Devotionals by Dr. M. Craig Barnes
The Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love - and whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper. --
All of us would love to substitute our name for Joseph's in the above verse. Wouldn't it be great to have the Lord show you his love and make everything that you do prosper? Yeah, except when the Lord prospered Joseph, he wound up in prison. The Lord can be a little quirky when it comes to things like prosperity.
It isn't that the Lord wants you to be a failure, but he clearly has a different means of measuring success than the rest of us. For him, it has more to do with faithfulness than affluence. In the Lord's eyes, to be prosperous means to have received an abundance of illustrations of his steadfast love for you. When you see all the traces of that love, you start to think more about faithfulness than affluence yourself.
So Joseph chose to be a faithful, model prisoner and eventually assumed the responsibility of caring for the other prisoners. But he never settled for living in jail, and he never sacrificed his dream of being free. He became so faithful and good at dreaming that he could even interpret the dreams of others, which was how he eventually became free.
When the Lord calls you to faithfulness, he is never asking you to settle for how it is. Instead, he expects you to remain faithful to the dreams he has placed in your heart, because in giving you a dream, he has already prospered you.
-- Craig Barnes