Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: If you have your Bibles, if you'll take those and turn to the book of Genesis.
We're going to begin reading in a few moments in the 37th chapter.
So let me just begin by asking you a question to which you I'd like you to respond by raising your hand if your answer is yes.
How many of you have experienced dreams of some level? Not just dream that every, every night kind of dreams, but dreams of some kind of of significance where you felt either that God was speaking to you or there was some kind of extra significance that was attached to dreams or a dream? How many of you have had that experience? Will you raise your hand, look around at how many. That's got to be 90% of the people here.
Now I know that we can get off into la la land when we start talking about dreams and people can get goofy and weird about it. However, having said that, let me say to you that it is a biblical model that God speaks to us through dreams.
Now it's not the clearest way that God speaks. The clearest way God speaks is through his word.
In preached word, in taught word, there were things but sometimes God can access us to speak to us when we're not awake, to add anything to it.
Then he can access our subconscious mind. And it is a biblical model God does that.
I'm not going to speak tonight on dreams particularly, but there is no way to understand the story of Joseph apart from the issue of dreams, of a dream and dreams.
The dream which begins the story of Joseph and the dream in a sense a dream, a vision, a prophetic hope, a dream of Israel that ends the life of Joseph.
Those are the bookends of one of the greatest lives in the Bible.
On last week, for those of you that were here, on last week we talked about Abram who became Abraham and certainly one of the patriarchs and the launching pad of the Jewish people that apart from Abraham their there are no Jews. The Jews began with Abraham who was not Jewish.
So the offspring of Abram and who became Abraham is the Jewish people.
But we said as great as he was, Abraham had some moments of profound clay feet where he, he showed his humanity, fear and compromise.
Now he was Certainly a man of great trust. We sang last week, Let us entrust and obey. And he did trust, and he did obey God.
Except a couple of times when he didn't trust God enough to stand up for his wife. He was willing twice to let other men have his wife because he was afraid they'd kill him to get his wife.
Maybe not the most admirable moment of anybody's life.
That's Abraham when it comes to Joseph. And this is one of the reasons I just asked Pastor Travis if he would just invite Joshua to bring the young people in here. You want a model?
Now, listen to Dr. Mark.
You want a model? You want somebody to say, that's what I want to be like in the whole Bible.
I mean, Jesus, yes, but of a human person in the Bible. You want somebody who said, that's what I want to be like? It's certainly Joseph.
A life of such character, strength of character and nobility of life.
And the. The confidence in who God is, irrespective of the circumstances through which he went through many dangerous toils and snares. That's what we just sang.
Through many dangerous toils and snares. Now let me tell you something. The life of Joseph is a life of dangers, toils and snares that begins with a dream and ends with a transcendent hope.
Genesis, chapter 37, beginning with verse 5. I'm gonna skip a wee bit, but I'll tell you when I do so you can follow me.
And Joseph dreamed a dream and told it to his brethren, and they hated him yet the more.
And he said unto them, here, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed for. Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field. And lo, my sheaf arose and also stood upright. And behold, your sheaves stood round about and made obeisance to my sheaf. Now, pause a moment.
That's an antiquated English word. It's still perfectly good. It's just that we don't use it anymore. It means to bow.
But when you use the action verb bow, there's no motivation implied. It just says he bowed. It doesn't tell you anything about why or anything else. When you say when one says to make obeisance, it means to bow reverentially, as in the presence of a high official.
So he's saying, your sheafs, the sheaves of wheat or barley, probably, or whatever it is.
Your sheafs would bow reverentially to my sheaf as if I were some kind of dignitary or royalty or something.
That'll make your Brothers love you.
Verse 8.
And his brothers said unto him, shalt thou indeed reign over us, or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the more for his dreams and for his words. And he dreamed yet another dream and told it to his brethren and said, behold, I have dreamed a dream more. And behold, the sun and the moon and the 11 stars made obeisance to me.
And he told it to his father and to his brethren. And his father rebuked him and. And said unto him, what is this dream that thou hast dreamed?
Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee, to the earth? Now pause again.
Look.
Do you see? Joseph does not interpret his dream. He just reports it.
He doesn't say, the sun stands for my father Jacob. He doesn't say the moon stands for my mother. He doesn't say the 11 stars stand for my brothers. He. He just says the sun, the moon and the stars.
It's Joseph who makes the interpretation. Now listen to this.
Sometimes those who hate you and your dream the most may understand the implications of your dream before and better than you do.
Verse 11. And his brethren envied him, but his father observed the same. Verse 18.
And when they saw Joseph afar off, they meaning his brothers, and even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him.
And they said one to another, behold, this dreamer cometh.
Come now, therefore, and let us slay him and cast him into some pit.
And we will say some evil beast hath devoured him. And then we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Put your hand on your Bible, and let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, with our hands on the Word, and our hearts and minds as open as we know how to get them, we ask you to do all the rest.
Brush aside everything that would stand between us and your transcendent word, all of distraction or fatigue or weariness of heart or soul, and speak to us rushing over the threshold of our souls.
When we leave here tonight, we will say one to another, surely the Lord has spoken unto us in the mighty name Jesus, the strong son of God.
Amen.
So these are the generations. Abraham is the father of Yitzhak or Isaac. Isaac is the father of Jacob. Jacob is the father of all these boys.
The last at this point.
Not the last, but the last at this point is Joseph.
There is no doubt in the story that Joseph is his favorite and he loves him.
There is a great. There is no lack of absolute sibling rivalry envy in the story, but it's more than that.
The hand of God, not just the hand of Jacob, the hand of God is on Joseph.
And it. It becomes apparent almost from the beginning of his life, he's just special.
And everybody can feel that.
Now, I'm just going to summarize the next little few chapters and then come back to the dream.
So his brothers throw him into this pit. They're going to kill him.
And one of the brothers says, no, let's don't kill him. We don't want his blood on our hands. Furthermore, if we kill him, we don't make any money on him. Let's sell him into slavery.
So they sell him to an Ishmaelite caravan going to Egypt. They take him to Egypt and sell him there. He's purchased by an Egyptian aristocrat.
And there, as a slave in the household of this Egyptian aristocrat, this hand of God on Joseph, this thing, everything he touches just seems to work.
He just seems to have this gift.
And there the hand of God on him blesses the household of this Egyptian.
Until the Egyptian's wife begins to lust for him sexually. And she tries to seduce him. And he stands firm. And he makes a statement of integrity and loyalty. He says, look, my master Potiphar, my master has withheld nothing from me.
I'm like the chief of his whole household.
He's withheld nothing from me except you.
How could I sleep with you when he's been so good to me?
Now wait a minute. Pause a moment.
When he's been so good to me. He is Potiphar's slave, but his loyalty and his faithfulness to his master is difficult for us to grasp.
So she won't take no for an answer.
She tries to literally drag him into bed.
And he. She grabs his coat and he shucks out of it and runs out.
But now she has evidence, so she claims attempted rape.
Potiphar believes her, has him arrested. He's thrown into prison, and he spends years in prison.
He is now gone from his father's favorite to the most hated of his brothers.
Thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, falsely accused of rape, thrown into prison.
His life just seems to be unraveling.
He couldn't be getting any further from that dream.
And then he interprets dreams.
Dreams are a part of his life. By the way. It's interesting to note that in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, two men to whom God spoke extremely directly to influence destiny and history through dreams were both named Joseph.
Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Joseph, the child of Jacob.
Now there's two convicts that are with him. They used to work for Pharaoh and now they don't.
So the one of them has a dream, and Joseph interprets it. And he says, that dream means that Pharaoh is going to lift you up, take you out of prison, lift your head up and restore you to his place.
And the guy says, great.
So the other man says, okay, what about my dream?
See, as soon as somebody gets a good interpretation, you think, hey, what about my dream? He says, okay, your dream is a little different.
Your dream says, pharaoh's going to cut your head off.
So which Both of those dreams are fulfilled.
So when the guy returns to Pharaoh's palace, Joseph says, when you come into the palace and into Pharaoh's presence, remember me.
And the guy says, you betcha.
He forgets him for two more years.
He is in prison for two years, but he becomes the trustee in the prison.
The warden kind of turns the prison over to him.
It's this thing that's on him, this prosperity thing. Just seemed. Everything he touches seems to turn to gold.
Now he's running the prison, and the other guy's gone to be with Pharaoh. And then Pharaoh has a dream. And Pharaoh can't interpret the dream. Nobody can. It's complicated.
Anybody ever have a dream this weird?
He dreams these cows, and then he dreams these other cows, and then these cows eat those cows.
And Pharaoh says, you know, this is weirding me out.
Can't anybody interpret this dream? And the guy says, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I met a guy in prison and he can interpret dreams. They bring Joseph. He interprets the dream and he says, what it means is this first seven cows are gonna be years of great prosperity.
The second seven cows are years of famine. These cows are gonna eat those cows, and you're gonna have seven years of famine.
And the Pharaoh says, what should I do? He says, store everything for seven years.
Stockpile everything you can for seven years. And when the famine comes, sell it, and you'll be able to feed people and you're going to be rich and powerful. And the Pharaoh says, I like this Jewish kid.
And so he makes Joseph the second most powerful person in Egypt, which is at that time the most powerful empire in the known world.
So Joseph is now the second most powerful person in the known world behind only Pharaoh.
Famine hits Israel.
I'm not going to go through a long, complicated thing here, but Joseph's family now, through a set of kind of convoluted in and out wind up back in Egypt. And they don't Recognize him? Why would they?
He was a young boy when they threw him into a pit and sold him into slavery. Now he's a grown man. He's married. He's an Egyptian. He looks like an Egyptian, dresses like an Egyptian. He's second only to the pharaoh.
So it's the only moment where you see Joseph struggle, but he struggles with his emotions.
He loves them, but he's kind of remembering them throwing him into a pit, selling him into slavery.
So his emotions are all torn up and he's back and forth. Shall I have him arrested?
Shall I let him go? Shall I not let him go? It's kind of a weird moment in the story. But finally they.
He brings them in and tells them who he is.
How do you think they feel?
They are terrified.
They fall on their faces in terror before their brother. And they bow before him and make obeisance. And the dream is fulfilled.
Now, I'm coming back to the dream. But just stay with me one more moment.
Now, why does God move Jacob, the brothers, Joseph, the entire Jewish family, 37 people.
Remember I told you there are no Jews before Abraham.
So then Abraham, Isaac and his family, now Jacob and his family, and they're all in Egypt. Why?
It is because in Egypt, the Jewish people will become a people, a nation.
37 will become a nation.
But the means by which it happens is actually 430 years of bondage in. In Egypt.
But Joseph says when he's dying, he says to the They've multiplied, they've prospered, except for slavery, but they're healthy, they're strong.
And Joseph says, when I die, don't bury me in Egypt.
Take me back to the Holy Land.
So he is speaking prophetically now from the dream in his father's tent. He's now dreaming of the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Dream unto dream. Dream unto destiny. Destiny unto national identity.
So from a dream in his father's tent, he's envisioning the Jewish people in their homeland.
And when they leave in that great getting a morning when Moses leads them out, we're coming to Moses.
But when Moses leads them out, they take up the sarcophagus, the. The mummy. Probably. Probably. It looked just like what we've dug up in Egypt. He was an Egyptian.
And they carry that mummy with Joseph's bones all the way back to Shechem. And he is buried. Joseph is buried in Israel.
Now, let's deal with the dream.
So the first thing is this.
When God gives you a dream, you have to remember that that's not the promise of its fulfillment, that moment.
The one.
The one. Well, let me give you two great mistakes you can make with dreams. One is to ignore it completely. The other, whether it's a sleeping dream or the dream of your life.
So somebody said, I have a dream of being. I have a dream of being a schoolteacher. I have a dream of being a nurse. Or I have a dream of being a doctor. Or I have a dream of being a business person, owns my own business, okay? In almost every language of the world, that word is the same in both things. A sleeping dream. In Spanish, sueno, the sleeping dream. And I have a dream of being a nurse, it's the same word.
So there is a connection between the dream of my life and a sleeping dream.
So when God gives you that dream, the second, the first mistake you can make is to ignore it, bury it, disobey it. You'll spend your whole life running from the dream. If there's one thing I said to your pastor on the front row from the day he was born, and I've said it to his children, I've said, God, come on out loud. God.
God has a destiny for your life.
I said, when Grandpa is dead, I want you to look over and say, yes, Grandpa, I know a destiny for my life.
So the one thing you can do is ignore it and fight it. The other thing you can do that's wrong, try to make it happen.
Try to force it. Try to. Because you don't know what it's gonna look like.
You may think you do, but you don't really know what it's going to look like.
Because God has to speak to you in dreams, in symbolic language.
Actually, none of Joseph's dreams came true.
No sheaves of wheat bowed down to him. The sun and the moon and the stars didn't bow down to him. So they didn't come true. It's just that they came true.
But they didn't come true like that.
So you have to remember that God is revealing to you a dream. But you have to wait for the fulfillment of the dream. Because you don't. You may not even understand what it means.
It may not look at all what you thought.
I grew up in a very, very odd family.
I see a lot of young people in here tonight. I have a word of prophecy for you. When you're my age, you'll realize how odd your family was.
But my family moved constantly. My parents. My dad was a true vagabond. I went to 25 schools before I graduated from high school. I went to four schools in the first grade and we just moved. People used to ask me, what does my dad do for a living? I said, move.
Till I was 16. I thought we were in the witness protection plan, but we weren't unemployed. We didn't live out of the boot of a car or something. It was just that my dad was a true vagabond. He could do anything. He could do anything. So he'd hear about a job in California, make a phone call, and he'd say, all right, pack up. We're going to California. I mean, no, I mean right now.
So you just learn to pack light and get in the car.
When I was in the second grade, right at the end of the Civil War, I remember we moved for just a few weeks to Arlington, Texas. I attended a little elementary school in Arlington, Texas. Just a few weeks.
And when you move in, anybody here ever move in new into a school? You were the new kid. Okay, then you know what I'm saying?
Nothing adjusts to you.
They don't say, oh, we've got to explain everything to the new kid. The rope is turning. You just run in and start jumping.
And they were getting ready for a patriotic tableau of some kind. That the second and third graders were going to sing these patriotic songs for the pta.
So every morning the second and third graders would come into the auditorium and we'd practice these songs. But. But they'd been practicing them for weeks. I was hearing them for the first time.
And children don't hear the lyrics of songs like adults do. We don't hear.
And I can remember this as a child. I remember, for example, I remember a Christmas song we used to sing. I never understood why we sang. I didn't know who Round John was, and I didn't know why we sang about him. We sang about it every year at Christmas. Round John, Virgin, Mother and child. Who was round John?
I can remember thinking, who was Round John? And why are we singing about him in church?
I'll tell you another one. Do you remember this hymn, Les Gladly the Cross Eyed Bear? I remember that. And I used to think, who was Gladly? Why was he cross eyed? And why are we singing about a bear?
Every time we sang that hymn, I had this. I'm Gladly the Cross Eyed Bear.
Kids don't hear what we hear.
So they were singing one of these songs. You know the song, you know the words, but they sang this song. Never heard it before. And in it was this one line about purple mountain majesty. There was something about that phrase.
It Electrified me. My little creative breast said, oh, God, imagine a mountain so beautiful that it's called purple mountain majesty.
I thought, if I could just see purple mountain majesty. A few weeks later, I went home from school. My dad said, you'll not go back to school in the morning. We're moving to California.
I said, California?
Are we going through the mountains? He said, you bet we are. I. I said, are we going to see purple mountain majesty? He said, well, yeah, we are.
God, I was wired for sound.
We left the next day. We got about two hours west of Fort Worth. And my dad pulled the car to the side of the road and he said, now listen to me, Mark. We're going to the mountains. We're going to see purple mountain majesty. But if you ask me about it again, you'll not live to see it.
Finally we started up into the mountains and I said, daddy, are we going to the top? He said, we're going to the top. I said, don't lie to me, dad. Don't lie to me. I mean the tip top. He said, the tip top. I said, are we going to the tip tip top? He said, the tip tip top.
Finally, we pulled the car into one of these overlooked things and he said, there, Mark.
And I looked out over the expanse of the Rocky Mountains and. And I said, no, no, you said, the tip tip top. You promised.
My dad said, this is a tip tip top and I'm going to throw you off.
I hurled myself into the backseat and burst into tears because that little second grader could not explain to adults that I had seen Bug's bunny drive his car to the tip tip top of pyramid shaped mountains. And I just knew that our family car, a 1957 green Nash Rambler station wagon, was going to balance on the tip tip top of purple mountain majesty.
Until my dad said, everybody in the front seat. And we'd shoot the other side.
I was in the top of the Rocky Mountains looking at one of the most beautiful scenes available to human eyes. And I missed it because I was looking for a cartoon image that wasn't real to start with.
Now that can happen with your dreams.
That can happen with dreams. It can be right in the palm of your hand and you miss it.
So imagine there's this beautiful young high school girl who dreams about winning the Academy Award. She wants to be a movie star, win an Academy Award.
She goes to Christian college somewhere and has a misfortune to fall in love with a ministry student.
And so she marries him and she puts her dream of stardom on the shelf and subsumes her dream into his to pastor a church.
They get their first little country church. And at Christmas time, they ask her to direct the Christmas pageant.
And everything that can go wrong goes wrong.
The scenery falls over, knocks a manger over. A little plastic Jesus rolls across the stage.
But the people in the little church are thrilled.
After the play is over, they all go into the basement to have their hot chocolate. And she's sitting in the front row feeling sorry for herself.
She said, this is fine for him.
This is my husband's dream.
What about my dream?
When does my dream come true?
Just at that moment. A little boy with a bathrobe on that's dragging the ground and a towel around his head secured with a rubber band, holding an umbrella that he had used as a shepherd's staff. And in the other hand, he's got a. He's got a little flower that looks like he's been chewing on it.
And he comes in and he comes to the preacher's wife and he says, I've never been in a play before. I never thought I'd get to be in a play.
And tonight I was a shepherd for Jesus. It's the greatest night of my life, he says.
And he gives her that flower. And he says, this is for you.
Now she can despise that and long for the celebrity that Hollywood could afford her.
Or she could clutch that flower to her breast and say, at last, my Academy Award.
God may give you a dream that at the beginning you do not understand.
And when he brings it to pass, you may have it in your hands.
And you can't see it.
You can't see it. For what was not more than a cartoon image, the son. What if Joseph had said, the son never bowed to me.
The moon never bowed down. What happened? Where'd the star. I wanted the stars to bow.
That never happened. It never happened. It just that it did happen.
Now, what about Joseph sharing his dream with his brothers?
He comes in for a lot of criticism from a lot of people.
They say, look, when they were mad at him over the first dream, how could he be stupid enough to share the second dream with them?
But one tends to think that one's family will be encouraging about one's dreams.
It's not unreasonable for him to think that his big brothers would say, whoa. We don't know what that means, but wow, we love you.
You need dream encouragers. The power of a dream. A dream is huge. The power of a dream draws energy and investment and attraction.
Dreams can change destiny.
Dr. Martin Luther King's greatest sermon was hardly more than just one phrase. I have a dream. And it changed the world. It changed American law and culture. The complexion in this room right now would not be like this if it hadn't been for Martin Luther King's dream.
But you got to remember, not everybody loves your dream. That dream got him shot off of a hotel balcony in Tennessee.
Not everybody loves your dream.
So you need to find dream encouragers.
That's what I like about Pastor Travis. I like about this church.
This is a church that believes in dreams.
Dreaming things, doing things, accepting new things, trying stuff. I want to be in that kind of an atmosphere.
I want to be around that. I remember the first time I shared my dream with somebody and they trampled it. God, it's a discouraging moment.
Alison and I were in our late 20s when we received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and we had known nothing about ministry except pastoring little, tiny Methodist churches. Suddenly, I had a dream of ministry that I had. I didn't even have vocabulary for it. I didn't even know what it was.
Now I know it means missionary evangelism, but I didn't know that. I just saw myself. We saw ourselves. We dreamed together, traveling the world in great churches, little tiny villages in the deep forest, everywhere, just preaching and sharing the gospel. I could see it like I can see you sitting there. But I didn't know what to call it, and I didn't know who to talk to about it.
I got invited to be a part of a committee of Methodist preachers, and I was the youngest person on the committee. I went to the committee meeting. The rest of them were really, really old dudes, way up in their early 40s, I think. And so we got finished with the committee, and the chairman of the committee said, that's a business is over early. Does anybody have anything to share? And it seemed like the propitious moment.
So I put my hot little hand in the air and said, hey, I do.
And I told them my dream, and I learned why. Jesus said, do not pour your pearls out before swine, because that room full of pigs turned on me.
They trampled my dream and they began to rend me.
They said, that's the stupidest thing we've ever heard of.
They said, you are going to flush your career right down the tubes. They said, you're going to walk off into Africa. Nobody will ever hear from Mark Rutland again. They said that kind of evangelism went out with Dwight L. Moody. Nobody does anymore.
And you know I wasn't so arrogant at 28 to think I knew everything.
These were some old guys. What if they're right? What if I'm about to make a catastrophe decision?
I staggered out to my car and I put my arm up on the roof of my car and laid my head over. And I was thinking, am I doing the wrong thing? And I heard an audible voice behind me. I thought it was God. It nearly scared the liver out of me. It said, forget those guys.
I spun around, and it was the only man in the room that hadn't said anything.
He followed me out to my car.
He said, forget them, son. Whatsoever the Lord saith unto thee, do it.
I said, what's wrong with them?
He said, they've lost their dreams and they hate you for reminding them of it.
He said, you remember that big guy in there that was the hardest on you? I've known him. We were in elementary school together. I know him. I remember the night at Camp Glisten and Youth Camp. And he knows I remember it when he stood up in a testimony service and testified that God had called him to be a missionary. And he never followed his dream. And he hates you for reminding him.
He said, now forget him. Forget all of us. Forget me and get on with it.
Now, we've tried, insofar as I know, over the last 50 years to follow that dream wherever it took us.
But one thing he told me to do, I never did for and never did do. And that was forget him.
He was the dream encourager I needed at that moment.
I.
I want to be that.
I work at being a dream encourager. I work at telling people, young people, old people, when they come to me with a dream. I work at saying, go for it. Try it. Take the risk.
It was. Sometimes it was hard for me as a university president.
Some kid meet me out on the quadrangle, and he'd say, president Rutland? You're always talking about dreams. Let me tell you my dream.
I'd say, all right, son, let's hear it. He said, I want to play in the NBA. I want to be a professional basketball player.
And I.
You don't know what to say.
Look, son, you're fucking 54 and you're white, you know?
Have you thought about the debate club?
We got a great theater club here.
But I didn't do that.
That's not my job.
Let life take care of that. That's not my job.
I'd say, go for it, man. Go for it and learn to jump.
Cause you're gonna need some altitude. Son, why would I do that? In the first place, I don't know who he is.
I don't know who he is. What if he's the first 54 white kid to make it in the NBA? When he writes his autobiography, I want it dedicated to me.
The second thing is, he doesn't know who he is.
Maybe that dream doesn't ever happen that way. Maybe he becomes a billionaire and buys a basketball team.
Mark Cuban never played a day in his life. I can promise you that.
Maybe he becomes a sports writer. Maybe he becomes a referee.
You don't know what that dream means to him. He only knows what it says at that moment.
Sometimes God calls us to be dreamers. And sometimes he calls us to be dream encouragers.
I want to tell you about the greatest dream encourager of my life.
The person I needed just at one moment.
When I was in the fifth grade, in another of our transcontinental moves, we moved for about four months into a tiny little town. Very rough little town.
Small school, 1st through 12th grade, all in one building. There were fistfights and. And I was small for my age. I know as you look up here at this massive and chiseled frame now, it's hard for you to imagine that I was small for my age in the fifth grade.
And I was frightened and out of place culturally. There was one bright spot.
My fifth grade teacher was a little fat lady named Mrs. Burkett that just loved us.
And she was not supremely educated. She taught me a mispronunciation for Mesopotamia that was to haunt me later in life when I was at University of Maryland and in an open classroom referred to the Fertile Crescent as Mesopotamia.
That was an awkward moment, but one for which I've forgiven her in light of her greater good.
Every other Monday, she'd twinkle her little blue eyes mischievously and rub her chubby little fingers together. And she'd say, well, it's dream day. And we'd all cheer and pull our little desks into a semicircle. And she would take. If it took the whole day. The whole day.
She would talk to each child. Tell me your dream. Talk about it. Process it. One by one by one. If it took the whole day. And she was a master at it. She was a master at it.
Sometimes it seemed crazy to me. I remember she said, the Dalton Toll. What's your dream? Dalton was a dangerous Hulk. He was 35 years old in the fifth grade. We were.
We were all terrified of him.
She said, dalton, what's your dream? He said, I want to be an astronaut.
I remember thinking, if Dalton Tull goes into space, it'll be with the chimpanzees.
But she acted like it was the most rational thing she'd ever heard. She took it up. She said, oh, Dalton, won't it be exciting for me when I'm watching TV and it says, colonel Dalton told United States Air Force and NASA climbing into the no zone of his spaceship. Wait a minute. He wants to make an announcement. And you'll raise the visor on your space helmet and say, I want to dedicate this flight to Mrs. Burkett and all the kids in 5A. And we cheered. And I remember thinking, this imbecile's going to do.
And she'd say to little Maisie Blanchard, little skinny dishwater blonde in a family so poor that she wore the same faded print dress to school every day of the fifth grade, and the only shoes she had were her brother's castoff tennis shoes. Maisie, what do you want to be? I want to be a movie star.
Oh, Ms. Burkett said, won't it be fun when I go to the theater, have my popcorn and my Coke? The lion roars and the credits roll? It says, starring Maisie Blanchard. She said, think how proud I'll be when I turn around to everybody else in the movie theater and say, you may not know, I taught Maisie Blanchard in the fifth grade.
I don't know if she was a Christian. I wasn't. My family wasn't. I didn't know if she knew anything about speaking by faith.
What I know is she talked, and we saw each other and ourselves differently.
I remember thinking, she's going to be rich and famous someday. I'm going to be nice to her.
And then she said, here's the new boy. Let's ask him. Well, I knew who the new boy was.
I was 16 before I knew my real name.
I thought my name was new boy.
She said, mark, what's your dream? As far as I know, no one had ever asked me that.
As far as I know, I'd never cognitively isolated what my dream was.
But when she asked me, it erupted out of me like a rocket ship. I answered without a moment's hesitation, I want to write books.
And the minute I said it, compared to astronaut and cowboy, it seemed like such a prissy dream. I just glared at the other boys in the room and I said, just laugh. Dream this.
But Mrs. Burkhett took that dream up in her hands and she breathed a breath of life on it.
She said, oh, Mark, that's going to happen.
She said, someday I'll go into a bookstore and buy a book by Mark Rowland and I'll say to the cashier, I taught this boy in the fifth grade.
Now I don't know what happened to anybody else in that class. I don't know if Dalton even went to space even after he got out of prison. I don't know. But.
What I know is in January of this year, my 20th book was released.
20 books that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide in three languages.
And I don't believe I ever would have written the first word of it if it hadn't been for a little fat lady that couldn't pronounce Mesopotamia.
That's who I want to be.
I want to be that person that can breathe faith and life on people's dreams.
Joseph's dream sustained him.
You hold on to your dream and let God hold on to you.
Let God bring it to pass.
Wait, I say. Wait on the Lord.
It may not look like what you thought and it may take longer than you can imagine.
What if God gave you a dream that through you hundreds of thousands of people will come to Christ?
And you go through your whole life and you work at your job and it never seems to happen. And you raise your kids and you do the best you can and not your child and not your grandchild, but your great grandchild becomes the 21st century's Billy Graham and wins hundreds of thousands of people to Christ. And through you, that dream was fulfilled.
You don't know what it means and you don't know how. God's timing, everything has to arrive at the intersection of God all at the same time. And you can't make it happen. You can't rush it any more than anything else. You just have to wait and then let God bring it to pass. And then open your. Dilate your faith.
There are people in this room that I believe.
Your dream is in your hands right now.
And you keep waiting for it to happen because you're waiting to be on the tip tip top of purple mountain majesty.
Well, let me close. You've been very patient.
When I was in India once I went to speak at a boy's home.
Big boys home. There was a old lady there that was the headmistress of the boy's home. She had a horrible and disfiguring scar.
Looked like a big thick red hand across her face. Pulled her eye and her nose and mouth like that.
She told me that when she was a little girl she had jerked the coleman Lantern off a high shelf, and it exploded on the side of her face.
So the village family of limited means and plastic surgery was out of the question. But frankly, looking at her, I'm not sure anybody could have helped.
Her mother was hurt by life and hurt people. Hurt people.
So she said to her, you're ugly.
No man's ever gonna have you.
You better take care of yourself.
Make your own way.
But this little girl kept dreaming of holding and rocking and loving babies.
And she'd tell her mother about it, and her mother would rebuke her. Finally, her mother forbade her. She said, satan is torturing you with that dream. No man will ever give you a baby.
She said, I forbid you to mention that dream again.
She made straight A's in high school. She got a scholarship to college. She finished college. She went to the university in New Delhi and got an mba.
And when she finished her mba, she came home to her mother's village. And that night she dreamed the dream again.
As they worked in breakfast the next morning fixing breakfast, she said to her mother, I dreamed that dream last night again. I was rocking baby in a high chair, and they were playing around my knees, and I. And her mother spun around and slapped her and said, I told you not to ever mention that lie again.
She said, Dr. Olam, while I was standing there, the phone rang.
She said, she picked the phone up and it was the bishop, used to be called Madras. She said, it was the bishop of the Madras Archdiocese of the Church of South India.
And he said, I understand you finished your mba.
She said, I've got a boy's home out in the countryside, and the old lady is passed away, and we don't know what to do. Would you go out there with us tomorrow and take a look at it? She was now hurt and hurt people. Hurt people.
She said, bishop, I'm disgusted that you call me. When I was working my way through seven years of college, you didn't give me a dime.
Now I've got an mba. You think I'm going to be the house mother at your little rundown boy's home?
He said, excuse me, I have miscommunicated.
I'm not asking you to be the house mother. I want to hire you as a consultant. I want you to go out there and look at it with me. Analyze the deferred maintenance, look at the books, see how bad trouble we're in financially, and then do the search and help us find the headmistress.
She said, oh, Bishop, I'm sorry. Of course I would love that. Contract.
He and his driver picked her up in his private car. The next morning they drove out to the boys home.
And there's a. I've been there several times. There's a circle drive like this in front of the main building. They pulled in and stopped and she stepped out on the building side. And when she stepped out, she said, that building vomited little boys.
She said, they came out the windows and doors and they surrounded her and they were jumping up and down and cheering and cheering. She couldn't think what was going on. She said, finally a little four year old came and ran and threw his arms around her hips and looked up into her face and. And she said, it was as though he couldn't even see my scar.
It was as though he couldn't even see how ugly I was.
And he said, are you our new mother?
She said, I turned to tell the bishop I'd like to reconsider about being the house mother. And she said when I turned, his car was driving out the main gate and.
And she said, I've never seen him again.
She said, I am the mother of a multitude. She said, I've rocked more babies than any woman in India. She said, I've changed more diapers, raised more sons. She said, that little four year old is now a doctor in Madras that treats my boys for free. She said, I am the mother of a multitude. My dream came true. She said, I've learned two things. When God gives you a dream, you believe God and hold onto that dream. He'll bring it to pass his way in his time.
I said, what's the second thing you learned? Oh, she said, the first thing is you can trust God. The second thing is you cannot trust bishops.
And Joseph dreamed a dream, and from that dream a throne in Egypt. And from the throne in Egypt, 430 years in bondage. And from 430 years in bondage, Moses and the Exodus and the Holy Land and the nation of Israel.
God has a dream for your life.
Will you bow your heads and close your eyes all over the house, if you will, please.
Heavenly Father, I thank you.
I praise you that you love us, you know us, you care about us, you know our weaknesses and our fears and sins, our abilities and what we think are inabilities and disabilities.
And yet still somehow, in your amazing grace, you have a plan for our lives.
Now, with your heads bowed and your eyes closed, if you would say, Dr. Rutland, will you please pray for me? Please pray.
I know God has a dream for my life, and I want to be yielded and surrendered to it. I know he has a dream for my life. If that's you, then I want you to lift your hand up right where you are and I want to pray for you. Sure. Just hold it up high. Thank God. Thank God. Thank God. So many. That's a house full of dreams.
Heavenly Father, I thank you and I praise you. I pray that you will move aside barriers, that you will sweep away anything that stands in the way. Guide them to it. Give them perseverance, no matter how hard they have to work, no matter how long they have to wait. God, I'm believing you for your amazing grace to bring those dreams to pass. And we'll be very, very careful to see the dream and not the cartoon. We thank you for it. Now keep your heads bowed and your eyes closed. But you take your hands down. Others would say, Dr. Mark, will you pray for me? Please pray.
I just feel like my dream is just in a pit or a prison. I just feel like it's getting further and further away.
I'm so discouraged about my dream. Will you pray for me? If that's you, then you lift your hand up and I want to pray for you. Sure, sure.
Of course.
Heavenly Father. Sometimes it. It can just seem to us, oh, God. Like it's so far away. It's so unreachable, so untouchable. God. From a pit, from slavery, from a prison, from false, false accusations.
Oh, God, have mercy on us. Have mercy on us. Give us faith. God, I pray that you will reawaken the dreams in these people, that you'll quicken them. Give them joy, unspeakable, full of glory.
Give them faith and God, anything in their lives. Any obstacle that they're putting forward, any sin or habit or bondage or any way that they're being disobedient. God, bring them into alignment with the dream.
And I believe you for this.
I believe you for it. Now, one last question. If you'd say, will you please pray for me?
I just don't feel like I've ever had a dream.
I don't know what the dream don't make it. It's not to be a king in Egypt. Maybe it's to own your own business or pay your house off. Those are perfectly wonderful dreams. Maybe it's just to raise good kids that love Jesus.
But you just say, I just don't know what the dream of my life even is. Then I want to pray for you. You lift your hand up and I want to pray for you. Sure, sure. Of course. Of course.
Heavenly Father, I pray that you'll sweep aside the clouds, open up and let the light shine in that they may see the dream that you have for their lives that it's a good and sweet dream.
Open their eyes and their faith and bring to them dream encouragers that will breathe life and faith on their dream.
I believe you for it. In Jesus name, Amen.
God bless all of you and may all your dreams come true. God bless you.
[00:54:54] Speaker A: You've been listening to the Leader's Notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X @DrMarkRutland or visit his website, drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
