The next thing they did was they betrayed him. They sold him as a slave into Egypt, sold their own brother. They totally betrayed him. One of the paths on the journey to being a man of God, woman of God, is you'll experience criticism and judgement and hatred and people will betray you, so when you've trusted them, they do the dirty on you - which is okay if they were unsaved, you could handle that. It's just they're a Christian, that's what makes it so hard to handle, but that's part of your growth. That's part of your growth, so God in heaven is watching how do you respond when people treat you that way, what comes into your heart, and what comes out of your mouth. How do you respond? Have you got bigness growing in you, or are you going to stay little? Will all it take is someone's criticism to shut you down? What will it take to stop you from pursuing greatness in your life?
So the next thing that happens is, so firstly he had problems in his home. There's always difficulties and challenges in our home life to fulfilling the dream. That's where the first place you experience the problems, so if you're overwhelmed by the issues in your home life, the relationships in your home life, believe me that's the first place to work on yourself, in order to prepare yourself for big things. Anyone who's had teenagers will know there's difficulties - so the next thing that happens is in Egypt, he got sold to Egypt. Egypt is often a picture of the world, a place without Christ, a place of bondage and slavery, a place where people are driven, a place where people are held, slavery, captivity to all kinds of things and here's the thing that happens there.
The first thing that happens, in Genesis 39, Verse 7, is the master's wife starts eyeing him up, so she starts dressing in scanty clothes, and starts persuading him, saying every day, every day, day after day after day, come on, lie with me, come on, let's have sex. My old man will never know. That's what was happening - every day temptation, so here's what will happen to you too, on the path of your dream. There'll be temptations to take you off course. There's always going to be temptation. There'll be some other woman if you're a man come into your life to take you off course; if you're a woman there'll be some man that you get a crush on or whatever. There'll be always something, somewhere, pushing on you to draw you away - and he had the courage to stand up against it and guess what happened. Then, when he stood up against it and refused to fall into temptation, next thing is he's accused falsely of attempted rape on this woman. So false accusation, then the master doesn't even give him a hearing, so no one even hears his side, he doesn't get a fair trial, doesn't get any trial. The master just gets angry and throws him in prison, and now his reputation is totally destroyed. That's pretty hard stuff, but this is the preparation ground of kings.
This was how God prepares kings. You may have had not a dramatic thing like that, but sin and temptation is near the door for every one of us, compromise in some little way, give up, pressure financially, all kinds of areas we face pressures and temptations. Many times when you stand up and do what's right, people will falsely accuse you, and treat you unjustly, and you'll find yourself with your reputation being knocked, and you know what happens when that happens to us? You know what's in every one of us? You want to vindicate yourself, stand up and prove I'm right, you're wrong! Character. If you need to vindicate yourself, you're going to be too small, too small for the job God's got for you, and you have to learn how to let God vindicate you, just walk in integrity. Walk in integrity. Keep your mouth shut, stop trying to defend yourself, learn to just stand fast and trust God in the midst of those kinds of challenges. I've had many of them. You know the hardest thing to do is to keep your mouth shut, when everything in you is screaming to try and defend yourself.