My Battle My Dream by Apostle Johnson Suleman: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Scripture Foundation

The reading is taken from three portions. Genesis 37:5 and Genesis 37:9: Joseph dreamed a dream and told it to his brethren, and they hated him yet the more. This was the second dream, so the hatred recorded here was already a repeat, meaning they had hated him before the second dream came. Genesis 41:46: Joseph was thirty years old when he stood before Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Genesis 42:6: Joseph was governor over the land, and his brethren came and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the earth.

If a man will not bow in Israel, he will bow in Egypt. He must bow somewhere.

How God Makes a Man

A dream is a divine impression of your future — an imprint of the celestial upon the terrestrial concerning a destination. When God imprints a dream, that dream naturally attracts conflict. Every great destiny attracts conflict.

Job 1:3 records that Job was the greatest man in all the east. By Job 42:12 and Job 42:16, after his process, Job became the greatest man in all the earth. To move him from being the greatest in the east to the greatest in the earth, God took him through a process. He lost the four most valuable things that matter to a man:

• His wealth — his investment, lost in one day
• His health
• His honor — he was not just broke, he was struck down; he was stranded
• The final touch of his family — his children

The reason God left Job's wife was not cruelty. If she had been in agreement with him, two could have agreed as touching a matter and it would have bounced back quickly, but she disqualified herself by telling him to curse God and die.

Legacy Beyond a Lifetime

After the process, Job lived a hundred and forty more years and saw his sons to the fourth generation — a man they thought was almost dead lived to see his children's children's children.

Someone once explained a personal policy: whatever money his own children have, they should simply enjoy it — they owe no contribution toward their grandchildren's education, because provision has already been kept aside for that. Money is not given to be spent. It is given to be sent. The value of money is not what you acquire with it, but what you send it for.

When Affliction Is Working for You

2 Corinthians 4:17-18 says this affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. Affliction can be working for you even while you are stranded, even while you are going through challenge and struggle.

Deuteronomy 8:2 explains why: God allowed Israel to go through the wilderness that He might prove them, to know what was in their heart. When God wants to reveal the content of a man's heart, He allows a shaking.

Job's only distinction through his entire crisis was this — in all of it, Job did not sin, despite what he lost. That was all God wanted.

If a person wants to be purely logical, leave the Christian faith, because there are things God does or permits that will not make sense to reason alone.

When God's Instruction Doesn't Make Sense

God may not make sense, but He will make signs and wonders.

In one church's emergency section reserved for the critically ill and afflicted, an encounter with a group of chained, mentally afflicted people led to an unusual instruction — to dance among them, without music. Two of them began pointing, laughing, and joined the dancing; when the instruction changed to prayer instead, deliverance followed for the rest.

How do you tell soldiers to shout? Soldiers are trained to shoot, not shout — you can get a choir to shout, not soldiers. Yet God said shout, and as they shouted, the walls came down.

The Meaning of the Dream

Joseph told his brothers, "I saw the moon and the sun and the eleven stars bowing down." The moon is the reflection of light; the sun is the source. The moon represents God the Father, in whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning. The sun represents Jesus, the Son of Righteousness. When Joseph said he saw the moon and the sun in agreement with his dream, he meant God and Jesus were both in agreement with what he had seen. If God agrees and Jesus supports a matter, no opposition can overturn it.

There is a stamp on God's plan for your life. There is something God has said about your family, your home, your children, and there is a seal on it — that authority belongs to God alone.

The Letter P — Your Problem Is Your Promotion

Joseph went through the pit, the prison, and Potiphar's house. Every major turning point in his story began with the letter P, and each one felt like a trigger of pain — until it became clear that the letter P also stood for Prime Minister, Palace, and Pharaoh, the very things that made him governor.

Your problem may actually be your promotion in disguise. Before a man is buoyant, he will often first pass through what looks like bankruptcy. If you are financially struggling right now, or delayed in marriage, it can be a sign that something greater is being formed. Everything God intends to do in a man's life will often first make him pass through the opposite of it.

Learning to Pay the Price

Growing up in a wealthy home with drivers, cooks, and food always available made fasting an enormous struggle later, when the call of God came. The first attempt at a fast barely lasted until nine in the morning before it broke. Every subsequent attempt was a fight against a mindset shaped by never having known lack — including one attempt to fast for two full days that ended after only thirteen minutes, and another attempt, inspired by watching Benny Hinn on television, that ended with friends being begged to unlock the door before the fast was complete.

Hunger has five levels:

1. Rumbling — the stomach simply rumbles; this is the beginner's stage
2. Pangs — a sharper, more insistent discomfort
3. Seeing things — a prophetic level, where perception itself is affected, as with the man who saw men as trees walking

Whatever you intend to master, you must first come under its discipline. Three hours of prayer, or three days of fasting, is not something to boast over — it is only preparation to begin learning how to fast and pray at all.

The First Battle of a Dream: Discouragement

Every battle Joseph passed through was ultimately aimed at one thing — discouragement. This is the first weapon Satan uses against a dream.

Discouragement is when your zeal is quieted and your spirit is depressed, when you no longer see a reason to keep going. Depression is the departure of enthusiasm — when you become dispirited, disheartened, emasculated, and deterred.

Joshua 1:9 told Joshua that though many things would be given to him, he needed above all to be strong and of good courage. Courage is not the absence of trial but resilience in the midst of trial. Great men are not naturally men of might — they are men of courage, men who refuse to give up even when the odds are against them.

It was understandable that Joseph, in prison, could have said, "Lord, this is not what You showed me." But he went on.

Job's own friends, throughout their speeches, kept circling back to the idea that his suffering must be the result of some hidden sin he needed to confess. In Ezekiel, God told Ezekiel that by the next day He would take from him one who was pleasant to his eyes and dear to him — his wife — and instructed him not to mourn openly, not to weep, but to put on his attire, anoint himself, and carry on as though attending a normal function.

When David faced Goliath, his confidence was not in his own strength but in his testimony: the God who delivered him from the lion and the bear, when he kept his father's flocks, would deliver him from the Philistine. The lion and the bear were preparation. Courage does not appear from nowhere — it is built through the very experiences that felt like unnecessary trials at the time.

The Second Battle of a Dream: Delay

When the devil sees a man who is relentless, aggressive toward his purpose, and unwilling to give up, he does one of two things: he corrupts the achievement, or he delays it.

If he cannot stop a destiny outright, he tries to corrupt it — leading a person into a relationship, a compromise, or a mistake that leaves lasting scars and regret, even if the destiny itself cannot ultimately be destroyed. Where he cannot corrupt, he delays.

Genesis 15:13 stated that Israel would be in bondage four hundred years. Exodus 12:40 records that they were actually there four hundred and thirty years — thirty years added by the enemy. Thirty years is long enough for a boy to become a man, for a child to become a woman, for someone to go from kindergarten to a doctorate. That is what delay can steal from a destiny.

The bondage in Egypt was not merely a political or legislative problem — it had a spiritual root in the magicians of Egypt, who mimicked every sign Moses performed, hardening Pharaoh's resolve. Pharaoh himself was worshipped as a god in Egypt's pantheon, which is why God told Moses in Exodus 7:1 that He would make him a god to Pharaoh. Pharaoh's daughter going to the river was not for bathing — better facilities existed in the palace — but to worship the river goddess, which is where she found Moses and named him for the fact that the water had given him to her.

Fighting for What Has Already Been Spoken

Acts 16:1 describes Timothy as the son of a Greek father and a Jewish mother — in biblical classification, the Greeks represented those far from God, while the Jews represented the people of God. When a father's altar contends against a mother's prayer, when patterns from one bloodline oppose the declarations of the other, a warfare results. That is why Paul charged Timothy, in 1 Timothy 1:18, concerning the prophecies that went before him, that by them he should war a good warfare — war with the prophecies, war with the declarations already made over his life. There is a contest, a battle, an intercession that must be made in this world to see spoken words come to pass on time.

Delay Is Not Denial

Some common Christian clichés need re-examining, including the saying that delay is not denial. It is not always true. Moses delayed on the mountain, and Israel made a golden calf and worshipped strange gods, and thousands died as a result. To them, that delay became denial. The downfall of a man is not the end of his life — it depends entirely on where he is falling from.

The number of your days you shall fulfill. There are people bound by delay who will be released, and this generation will not bury its children.

What Delay Actually Is

Delay is a stretch in time between expectation and manifestation — a pause, an extended pace. When a movie scene grows boring, the instinct is to reach for the remote and fast-forward to what is ahead. God does the same for a life caught in delay, though the process of being fast-forwarded, like a sped-up scene, often looks shaky and strange while it is happening.

To score a goal, the ball must be kicked into the net. Sometimes God kicks a person into their place of purpose — as He kicked Joseph out of Israel into Egypt — and a kick is painful. But timing matters: kicking a ball into an empty net when no match is on is not a goal. It is only a goal when the match is on, when relevance is being felt in the moment it counts.

Testimony: A Short Prayer, a Swift Answer

A man came to church carrying a heavy file, owed a large sum of money by the Ministry of Defense for years. He wanted to narrate the entire history of his case before receiving prayer. After listening politely without absorbing the long narration, a short prayer was offered instead — releasing the funds in Jesus' name — leaving the man confused that the prayer had been so brief. He left frustrated.

On a flight out of Benin City afterward, he noticed an elderly man struggling to walk and offered to help him — giving up his own seat for the elderly man's business-class seat, retrieving his luggage, and walking him down the stairs after landing. In gratitude, the elderly man wrote a note on an old card and told him to present it to "anybody." Doubtful of its worth, the man kept the old card until, out of desperation, he showed it to a ministry official — and it turned out the elderly stranger he had helped was the elder brother of the sitting president. The debt that had taken thirteen years to accumulate was resolved within a short while of that encounter, just as it took Esther only three days to reverse a plot that had taken Haman far longer to build.

It will not take God a lifetime to restore what Satan stole across a lifetime. It will take Him a short while.

Closing Declaration

• Lord, I refuse to be discouraged.
• Lord, I refuse to be delayed.