“And God sent me before you to preserve a posterity for you in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you who sent me here, but God;” Genesis 45:7-8a (NKJV)
This morning, as I spent time with the Lord, He brought to my remembrance the story of Joseph. Joseph was the guy all his siblings hated, because he was Daddy’s favorite.
To make matters worse, Joseph was a dreamer.
He dreamed of his elevation above his siblings and his father, even though he was next to the youngest of all of the brothers. You probably remember the rest of the story. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt. Through a series of events, he ends up going from Potiphar’s house to prison to the palace.
The Bible says he was 17 when he first had his dreams, and he was 30 when Pharoah made him second in command. He spent that time as a slave and as a prisoner. It took another seven years of prosperity and two of famine before Joseph was reunited with his family. A total of twenty-two years before his God-given dreams came to pass.
Why is this story important?
Because, as God reminded me this morning, there are no expiration dates when God gives you a dream. Abraham was eighty-six when Ishmael was born to Sarah’s maidservant Hagar. The son God promised him through his wife, Sarah, was not born until he was one hundred years old. And my personal favorite, God’s dream for mankind. He foretold of the coming of the Christ in Genesis 3:15. “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” It was thousands of years before Jesus came to defeat death and sin, but the people of God waited all that time with hope and expectation for the Messiah.
As I type this post, I’m anticipating the release of my first Christian romance novel, A Heart to Cherish* later this week. I started writing that novel last July, but the seed of desire to write was planted in my heart when I was nine years old and wrote a poem that won a contest. It took thirty-four years for that seed to bear fruit. Is it possible that my dream could have come to pass sooner? Maybe. Through the years I’ve had circumstances that have helped me along the way. Maybe He was preparing me or maybe I missed the mark up until now.
We won’t always know the avenues God will take or the seasons we need to go through before our dreams will come to pass.
We do know that God is faithful. When God gives you a dream, hold onto it and don’t let go. If you don’t already, consider keeping a prayer journal so you can keep track of those things He’s spoken to your heart. “Then the Lord answered me and said: ‘Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time; But at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; Because it will surely come, It will not tarry.’” Habakkuk 2:2-3(NKJV)
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