractors. He says, you search the Scriptures. You can, some translations say, you diligently search.

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You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. It is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you might have life.

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Jesus is of the impression that Moses and the prophets wrote about Jesus.

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And we, the idea then is that the Old Testament stories, in particular, are types and shadows that in one way or another are going to point us to Jesus.

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Let me give you another text in the gospel of John chapter 20, which I think is an important one because in this text, you can kind of think of it as the, well,

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I like to think of it as the thesis statement of the Bible itself. So, John writes in John chapter 20 verse 30,

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Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book.

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But these are written, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.

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So, good way to think about it. All of the Bible is pointing us to Christ. Christ is even described in Romans as the last

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Adam. So, Adam and Eve point us to Jesus. Yeah, they do. Abraham, in very real ways, points us to Christ.

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There's aspects of the story of Abraham that are really helpful in looking for this.

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The story of Joseph does this in spades. I would argue that out of all of the

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Old Testament characters, humans whose lives are recorded in the scriptures,

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Joseph's story parallels the life of Christ in compelling, meaningful ways.

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It is the story of a beloved son who, well, is sold into slavery, is humbled.

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He sort of dies, if you would, by being sold into slavery and then put in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

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He's innocent. And then God rescues him, but for the purpose of saving the world.

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Joseph is a Savior, and there are aspects of his life that if you really consider and try to look for the connections between Jesus and Joseph, you don't have to look far.

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I mean, it's really obvious in so many ways.

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So, you get the idea. That's kind of my governing principle. We're going to make the Old Testament.

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We're not going to make it. It already does. We're going to look for the ways in which it connects back to Jesus. And the overarching story that we find ourselves in.

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The overarching story is that we are rebel sinners in need of repentance, in need of being forgiven and pardoned by God, indwelled by the

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Holy Spirit, and then bearing fruit in keeping with that repentance. So, yeah.

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So, we're off to a bad start. Now, I'm going to drop the play head at just a little bit farther down the road, and we're going to listen as he makes promises for God that this text doesn't state, and I would argue are probably not even biblical.

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Here we go. Yeah, yes, indeed. Dreams, dreams. Well, this study on the life of Joseph, and especially today, I think it's going to help us as it relates to understanding the purpose and the power of a

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God -given dream. In fact... The purpose and the power of a God -given dream. The story of Joseph is not leading us to expect that God is going to give us a

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God -given dream. That's not the purpose of this story. In fact, here's what he's doing.

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He's taking a descriptive, historical narrative and turning it into a prescription, as if the real reason why

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God had Moses write the story of Joseph was so that you can expect a

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God -given dream in your life, so that you can be, well, you know, go from the prison to the palace like Joseph did.

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That's not what this text teaches at all. I want you to write this down somewhere. I want you to consider this, that the man without a dream is always at the mercy of a man with a dream.

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Where'd you get that from? Okay. The man without a dream is at the mercy of a man with a dream. Did you find that in a philosophy book?

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Did you find that in a Cracker Jack box? Where'd you find that? Because that's not in the

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Bible. So, he's giving a principle here that cannot be justified exegetically from the text.

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He hasn't read this out of the biblical text. He's reading it into this account and forcing

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Joseph's story to conform to these thoughts rather than letting

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God speak to us what the true thoughts are that are revealed in the story of Joseph.

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The person without a dream is always subject to the one who has a dream. I believe that God does powerful things through ordinary people like us through dreams.

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When we said perhaps, I believe that God does powerful things through people who have ordinary, ordinary people like us through dreams.

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I believe, let me back that up, okay? So, I believe that God does,

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I believe that God who has a dream, I believe that God does powerful things through ordinary people like us through dreams.

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When we said, where in scripture does it teach that God does powerful things through ordinary people through dreams?

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Because you'll know that's all plural. He's creating an expectation in our

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Christian walk that somehow this is the thing that God wants to do. God wants to do something powerful through ordinary you, ordinary me, but through our dreams.

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And he says, I believe this. My question is, why? Why do you believe that?

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The biblical text doesn't teach this. Perhaps the last week, that was all about dreaming. That was all about a vision.

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It was all about a preferred outcome. You couldn't see it with your natural eyes, but a dream allows you to see something in the future that's better than what you're looking at right now.

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Can you help me preach today? What kind of dream are you talking about? Because Joseph had a prophetic dream. And here's where we're going to do a little bit of work in actually taking a look at the account of Joseph.

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And Genesis chapter 37. So, Jacob, who's now been renamed

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Israel at this point in the story, he lived in the land of his father's sojourning in the land of Canaan.

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So, these are the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being 17 years old, was pastoring the flock with his brothers.

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He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives, and Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father.

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Now, Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons because he was the son of his old age, and he made him a robe of many colors.

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But when his brothers saw their father loved him more than all of his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him.

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Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said to them,

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Hear this dream that I have dreamed. Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright, and behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.

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His brothers said to him, Are you indeed to reign over us, or are you indeed to rule over us?

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So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words." Now, here's the thing. That was

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God talking. That was a prophecy. That was a prophetic dream telling him what would come in the future.

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And God always keeps his word. But here's the thing, there's different dreams.

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There's prophetic dreams, then there's daydreams, then there's like the, I have a dream speech, where you're helping people envision a better world or whatever, things like this.

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But note here that Mike Haman, he's not making a distinction between a prophetic dream that God gives and these other kinds of dreams.

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He's kind of convoluting things. So, when we see that Joseph dreamed, these are prophecies, and they are fulfilled later in the story.

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So, he dreamed another dream, told it to his brothers and said, Behold, I dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun, the moon, and 11 stars were bowing down to me.

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But when he told his father and his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him,

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What is this dream that you've dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?

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And his brothers were jealous, but his father kept the saying in mind. Now, a little bit of a note here. If you're looking for connections back to Christ, already there are some.

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One would be the book of Revelation. So, in the book of Revelation, it describes kind of a rainbow -type color thing that is behind the throne of Christ.

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I think it's invoked here in the coat of many colors that Joseph wears. He's the beloved begotten son of his father.

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It sounds like Jesus. But there's another connection. In fact, what I'm going to do,

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I'm going to pull this over here. If I were to go to the Gospel of Luke chapter 2, and let's see here,

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I'm going to need a Greek text just in case that's too big. Here we go. In the account of what happened with Mary, all right, and the things that occurred.

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So, in particular, let's see here. All right, here we go. So, when the angels went away from the shepherds into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, this is

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Luke chapter 2, this is the nativity narrative of Christ in the Gospel of Luke.

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They said, let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.

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And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the baby lying in a manger. When they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told to them concerning this child.

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And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.

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Well, take a look. Israel said, his father kept the saying in mind. There's similarities going on here, and already you should be saying, so Joseph is a type and shadow of Jesus.

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Bingo. That's the whole point of the text. And I would even add into the mix here, if you were to look at the

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Gospel of Matthew chapter 1, who's... so Jesus doesn't have an earthly father biological, but he has a legal father in a fellow by the name of what?

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Joseph, right? So watch how this goes down. So the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way, when his mother

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Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, Joseph. Before they came together, she was found to be with child from the

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Holy Spirit and a husband, Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.

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But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a what? In a dream. So these connections, they are so thin.

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This is like an Easter egg hunt with the Easter eggs all on a green mat, out in the open.

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They're just really easy to find. All you got to do is open your eyes and look. So you get the idea here.

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And so what is this dream that you've dreamed? And so Joseph's dreams are prophetic dreams, but you'll note that Mike Heyman is talking about mixing different types of dreams as if somehow

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Joseph's dream is a different type, and this is a problem. Let me back this up just a little bit, and I'm gonna slow him down just a smidge as we listen to this section.

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It was all about a vision. It was all about a preferred outcome. You couldn't see it with your natural eyes, but a dream allows you to see something in the future that's better than what you're looking at right now.

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Can you help me preach today? That's not the point of Joseph's dreams, and he was sent by God in order to save lives.

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He was a savior like Jesus. In Genesis 37, in fact, I love the story of Joseph because the book of Genesis dedicates more chapters to the story of Joseph than it does to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob combined.

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Starting in Genesis 37, and it rolls all the way to the end of the book of Genesis, it's almost like God recorded this for a specific reason, not only to learn from the life of Joseph, but how he used

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Joseph and the dreams that he gave him. Now, Joseph is one of... Yeah, God did have the story of Joseph put into the

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Bible for a very specific reason, to point us to Jesus. These things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the

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Christ, the Son of God, and by believing, you might have life in his name. So we got a problem, and it's huge.

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It's not small. This guy doesn't understand that the scriptures are about Christ. They're not about me and you.

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Of many sons, okay? The Bible says that Jacob, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he's one of the founding fathers of our faith, that Jacob had a bunch of children by four different women.

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Okay, bad idea. I highly recommend against that. But there were four women that produced a bunch of kids.

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And Jacob, when he was 91 years old, was given Joseph. Joseph was the child, the son, that was born of Jacob's old age.

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And the Bible says that Jacob loved Joseph more than all of his other kids. Joseph was favored.

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In fact, he was favored so much that the Bible says Jacob gave Joseph a special coat. The Bible says it was a coat of many colors.

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There were so many colors on this coat, but it represented something about prominence and power. In fact,

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Jacob wore this Armani suit coat while all of his brothers wore stuff from Goodwill. Jacob gave his son special treatment.

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Here, Joseph has these Air Jordans, and all of his brothers are wearing Skechers. How many know it wasn't really popular. Somebody say, favor ain't fair.

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Petey Somebody say, favor ain't fair. Hmm. Yeah, this is a problem.

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So again, first time I've ever reviewed anything by this fellow, and already we got some big problems.

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So let's review the prophecy that the Apostle Paul gave in 2 Timothy chapter 4.

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2 Timothy chapter 4, he gives admonition to young Pastor Timothy, who is a pastor at one of the congregations in the city of Ephesus.

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And he says to him, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing in his kingdom, preach the word, rightly handle it, preach the word, be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching.

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For the time is coming, and I would add, and is now here, when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.

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They will turn away from listening to the truth and they'll wander off into myths. And so when you take the name of the

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Lord your God in vain, you are teaching mythology in his name. And that's what this fellow is doing.

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And by saying, favor ain't fair, that's the bait on the hook.

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He's baiting you with greed. Oh, I want God's favor. I want to be

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God's favorite. Uh -huh. There was favor on Joseph. Now Joseph wore this coat, and he was really proud of it, because the coat not only recognized him as being the favorite, but it also said something to all of his brothers about the future of the family.

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Jacob intended to empower Joseph and leave him as the leader of the entire family.

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Joseph didn't handle this very well. Now notice, he's not reading the biblical account. He's summarizing it without teaching it.

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We're to preach the word. And so by him giving his synopsis, rather than actually reading out the biblical text, he can make

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Joseph's story about anything he wants it to be. That's another problem. I kind of flaunted his favor like he showed off his coat.

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And I want you to see how God uses some dreams in Joseph's life to prepare him for his future.

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Look at what it says in Genesis 37, starting with verse 5, okay? Genesis 37, 5, the Bible says, one night,

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Joseph had a dream. Okay, you're just, you know, okay. One random night, probably just like any other night,

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Joseph had a dream. If you're taking notes, write this first thought down. God is a dream giver. Whoa.

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So this creates the false expectation that God's going to give you a

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God -given dream. This is a mythology. This is actually breaking the commandment.

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You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Now, it's true. God does give dreams. But the reason he's saying this is to create the expectation that God's going to give you a dream.

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And nowhere in scripture does he say he's going to do that. Not like this. So be ready.

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Let me back that up. Watch it now in its entirety. Probably just like any other night,

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Joseph had a dream. If you're taking notes, write this first thought down. God is a dream giver.

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So be ready. So the other error that's happening here is he's using the story of Joseph as if somehow it is a is a normative paradigm that you should expect for your life.

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It's not. This is about Jesus. God is a dream giver.

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So be ready. Dreams are a glimpse of what can be. It's amazing the great things that we enjoy today that were once started just as a seed of a dream.

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You know, during the midweek services that we had leading up to Easter at Kongsvinger, I preached through the story of Joseph, the entirety of it.

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And most of my time was spent actually reading out the biblical texts and then walking back through them to pick up the points that were relevant, as it relates to how do we understand this and how they connect to Christ.

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He's barely reading any of these, the text at all. I mean, if you look at the history of the

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United States, there were dreamers who shaped the trajectory of our nation. Dreamers that shaped the trajectory of the

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United States. You're putting them on the same level as Joseph. Are you kidding me?

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What? Henry Ford was a dreamer. Henry Ford. He's up there with Joseph, you know.

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Thomas Edison. Edison up there with Joseph. Really?

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You think that this is what this is about? Was a dreamer. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream.

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Yeah, he did. But that's not what the story of Joseph is about. It's amazing the power of a dream.

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This random, ordinary night, the Bible says, Joseph had a dream. I want you to know the God that you serve, the

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God that you love, He wants to give you a dream for your life. Really?

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You're making promises for God that He's not making, and this story is not about that.

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Wow. Life. He wants to give you a vision. He wants to give you a revelation of how

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He can use you to make a difference in the earth. We're not called to make a difference in the earth. We're called to make disciples.

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Wow. This is really bad. I mean, it's about as bad as it gets.

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This guy is taking away the glory of Christ that's in this account and basically teaching people to believe in complete pipe dreams, myths.

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I mean, if you believe that this is true, I got some magic beans I'd like to sell you in a bridge in New York.

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Sell it for cheap. It connects Brooklyn and Manhattan. Oh man, I'd sell it to you for a song.

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It'd be quick to give you some guidelines. If we're talking about dreams, let me give some context, and the first is this.

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We must be sure of the source of our dreams. You got to be sure where this dream is coming from.

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Why aren't you reading this account? By the way, I did an extended study on how to understand the

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Bible and how to understand finding Christ in the Old Testament. We'll put a link down in the description to the one that I did regarding Joseph, an extended teaching on this entire passage, this entire narrative.

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And you're going to see the difference like night and day. But again, the purpose of this video is to point out the problems in this approach and this mythology that's being taught regarding Joseph and the hijacking of a biblical text like this, making promises that God hasn't made.

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If you have a dream, maybe it did come from God, or maybe it just came from your own flesh, or maybe it was the bad pizza you had the night before.

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Come on, somebody. You have to learn to distinguish the source of your dreams. With our kids, and I love this about my wife,

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Rachel, she prays over our three children. We have three kids. We have Eenie, Meenie, Miney. We ain't having no more.

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She prays over our children. And you know what she says? God, release dreams inside of them.

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God, give them vision. Give them revelation. God, speak to them about the mysteries of your will.

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I love that because what she's trying to speak into them is position your heart and get ready because God has something special for you.

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Position your heart and get ready because God has something special for you. Jesus promised his believers that the servant is never greater than the master.

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And if they hated the master, they're going to hate you. And the thing he promised us in this life is suffering and persecution.

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This is the epitome of what it means to scratch itching ears. I want to tell you,

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Healing Place Church, position your heart and be ready because God has something special for you.

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And how exactly does one position their heart? You see, none of this makes any sense.

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None of this makes any sense at all. All right, so if I fast forward to the 1616 mark, he's going to explain to us about how we get into position to receive a dream, which isn't taught in this text or any other text in scripture.

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All right, let's see what we got. Then be ready. Think about the physical position of a dream when you're asleep in bed at night.

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Think about it. You are laid out at rest. Spiritually, God wants your soul to be at rest because it's hard for him to speak a dream when your mind is so busy.

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Where does it say that in the Bible? It's hard for God to speak a dream when your mind is busy.

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I mean, what kind of God is that? You know, he can't interrupt your day. You know, let me just kind of throw this into the mix here.

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Man, this is so bad. Wow, this is just...

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All right, Luke chapter one. Okay. There was a fellow who got a message from God while he was at work.

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Let me read the account. So, in the days of Herod, the king of Judea, there was a priest named

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Zechariah of the division of Abijah. He had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was

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And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the

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Lord, but they had no child because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.

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And while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by law to enter the temple of the

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Lord and to burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense, and there appeared to him an angel of the

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Lord standing at the right side of the altar of incense, and Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him.

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And the angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, your prayers have been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you shall call his name

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John. You see, when God wants to communicate, if you're busy, he'll find a way to communicate where, you know, boom, what he has to say to you will get your attention.

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He just happened to send the angel Gabriel and interrupt Zechariah while he was on duty at work.

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You know, hard for God to speak a dream. Hi, this is the

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Holy Spirit, and I really have a dream that I'd like to speak to you, but you know, your mind is really kind of busy right now, and I'm just having a hard time kind of working the angles to figure out how to get your attention.

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Do you think that you could rest a little bit so that I can kind of finally get in there and tell you something?

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Because right now I'm really frustrated, and this is really hard for me to speak right now.

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Think about it. Your eyes are closed in the natural, in the spirit realm, you may have to shut your eyes to what's happening around you.

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So when I sleep, I go to sleep, and I'm asleep to everything, the world, the spiritual realm, and everything.

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How many of you have like two switches, you know, the physical switch for sleep and then the spiritual realm?

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This is nonsense. The utter nonsense. Where does it say that Joseph, you know, opened himself up to the spiritual realm so that he can receive that dream?

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That you can open up eyes of faith and see what God is doing in you. Are you with me? No, I'm not.

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You're making stuff up. None of this is actually in the Bible at all. So let me move forward just a little bit more.

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1912, I actually made some notes here on this particular message, right about here.

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And let's see what he does. You know, he basically, you got to put yourself in position to receive the dream.

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And when, once God gives you the dream, then you've got to expect that people are going to hate on you. Met. Number one,

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God is a dream giver, so be ready. Yeah, we already heard point number one. Number two, there will always be haters.

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Oh, you're not hearing me. There will always be haters, so be humble. You see, you can't talk about dreams without including the struggle.

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How many of you know struggle will always be part of the dream? You may have a call of God on your life and a vision for your future, but...

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Notice he is not teaching the story of Joseph. He's hijacked.

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Not everybody around you is going to celebrate what God told you. Oh, I wish I had somebody helping me preach today.

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And why should I expect that God's going to give me a dream? Hmm? I'm a 53 -year -old man, and I ain't getting any younger, all right?

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What is this? Where in Scripture am I told that I need to position myself and be ready because God's going to speak a dream, and then when that dream shows up, be ready for haters.

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You have completely hijacked the biblical text. If God is a dream giver, then we will be surrounded by dream stealers, by dream crushers.

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I mean, just the thought that God would promote and advance you is a threat to people around you. Let me be...

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Can I just say that this makes no sense? All right. So, you work in an organization, and there's a handful of Christians there.

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Is God going to only promote the Christians because they're the ones He's going to give the dreams to, you know? And everybody else is just going to be hating on them because God gave them a dream and is going to make them more special and glow in the dark than all the other employees.

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This isn't what Christianity teaches. This is a message that feeds narcissism.

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Just plain and simple. This is as narcissistic as it gets. Be quick to say this. Don't spend a lot of time focusing on your haters.

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Haters are going to hate. You got to shake them haters off. Come on, somebody. Okay. We're going to go back.

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I'm going to just do a highlight from the story of Joseph. Again, I do an extended teaching on this and how to find

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Jesus in the Old Testament. And again, the link to the video on the extended teaching is going to be in the description here.

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But if we go forward in the story of Joseph, okay, Joseph, his brothers, rather than murder him, which is what they wanted to do, they sold him into slavery.

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After he was sold into slavery, he was sold to a fellow by the name of Potiphar.

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And he was in his house and Potiphar's wife had the hots for him. And what ended up happening is that she accused

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Joseph of coming on to her when she was the one sexually harassing

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Joseph. By the way, in the Bible, in all of recorded history, the first recorded instance of workplace sexual harassment is by a woman against an employee who is a man.

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I'm just, I'm putting that out there. All right. So, Potiphar believes the false allegations of his wife and Joseph is put in prison for 13 years.

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For 13 years, he's in prison. And then you'll note there were two prisoners that came and they had a dream, one a baker, the other a cupbearer, bread and wine.

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In fact, let me throw this into the mix here. So, while Joseph's in prison, and we learned from the

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Psalms that Joseph had iron fetters around his neck, and his faith in God, and his faith never ever wavers in the midst of all of this suffering and difficulty that he goes through.

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So, sometime after this, the cupbearer, the king of Egypt, his baker committed an offense against the

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Lord, the king. Bread? Wine? Hmm. That kind of invokes the body and blood of Jesus.

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I wonder if there's something like a crucifixion. Watch. Pharaoh was angry with his two officers, the chief cupbearer and the chief baker.

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He put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard in the prison where Joseph was confined. The captain of the guard appointed

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Joseph to be with them and he attended them. They continued for some time in custody. And then one night, they both dreamed.

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The cupbearer and the baker, the king of Egypt, who were confined in prison, each his own dream, each dream with its own interpretation.

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And when Joseph came to them, these are, by the way, prophetic dreams, in the morning, he saw that they were troubled.

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And so, he asked Pharaoh's officers who were with him in custody in his master's house, why your face is so downcast today?

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Which means that Joseph's face wasn't downcast. He wasn't doing a pity party here. What was he busy doing?

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Serving his neighbor as a prisoner. Prisoner is a vocation that you can serve your neighbor in, right? So, they said to him, well, we have had dreams.

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There is no one to interpret them. Joseph said to them, well, do not interpretations belong to God? Please tell them to me.

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He has faith in God too. So, the chief cupbearer told his dream to Joseph and said to him, in my dream, there was a vine before me.

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And on the vine, there were three branches. And as soon as it budded, its blossoms shot forth and the clusters ripened into grapes.

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Pharaoh's cup was put in my hand. I took the grapes, pressed them into Pharaoh's cup, placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand.

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And Joseph said to him, well, this is the interpretation. The three branches are three days. Pay attention to that three -day stuff, by the way, in the

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Bible. It's all over the place. In three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head, restore you to your office, and you shall place

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Pharaoh's cup in his hand as formerly when you were his cupbearer. Only remember me when it is well with you.

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And please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh and so get me out of this house. For I was indeed stolen out of the land of the

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Hebrews. And here also I have done nothing that they should put me into the pit. And when the chief baker, bread, wine, saw that the interpretation was favorable, he said to Joseph, I also have had a dream.

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And there were three cakes on my head. And in the uppermost basket, there were all sorts of baked food for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating it out of the basket on my head.

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Joseph answered and said, well, this is its interpretation. The three baskets are three days. In three days,

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Pharaoh will lift up your head from you and hang you on a tree. I know a fellow who was hung on a tree and he instituted the

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Lord's supper, bread, wine. Yeah, that's the point.

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This is a connection to Christ. And these, like I said, these are Easter eggs hiding in plain sight.

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And when you make these connections, you begin to realize, whoa, Jesus was right. The Bible, all of it's about him.

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It is. And you sit there and go, there's no way that this happened by accident or coincidence.

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The Bible has to be the inspired word of God. Who else can prophesy in people's lives like this?

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Only God can, right? So, then Joseph interprets

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Pharaoh's dreams, he's let out of prison, and he's in charge of the whole land of Egypt because there's a famine coming, a famine of, well, there's seven years of plenty, then seven years of famine.

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And when the famine hits, who shows up except for Joseph's own brothers?

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They came to Egypt for the purpose of buying grain so that their families could live.

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And Joseph is their savior. And you'll note then that Joseph is doing well, but when his brothers show up, okay,

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Joseph has to check to make sure that Benjamin is still okay, and they haven't done him in.

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And so, there's a lot of intrigue in the story as to how he goes about determining whether or not

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Benjamin is alive and okay. But when they finally returned to Egypt, bringing

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Benjamin with them, because the first time they came, Benjamin didn't come because Israel, Jacob wouldn't allow him to travel with his brothers because his brother

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Joseph was dead. He was still mourning the fact that his son, he thought

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Joseph was dead. And here's the thing, his brothers never confessed their sin to their father about what they had done.

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And so, Jacob believes that Joseph is dead. And what ends up happening is that Joseph can understand his brothers and he works, he manipulates everything for the purpose then of finally revealing himself.

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And so, when Joseph reveals himself, it's one of the most beautiful things in all of Scripture.

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And let me find this here. Joseph tests his brothers. Yeah, I'm just kind of scrolling through the account here.

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Again, I preached this through this entire story in my midweek services, you know, leading up to Easter.

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So, let's see here. Okay. Let me, all right.

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So, here's what ends up happening. Joseph puts, you know, puts a kind of a trap in place and makes it appear like Benjamin had stolen his cup when he hadn't.

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You know, read the account. It's absolutely interesting. But Judah then steps up.

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They end up heading back to Egypt and, you know, and in order to prevent

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Benjamin from being, you know, being put in prison for stealing the cup of Joseph. So, when we went back, when we went back, your servant, my father, we told him the words of my

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Lord when our, this is Judah speaking. And when our father said, go again and buy us a little food, we said, we cannot go down.

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If our youngest brother goes with us, then we will go down. We cannot see this man's face unless our youngest brother is with us.

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Then your servant, my father said to us, you know that my wife bore me two sons. One left me.

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And I said, surely he has been torn to pieces. And I have never seen him since. If you take this one also from me and harm happens to him, you'll bring down my gray hairs to Sheol.

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This is Judah's talking about the words that Israel had spoken. So now, therefore, as soon as I come to your servant, my father, and the boy is not with us, then as his life is bound up with the boy's life, as soon as he sees that the boy is not with us, he will die.

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You're going to kill the boy's father and your servants then will bring down the gray hairs of your servant, our father, with sorrow to Sheol.

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For your servant became a pledge of safety for the boy to my father saying, if I do not bring him back to you, then

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I shall bear the blame before my father all my life. Now, therefore, please let your servant remain instead of the boy as a servant to my

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Lord and let the boy go back to his brothers. For I can, for how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me?

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I fear to see the evil that would find my father. So Joseph couldn't control himself before all those who stood before him.

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And he cried, make everyone go out from me. So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers and he wept aloud so that the

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Egyptians heard it and the house of Pharaoh heard it. And Joseph said to his brothers,

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I am Joseph, is my father still alive?

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This is one of the most poignant, beautiful portions of all of scripture, the reveal that Joseph is still alive and that he is the one who's saving them.

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Watch this. But his brothers, they couldn't answer him. They were dismayed at his presence. So Joseph said to his brothers, come near to me, please.

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And they came near and he said, I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. Now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here for God sent me before you to preserve life.

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For the famine has been in the land these two years and there are yet five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest.

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And God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to keep you alive and to keep alive for many survivors.

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So it was not you who sent me here. It was God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh and the

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Lord of all of his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. Hurry, go up to my father and say to him, thus says your son,

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Joseph, God has made me the Lord of Egypt. And the reason I'm pointing this out in the big reveal here,

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Joseph has no grudge. He completely forgives his brothers.

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And on top of that, he recognizes that his steps were ordered by God and that God sent him for the purpose of saving them.

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And so it is out of line here to somehow look in the early part of the story of Joseph and say, well,

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God's going to give you a dream, so be ready. And as soon as he does, you're going to have haters because Joseph had haters and his brothers, they tried to put an end to that dream, man.

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God gave Joseph that dream that he can hang on to because he was going to send,

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God was going to send Joseph to Egypt for the purpose of saving his brothers, all of them.

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So family, because Judah is the, well, Jesus comes from the line of Judah and by saving that family and saving

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Judah, he saves the world through Jesus Christ. So to somehow reduce

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Joseph's brothers to, well, haters are going to hate. It's so wrong.

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There's nothing right about this way of approaching this text. Let me back to Let me be quick to say this.

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Don't spend a lot of time focusing on your haters. Haters are going to hate. You got to shake them haters off.

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Come on somebody. Joseph didn't shake them off.

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He saved their lives. Again, this points us to Christ.

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Romans five. For while we were still weak, at the right time,

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Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person, one would dare even to die.

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But God demonstrates his love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

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Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved from the wrath of God.

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For while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son.

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How much more now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life? This message does so much violence to the actual story of Joseph that I can only describe it as satanic.

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This isn't a possible legitimate interpretation of the story of Joseph.

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This is not in the realm. There's nothing possible, this being a possibly fine interpretation.

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No, it's not. This is evacuating the story of Christ, which means this has nothing to do with sound doctrine at all.

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Who thinks it hasn't found up in here? If all you do is listen to the criticism and the hate directed towards you, it's going to mess you up right here.

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It's going to cause you to... If you listen to the sermon and you believe it's true, it's going to mess you up right here and in your soul.

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Lose focus on who God created you to be, on what he's doing in you. Please do not give your haters any credit, but please do...

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Spoken like a narcissist. Narcissists can't take criticism. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, though, scripture says.

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Not give them... Don't think twice about what they're... I mean, they're drinking the haterade. Don't think twice about them.

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Jesus himself was surrounded by haters, was he not? Think about it. The son of... Yeah, and he died for them.

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God. Think about the dream, the vision, the revelation that Jesus was bringing into the earth.

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And he just healed people and he blessed people and he forgave people and he left a trail of changed lives everywhere he went and people hated him for it.

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In fact... You're driving the wrong connection. They couldn't find anything wrong with him, so they had to make stuff up about him.

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Kind of like Potiphar's wife did with Joseph. You see what I'm saying? Come on, you know people will lie about you.

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Yeah, like Joseph was lying. Try to find something to criticize and if they can't find anything, then they'll make it up.

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Now, Jesus, check this out. This has nothing to do with the story of Joseph. Jesus, in Matthew 15, he rebuked the

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Pharisees and look at what the disciples said in verse 12. The disciples came to him and said, um, excuse me, Jesus, do you realize that you just offended the

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Pharisees by what you just said? I mean, oh, Jesus had to deal with political correctness even in his day.

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And I told you last week we're not gonna... He's not... He's not teaching the story of Joseph. He's just... Tiptoe.

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The truth never tiptoes around political correctness. The disciples were a little concerned. Oh, Lord, you just roasted the

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Pharisees. I'm concerned. Do you... Don't you know that you, by what you just said, you offended them?

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Look at what Jesus replied, verse 13. Every plant not planted by my heavenly

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Father will be uprooted. So here's what you need to do. Ignore them.

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Ignore. Don't pay any attention. This is not a valid cross reference to what happened to Joseph.

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It's just not. Listen, the minute you respond to drama, you become part of the cast.

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This guy's sloganizing. He's not exegeting. All right. Last point. I'm just gonna drop the play head about right here.

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And so this is his third point. So God's a dream giver, so be ready. And as soon as you got a dream, you're gonna have haters.

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What's your third point? Can I have a good amen? Number one, God is a dream giver, so be ready. Number two, there will always be haters, so be humble.

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Number three, look at what it says here in Genesis 37, verse 18. When Joseph's brothers saw him coming, they recognized him in the distance.

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And as he approached, they made plans to kill him. See, the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy.

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Yet Joseph going to Egypt was to save them, because Christ dies for his enemies.

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There's a dream inside of you, and the devil is disgusted with it. No, there isn't.

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And the devil is thrilled that you believe that this is true. The devil doesn't want you trusting in Christ.

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You see, these things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and by believing, you might have life in his name.

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So, I think you get the point. This is a very prominent false teaching as it relates to the story of Joseph.

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It's narcissistic. It scratches aging ears. It evacuates the text of its true meaning and its true connections to Jesus Christ.

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And again, if you want to hear a full teaching on it, I have a whole video down below. Click on the link and just compare.

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Just compare. And when you see the comparison, there's like, it's the difference between night and day, between darkness and light that we're talking about here, because the scriptures are about Christ and what he's done for you.

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And the story of Joseph in the types and shadows is one of the deepest, most profound and comforting, comforting accounts that shows us what the

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Savior will do to save even you and me. So, anyway, hopefully you found this helpful.

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I'm going to have to go floss my brain with something after this. If so, all the information on how you can share the video is down below.

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And until next time, may God richly bless you in the grace and mercy won by Jesus Christ and his vicarious death on the cross for all of your sins.