Joyce Meyer - Quitting Is Not An Option

TOPICS: Giving up

Quitting is not an option. You may feel like giving up, but we're not gonna let you. We're gonna tell ya tonight you gotta get up. Instead of giving up, you're gonna get up and press into the new beginning that God has for you and live the life that God wants you to live. We're gonna talk about what happens from the pit to the palace.

Joseph was a young man who had a dream, and I hope and pray that you have a dream for your life. Not having any kind of goals or any kind of dreams for your life is kind of a boring, dull way to live.

Don't ever stop dreaming. No matter how old you are, don't stop dreaming. You're not too young to dream. You're not too old to dream and even if you've got some shattered dreams in your life, I want to encourage you to dream again.

We are created, we're goal-oriented people. We need to look forward to something. We need to have something that we're working toward. And so being a person who has a dream and being goal-oriented is a very important thing.

Joseph was a man with a dream. He was a young boy who had a dream and he was young. He was inexperienced. He was immature, and he had a lot to learn. But he had a dream that God gave him. And he saw himself in a role of leadership. He actually saw his brothers and his father bowing down to him and he went and told them, which wasn't a very smart thing to do.

Sometimes you need to keep a little bit of what you're seeing for your future to yourself and just let God make it happen because naturally that didn't go over too big with them. Well, his brothers, being very jealous of him and actually hating him, decided that they were going to get rid of him.

So let's look at Genesis chapter 37 "And when they saw him far off, even before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. And they said one to another, see, here comes this dreamer and the master of dreams".

You know sometimes, especially if you're around negative people who don't want to do anything with their life, they're gonna get mad at you if you have a dream for your life. Amen?

"So come on now, let us kill him and throw his body into some pit". You know the devil's always trying to dig some kind of a pit for us and trying to pitch us in it, whether it's a pit of depression, a pit of discouragement, a pit of poverty, a pit of sickness and disease. He always wants us to be somewhere besides on top "So now, let us kill him and throw him into some pit; then we'll go and tell lies [to our father]".

Well, we see him in the pit but now let's look at genesis 41 beginning in verse 38 and we see a whole different situation with him. Now we see him in the palace. "And pharaoh said to his servants, can we find this man's equal, a man in whom is the spirit of God"?

Now a lot of years have gone between this pit thing and what we're seeing now and in a minute, we're gonna spend the rest of the evening talking about what to do in the middle because a lot of times we only tell about have a dream and then we kind of talk about how great it's gonna be when your dream comes to pass. But we gotta talk about the middle because a lot of people never make it through the middle.

So I'm gonna just get real practical with you tonight and tell you how to get from the pit to the palace. Don't just have a dream to get out of the pit and get to the palace, but know what you need to do when you're in the middle. And even understand what's going on in your life when you're in the middle.