Now of course what happens is, the stuff that gets in your thoughts, in your soul, and your emotions, can shut down your spirit; so you have a spirit. You have the Holy Ghost inside you. You can speak in tongues. You can activate the gift of God. You can active your spirit man, and stir up your gift, so God begins to flow through you; and when you do that, the gifts start to flow. Gifts are not for you, they're for someone else, so in order for the gifts to flow, you have to stir yourself up and be committed to helping other people. In the midst of the prison, he learned to stir up the gift of God. It was his prophetic gift that got him into trouble in the first place, and now his prophetic gift is the very thing that will get him out of prison.
It was his prophetic gift that got him in there, it was his prophetic gift got him out of it. So if you let the gift of God shut down in you in the midst of difficult experiences, how will you get out of those difficult experiences? Because you need the flow of God's presence, and the flow of His power, to get out; so the thing is, when he rose up and he began to help people, he began to help people with his gift, he began to serve them with his gift, and the gift of God flowed; he began to interpret the dreams of this guy, interpret the dreams of that guy, both the guys got out of prison, and eventually one of them remembered; a situation came, and he was called on to exercise his gift. Imagine missing your moment because the time - suppose the king just suddenly said: okay boy, I hear you can interpret dreams, come and tell me what my dream is. Ooh, oh well I've been in prison, you can't expect me to do much. That was the place to be learning to stir your gift. Hey, what are you doing in your difficult time? Are you stirring the gifts? When was the last time you prophesied? When was the last time you heard a word of God? When was the last time you felt God flow through you? When was the last time you heard God speak clearly, something to encourage someone?
See. Stir up the gifts of God. Don't wait until you feel something. You've just got to stir them up anyway, it's stirring your faith, declaring the word of God. Here's another thing; you need to hold on and believe for a better future. You need to hold on in faith, and believe God your future's going to be good. The Bible says in Psalm 105: until the time His word came, the word of the Lord tried him. In other words, he held on to God's word in the face of difficult circumstances; and what the trial was was this - my circumstances disagree with what I believe. I believe I'm going to rise and be a leader, but what I'm seeing is different; and how do I handle what I feel, when what I see is so different to what God told me? At that point, many people quit, they give up. They say, what I'm experiencing is so different to what God told me, I can't ever believe that God's going to come through. I must have been dreaming, I must have been crazy - and you lose the word of God. You have to believe that tomorrow will be better than today, that for you: I know the plans that the Lord has for you. He says: I know the plans I have for you - Jeremiah 29 - plans for good, not evil, to give you a great future. Your future is great from God's point of view. It may not be from your point of view. Well, there's a recession. Well God's not worried about recessions. He uses them too. There was a great recession in Joseph's day, and God used Joseph to deal with the whole thing.