Your Dream Entails The House of Pain

If you’ve been listening to Rich and Doug a while, you will have heard Doug’s one-liner ‘new levels, new devils’. And if you have ANY intention of living out the plan God has for your life, a promise as sure as night follows day is that you will face opposition.

That’s actually good news. Because if you went to the gym, and saw some clod showing up day after day, going through all of the exercises, without adding any weight to the machine or any plates to the bar? You wouldn’t need anyone to explain that this guy was wasting his time.

He wasn’t getting tested, and he will never advance, no matter how much training he told himself he was doing.

Opposition and trials are the fitness club for our character. Think of it like moral ‘resistance training’. Just like ore needs the application of heat to separate it from impurities and produce, iron, silver, or gold, God lets hardship hit us.

Finding yourself ‘in the suck’ isn’t proof that you’ve wandered off the path of God (unless you happen to be in rebellion against his call, just ask Jonah about that). Sometimes embracing the suck is the path you need to take to arrive at the destination to which God has called you.

We’re back to looking at the life of Joseph where, even when he was doing all the right things, he was being wronged, and his life was sucking worse than an airplane toilet. Plenty would have taken the advice of Job’s wife (Job was another guy who didn’t deviate from God’s path) to ‘curse God and die’. But he held strong, even when he was in a strange land, with no accountability partners and no obvious gain for having impeccable moral character.

Even that series of difficult-to-accept hardships was part of God unfolding not only Joseph’s dream, but Abraham’s dream, and the entire Divine Plan on which redemption depended. You know, the one that was developed ‘before the foundation of the world’.

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While you’re at it, check out Doug’s latest book. It’s got a tie-in to the dream Doug mentioned in this episode:

The Bible And Hunting

If a person looked to Scripture and paid particular attention to the passages within the Bible that address the topic of hunting, then they’d walk away thinking not only is hunting animals tolerated but it is endorsed by God. And that’s exactly what this little book is about: proving that God, from Genesis to Revelation, is extremely cool with hunters and hunting. I’ll go out on a biblical limb and claim right off the bat that you cannot show me, through the balance of the Bible, that the God of the Scripture is against the responsible killing and the grilling of the animals He created. ~Doug Giles