The Pride Test

Welcome to Worship in the Word with Pastor Robert Morris. Today we're starting a new series called From Dream to Destiny. In this series Pastor Robert teaches us about ten character building tests from the story of Joseph that we must also pass before God allows us to realize our dreams and step into our destiny.

Well this is an absolutely incredible message so let's join Pastor Robert now. Every person has a dream from God. Every person, and maybe you haven't had your dream yet, but every person has a dream that's from God and every person has a destiny from God.

The sad fact is though that many people live with the dream instead of in the destiny. And so in the life of Joseph, we're going to look at the life of Joseph. In the life of Joseph, God gave him a dream when he was 17 and he stepped into fulfilling the destiny when he was 30. Now he didn't fulfill it when he was 30.

He fulfilled it many years later but he stepped into beginning to fulfill that destiny. But in order to fulfill the destiny God gave him, he had to pass ten tests. So I know that that doesn't excite you, but there are ten tests that we all have to pass to be able to fulfill the destiny God has for us. They're ten character tests. And the reason that many people have a dream but haven't stepped into their destiny is because they haven't passed these tests yet. So we're going to show and talk about these tests over the next few weeks. And the first test is the pride test. So if you think that you don't need this one, you listen carefully.

That's a good sign right there. All right, we're going to read quite a few scriptures because I want us to catch this story. Genesis 37, look at verse 1. Now Jacob dwelt in the land where his father was a stranger in the land of Canaan. This is the history of Jacob. Joseph being 17 years old, remember I told you he was 17, was feeding the flock with his brothers. And the lad was with the sons of Bilhah Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah. Now one of those was Leah Leah's sons Leah's maid and one was Rachel's maid, Zilpah and Bilhah.

I'm sure they were lovely girls. But you have to remember that Joseph, his mother was Rachel and Joseph and Benjamin. Leah had six sons.

This is how we get the 12 tribes. Zilpah had two, Bilhah had two, and then Rachel had two. And so these are his half-brothers that he's with, all right? But his father's wives now, and Joseph brought a bad report of them to his father.

I just want you to notice before he ever has a dream, he's already a tattletale. Verse three, now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children because he was the son of his old age and he was the son by Rachel. Also he made him a tunic or a coat, would be the best way to say that for us, a coat of many colors. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him. Now Joseph had a dream. Now remember his brothers hated him. Just want you to remember that, all right?

Because you will see in a moment what 17-year-olds do. Now Joseph had a dream and he told it to his brothers and they hated him even more. You know, when we read the dream here, you're just going to be in awe of the wisdom to tell this dream to older brothers that hate you. So he said to them, please hear this dream which I've dreamed.

There we were binding sheaves in the field and then behold my sheaf arose and stood upright and indeed your sheaves stood all around and bowed down to my sheaf. That's just brilliant to tell bigger brothers that, isn't it? And his brothers said to him, shall you indeed reign over us or shall you indeed have dominion over us? So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words, the way he talked about himself and his dreams. Then he dreamed still another dream and told it to his brothers. He'd never learned and said, look, I've dreamed another dream.

I'm sure they're excited about hearing the second dream. And this time the sun, the moon, and the 11 stars bow down to me. 17. You remember 17?

Okay. So he told it to his father and his brothers and his father rebuked him and said, what is this that you've dreamed? Shall your mother and I and your brothers indeed come to bow down to the earth before you? And his brothers envied him, but his father kept the matter in mind. He has a dream and he tells them. And by the way, I told you he was 17, Genesis 41, 46 says Joseph was 30 years old when he stood before Pharaoh king. So he's 17 when he gets it, he's 30 when he steps into his destiny. What happens between the dream and the destiny? Well, these are the tests we're going to talk about, but I want to establish something at the beginning of this series with point number one. All right.

So here's point number one. God has a dream for you. God has a dream for you. Joseph gets this dream and here's something about this dream that we need to understand. This dream was from God. Joseph bragging about it was not from God, but his dream was from God. Both of his dreams were from God. And God's dream for your life is better than your dream. And his destiny for you is bigger than your destiny. I promise you, because God's always better and he's always bigger than us. Now, how can you know the dream that God has for you?

You ever thought about that? How can you know God's dream for your life? Let me give you one very practical way to know this. Let me read you this verse. Number one, God has a dream for you.

Let me give you one very practical way to know this. Let me read you this verse. Numbers 12, verse six says, then he said, this is God speaking, hear now my words. If there's a prophet among you, I, the Lord, make myself known to him in a vision. I speak to him in a dream, not so with my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. That's a really good thing to understand about being able to hear God.

I speak with him face to face, even plainly. Okay, let me just tell you very, very simply, if you'd like to know God's dream for your life, get to know God. Get to know God. Get to know the giver of the dream. Get to know, listen to this, get to know the one who can reveal it and fulfill it. Get to know the one who can reveal it and fulfill it.

That's a good tweet for all you tweeters, all right. The children of Israel, the Bible says, knew his acts. The children of Israel knew God's acts. Moses knew his ways. If you want to know what God's dream is for your life, get to know God and God will speak to every one of us plainly face to face. He says he spoke to Moses as a friend and Jesus said, no longer do I call you servants, I call you friends.

For a servant doesn't know what his master's doing, but a friend does. So we've got to get to know God. So God has a dream for every person here.

But listen to me carefully. We also can have dreams. We can have selfish dreams. And those selfish dreams can cloud us from hearing God's dream. And there are some dreams that you just need to lay down. You just need to lay them down.

For instance, let me give an illustration. How many of you men are over 40? Don't raise your hand yet. You're over 40.

And in school, whether high school or college, you played football. Can I see your hand? Put your hands up. Okay.

Okay. Listen to me. The cowboys are not going to call.

That they're not going to call. Give up on that dream. It's not going to happen.

I promise you it will not happen. See, there are some dreams that we have that they're dreams, but they're just not from God. So we have to find the dream that God has for us. The only way you'll ever find God's dream is to get to know God. All right. So when you get the dream though, what do you do?

Well, here's point number two. Don't brag about the dream. Don't brag about the dream. Listen to me carefully. The dream leads you to God's destiny.

Listen. And if you brag about it, you'll never get to the destiny God has for your life. I know people that brag all the time about God's call on their life, God's dream. Pastor, let me tell you God's call on my life.

You don't need to tell me. You just need to be faithful in all his house. You just need to be faithful to God. And yet we just brag and brag and brag. And it says his brothers hated him for his dreams and for his words. This is the pride test.

And in my opinion, Joseph failed the first test. He fails the pride test. God gives him a dream and he immediately goes out and brags about it. He tells everybody his dream.

He tells his brothers his dreams. Well, I'm saying he failed it actually with God. I believe that we actually never fail a test. We just take it over and over and over again until we pass it.

Isn't that great? God is such a gracious God, he gives you another chance. So if you've ever failed a test from God, guess what? You're going to get another chance. I don't think God puts F at the top of our papers. I think he puts retake. Just retake it.

So you can't move away when you have a problem. You got to pass whatever that test is, you got to pass it. And we've got to stop bragging. Now, stop bragging, stop bragging. Now listen to me. For some of us to stop bragging, because you might even say, well, I do it all the time and I don't want to do it and I try not to do it. So you're going to have to help me.

Okay, I'm going to help you. For some people to stop bragging, you're going to have to stop talking. Because when you talk, it's like if his mouth is moving, he's lying. You ever heard that expression?

Okay. Sometimes when your mouth is moving, your mouth is moving, you're just bragging. Now, I am a person that thinks out loud. There are some people who think before they speak. I try to do that.

I really do. There are some people who think while they speak. That's me. I'm kind of talking, some of you are laughing, you're looking at your spouse and your spouse is mad.

But you know, you just, that's me. I kind of think while I'm talking. And then there are some people that think after they talk.

And then there are some people that never think. But the point is, I just talk a lot. I'm just a very verbal person. But I knew as God began to work in my life, that I talk too much.

I just knew that. So years ago, I said to Debbie, will you kick me under the table, just lightly, but do it on the shin. So if I'm talking too much, just kind of bump me. And if I don't stop, then do it a little harder.

My legs were black and blue for years. She was helping me. I'm just saying to you, if you want to know why you're not fulfilling your destiny and other people around you are, you may need to pass the brag test. And one of the ways we pass it is stop bragging. Now, why do we brag?

You ever thought about this? Why do we brag? Let me tell you why we brag.

Because pride's in our heart. Matthew 12 to 34 says, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Now listen to me, because I'm going to blow away an old thing. I've heard this many times.

And I think to myself, have they never read the Bible? Listen, I can tell what's in your heart. I can. I just have to listen to your mouth for a little while. And here's what people say. Well, you don't know what's in my heart.

Well, I'm getting a pretty good idea by looking at the thing on your face right now and the words coming out of your mouth. You don't know what's in my heart. Listen, we do. I may not know everything that's in your heart. But the reason that we brag is because pride's in the heart. We've got to deal with the heart. It's very, very clear that if there's something in our heart, it's going to come out of our mouth.

If we speak and it's in our heart, it's going to come out. Pride, listen, pride always has to have a voice. Pride always has to be or wants to be heard. Pride always wants to give its opinion. Let me give you another example of pride. Pride always interrupts other people. You're just real quiet today.

Do you have a problem interrupting people? Do you know why? You're a prideful person. That's why.

Because your opinion is more important than their opinion. So they're halfway through and you've got to jump in and you've got to say what you want to say. That's pride. We have to deal with this or we will never fulfill God's destiny for our life. Now, I want to tell you something that's absolutely unbelievable to me about this passage that I didn't see the first time I preached this. I just saw this this week. I'm not taking just my sermons.

I'm going back studying it, praying over it, seeking God, and I'm getting all sorts of new revelation that I didn't see eight years ago when I preached this. Joseph brought a bad report of his brothers to his father before he got the dream. He's already a tattletale. He already has a problem with his mouth.

And remember, if you have a problem with your mouth, you have a problem with your heart. He's already got it. And then God gives him a dream of his brothers bowing down to him.

Now listen to me carefully. That dream was not Joseph's destiny. His destiny, his purpose on this earth was not to get his brothers to bow down to him. His purpose was to save multitudes of people. His purpose was to be the second in command in the greatest nation on the earth at that time and to store up grain that during a seven-year famine, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lives could be saved. That's his purpose. Why didn't God give him a dream about saving multitudes? Why didn't he say I had a dream about that if I would be a good steward, that God would use me to help other people one day?

There's a couple reasons why. First of all, that doesn't motivate most of us when we're young. When we're immature in the Lord, it doesn't motivate us to help a lot of people.

It motivates us to be well-known or to have power or to have success. So listen to me carefully. Listen, listen, listen. So many people, they get this all mixed up.

Listen. Yes, maybe you have a dream about you being great, but you being great is not God's purpose for your life. You helping a lot of people is God's purpose for your life. And as we mature in the Lord, we realize, yes, God may give me great influence one day, but that influence is for his purposes, not for my purposes.

And that maturity begins to happen in our life. So possibly God gave him this dream because the dream of helping a lot of people wouldn't have motivated him at that. Secondly, God may have given him this dream because this dream would reveal what was in his heart. Is it possible that God has given you a dream and he's actually using that dream to work some things out of your life so you can fulfill the destiny God has for you?

Are y'all following me? Am I making this clear? Because this is really good stuff.

This is very good. I'm telling you, listen, the dream, the dream from God is not the same as the destiny. The dream is simply what starts us on the path to maturity so we can handle the destiny.

And can I say this? If you can't even handle the dream, you can't handle the destiny. If you can't be humble with the dream, listen, if you can't be humble with the dream, you will never have the destiny because the destiny would destroy you.

And God knows that. So he gives you the dream to reveal the pride or to bring it to the surface like a pot of gold and you turn the fire up under it and the dross comes to the top and you scrape it off. I'm telling you, God gives you a dream, a good dream and a big dream to get some stuff out of you so he can make you pure enough to be able to handle the destiny that he has for you. So if you're going to move from your dream to your destiny, you got to believe God has a dream for you.

And then when you get the dream, don't brag about it. And then number three is deal with the root of pride. We've got to pass the pride test.

So how are we going to pass it? Deal with the root of pride. All right, let me ask you a question.

I want all of you at all the campuses to raise your hand, all right, if you agree with this. How many of you at some time in your life have dealt with pride? Can I see your hand? The rest of you are dealing with it right now because you didn't raise your hand. Okay, all right. Now, how many of you have dealt with pride in your life more than once? Can I see your hand?

Yes. You know why? There's a couple of reasons. First of all, many of us deal with the fruit and not the root. Many of us see the pride and we say, well, that pride, I just made these prideful statements, so again, I'm going to not talk as much. But the pride's still there.

It's still there. So we've got to do something to deal with the root. And what is the root of pride?

Listen to me carefully. Insecurity is the root of all pride. All pride is rooted in insecurity. If you ever see a prideful person, you're seeing an insecure person.

If pride, listen to this, here's another great tweet. Listen, if pride is in your heart, insecurity is in your soul. If pride is in your heart, insecurity is in your soul. That's why we talk about we need the healing of the soul, such as Freedom Ministry and Kairos and things like that that help us. Our souls have to be healed because as long as there's insecurity in our souls, pride's in our heart. Now, I said that's one of the reasons. Here's another reason that we have to redo this or continue to deal with pride, because with every new challenge comes new insecurities. Let me say it another way. With every new level of responsibility comes new insecurities.

New insecurity. In other words, we're doing great. We're doing fine. We've walked with God.

We really sought God. We're in a position, and boy, we're just doing great. And all of a sudden, we get a promotion. We get a new position. We get a new leadership assignment, a new ministry position at the church, whatever.

And all of a sudden, oh, man, I can't do this. You know, we were a greeter or an usher or a servant in some way. And all of a sudden, say, listen, we'd like for you to be the leader now of the greeters. We'd like to be one of the team leaders. And we'd like for you to organize, oh, I don't know if I could do that.

And all of a sudden, there we go. But here's the problem. You can't deal with it by becoming more confident in yourself, because then you'll have pride. You have to be more confident in Jesus. You can't just say, you know what, after a few months or weeks, and it's going real well, boy, I am pretty good at this.

I probably should lead several of these things, because I'm really good. Because the pride comes again. So when there's insecurity in our heart, we have to deal with it.

We have to learn to deal with it. Do you remember what Jesus said to Satan? I think this, I mean, what Satan said to Jesus, I think this is incredible.

It's amazing. Satan begins with Jesus by this. If you are the Son of God, how incredible is that? And here's what I want you to notice. Jesus never said, I am too the Son of God.

Or not, I am too. Do you know why he didn't say that? Because he knew who he was. He knew he was the Son of God.

He knew he was a child of God. Listen, this is the way we deal with insecurity. We have to come to a place that we know we're children of God.

And not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but by his grace, he has saved us. That's what deals with our insecurity. Let me tell you a story. Think about a village, an old-time village with a kingdom, a castle, and a moat around it, and you know, all that. You got the king, and the queen, and the castle, and the prince. And let's just say that, and the prince looks out of the castle one day, and he sees in the village a beautiful young lady.

And it's love at first sight. But he's the prince. She's a pauper. So he leaves the castle and disguises himself as a pauper, because he doesn't want her to love him because he's the prince. He wants her to love him because she really loves him as a person. And for months and years, he works as a pauper and earns his keep, and he wins her heart. And then he proposes, she accepts, he takes her back to the castle and marries her. And then in time, he becomes the king, and she's the queen.

Okay. How does she overcome insecurity? She overcomes insecurity because she knows she's the queen. She knows that. And she knows that her husband truly loves her because of what he sacrificed to get her. That's how she deals with insecurity. How does she deal with pride? She knows where she came from.

She's never forgotten where she came from. Understanding that I'm a child of the king deals with my insecurity. Remembering where I came from deals with my pride. God has a destiny for you. God has a dream for you, and He has a destiny.

But you will never fulfill your destiny until you pass the pride test. We want you to take a moment to think about what Pastor Robert shared today and listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying to you. If you want to connect with us, we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear from you. If you want to connect with us, or check out some of Pastor Robert's other messages, visit pastorrobert.com. And if you haven't already, go follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter so we can be a part of your community. Thank you again for joining us at the start of this new series. Next time, Pastor Robert is going to talk about the second test in reaching our destiny, which is the pit test. Until then, have a blessed week.