So God leaves obstacles and difficulties, you and I must arise and begin to do things. So Joshua's told meditate in the promises of God, speak the promises of God, hold the promises of God over your life, and begin to do what God calls you to do, and things will happen. See, the Great Commission is a mandate to change the world. It's still in effect by the way. No matter what the world is looking like, the mandate to change the world is still in effect, but here's the thing. Although God's heart is to change the world, it requires we actively co-operate and participate in it. It'll never happen by itself. It actually requires we get into prayer, and we engage the loss in a meaningful way, building relationship to see them drawn, so what do you do when there's delay? When there's a delay you need to look at, what I need to develop in my character. Do I need to develop faith? Do I need to be holding the word of God, meditating in the word of God, speaking the word of God? What is it I need to be doing? Are there areas in my character I need to grow, or do I just need to hang in there until God does this thing?
See, so no dream comes about without perseverance and without doing something. Here's the last one, I'll just cover it quickly and that is disappointment. Disappointment's a major issue in dreams, and I've struggled with this at times. Disappointment is what you expected doesn't happen, or what you didn't expect does happen, and you end up with a very deep grief and pain in your heart. People can disappoint us, life circumstances can disappoint us. You may for example have a dream about your family, and in that dream about your family - you have dreams. I mean all of us have dreams about our kids. We dream about their first day at school, we dream about them going to high school, we dream about them going out and getting a job, we dream about their careers, we dream about them getting engaged, we dream about them having a wonderful wedding day and family. Even if you don't have a concept of it, you do think about those things. Then what happens when you get a teenager who goes on to drugs and all the dreams you had just seem to die? What happens when you have a teenager and they go off the rails, perhaps they're assaulted or there's sexual assault and now their life is broken and damaged, and everything you had hoped for them is suddenly stolen away, and your heart is full of grief and disappointment?
What about you have a child that commits suicide, and you can't understand all the dreams you had for that child are all gone? This is the real world we live in. This is the things that happen, and so often dreams meet with real disappointments in life. Marriage can have it's disappointments, can have disappointments in business and finance, and so life faces us with things that we didn't expect. This is part of life. I love it when everything's going well, but my reality is, there are times it goes well, and times of great disappointment, and if we don't deal with disappointment, it will hold us back, and you lose heart for your dreams. What happens is grief will cause you to lose your dream; grief caused by disappointment causes you to lose your dream, and we don't have to hold onto that. Some of you today will have lost dreams because of grief. In the Bible in Genesis 11, Terah lost his son, and he never resolved the grief, so he walked with Abraham until he got to a place that reminded him of the grief of a lost son, and he just wouldn't budge. He just stayed there and never moved on. Many people in life have a dream, and they get a disappointment, and they get stuck and don't move on. They just lose heart and lock down. You don't have to do that. There are other choices. There are many other choices we can make when dreams fail.
In 1 Samuel 30, David had a dream. He had a dream of being a king. He had men who believed in that dream, and one day he was late getting home and when he got home his house was burned down, his wife and children taken, all his finances taken. He'd had a financial and family collapse in just one day, but not only him, all the men he led experienced the same thing, and now they lost hope because of their grief. It says they wept bitterly, then they wanted to stone David. They wanted to attack the one way, the one person who could get them out of the mess. David strengthened himself in God. If you have a dream - he knew that God had spoken to him, and he would be the king. He held the dream in the face of the deepest setback you could possibly face; you've lost everything that was precious to you, and in the face of that he held the dream. It says he strengthened himself in God. What do you do to deal with disappointments? They do come to all of us. What do you do with it? If you don't do something about it your vision will go, your dream will go.