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The story lends itself to a bunch of creative titles. Unfortunately I came up with too many. I could have called this message:

Never trust a skinny cow.

Not now brown cow!

A trial of another kine.

A kine dream

Cow Cannibals

Corn gone bad

Read it and wheat

Don't dream like an Egyptian

etc...

The titles were getting worse, so I decided to stop and simplify it!

{Explain story of Pharaoh's dream and the circumstances that were at work in it. Explain what happened in context with the story.}

For God to have recorded this dream in scripture, there must be something else besides history in it. The scripture says that ALL scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine and exhortation (2 Timothy 3:16). There is a tremendous message from God in this story for even us today! Let's look at what Pharaoh's dream teaches us:

The application is this: Everybody's life is going to have good things and bad things, even if you live for God. The wise man said it best:

The Message puts it like this:

Jesus told us to be good to our enemies so:

You live in a sinful world and are going to have both good and evil in your life and God has caused both to set against each other. That means that in your river of life, the dream of Pharaoh will repeat; you will have fat cows come up out of it and skinny cows come out of it. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people sometimes. That's just life.

Pharaoh did not serve the God of Joseph. He was an idolater and yet even in his life God brought forth equal amounts of good and bad. There were seven cows of each. Even without God and before you knew Him, I'm here to tell you that as much as may have gone wrong in your life, there is the same amount of things that went right. Think of the scripture that said it rained on the just and the unjust as a promise! In time, all things equal out in this world. But this brings us to the next lesson of Pharaoh's dream:

For some people, they always focus on the bad and the skinny and they let the skinny consume the fat. They let the bad eat away the good. They let the bad in their life magnify in their life so that it devours all the good that has been done. And such thinking is dangerous because it means you are thinking like an Egyptian, who were ungodly.

Pharaoh's dream teaches us about the nature of the bad things that happen in your life. The negative in your life is a devourer. It wants to consume all of you and get you to focus on nothing else but it! And so people who are always depressed or always down or always defeated or always viewing the negative are letting the skinny eat the fat! They are letting the bad devour the good. We must be realistic but within all of us is the tendency to make it worse than it really is. And some people allow themselves to focus on the negative so much that the good that they have experienced is totally consumed. Unfortunately, I've seen Christians with this same attitude at times:

I've seen people get the Holy Ghost and then go through a little persecution and get so focused on the persecution that they allow it to devour the joy of the Holy Ghost in their life!

I've seen people get a fantastic healing and miracle and then get discouraged over a little fever that takes a few days to die off and focus on it so much that they allow their one small thing that God didn't instantly heal devour their rejoicing and testimony of the tremendous miracle that God did.

I've seen people get awesome blessings in church and in prayer and go through a few months of dry time and they are ready to write off God as gone. They let their dry spell devour the tremendous rain of the Holy Ghost in their lives.

I've seen people so on fire for God one week and let just a few bad days of life devour their fire so much that they don't know if they are going to make it.

I've seen people that God wonderfully worked out tremendous situation get discouraged because of a situation that wasn't clear-cut how it was going to work out and focus on that situation and worry about it and magnify it until it had consumed all of their faith in the ability of God to work out the impossible.

Now what changed? What happened? The Bible says that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). Jesus has not changed, but what has happened is that they have let the skinny eat the fat, the good has been devoured by the bad. They have allowed their blessing to be devoured by the negative! They fed the devourer! They willingly fed the skinny cows.

The bad thing about magnifying the negative and feeding the skinny cows in your life, is that they will completely consume the good things and the joy and leave with you nothing. In the dream, the skinny ate the fat and yet you could not even tell that the skinny had eaten anything! They were still lean and bad and starving. The good was gone and yet the bad remained.

Bitterness is a side effect of people allowing the bad to consume the good in their lives. When people only see the bad and allow themselves to get bitter, it is proof that they have allowed the goodness to be consumed by the bad. The choice is yours. Bitterness and unforgiveness is a choice that you make. And it can go either way. You can choose to get bitter or you can choose to get better. There has been equal amounts of good and bad in everyone's life, the difference is that some people allow the bad to devour the good. We tend to forget the good things that happen and yet can recall with vivid detail the bad. We've got to guard against the devouring nature of the bad by dwelling on good things. You do that by obeying the teaching of the Apostle Paul:

Make up in your mind that you will learn to dwell on the positives and quick to forget the negatives. It's goes against your nature. It goes against Pharaoh's dream, but that's what we want, life's too short to allow the skinny to eat the fat in our life!

What else can we learn from Pharaoh's dream?

The issue in Pharaoh's time wasn't really the cows, but the grass that the cows ate. In Egypt it hardly ever rains and for irrigation, they are dependent upon the Nile river to overflow and water the ground. The seven fat cows represented seven years of healthy and abundant grass and the seven skinny cows a time of drought. In other words, the issue was the Nile river. For seven years, the Nile that was so trusted by the Egyptians to the point that they worshipped it, was going to let the Egyptians down sorely. The same is true of the ears of wheat. The issue was that the Nile river wasn't going to irrigate as it should for seven years and would thus cause a great famine.

I don't know what you put your trust in, but all of us have something or somebody that we have complete and total trust. All of us -- whether we care to admit it or not -- have a spiritual Nile in our life. And I'm here to tell you that your Nile will let you down. The reason that Jesus Christ allows bad things to happen to good people is to remind us that we must love our enemies and do good to those who spitefully use us. But it is also to remind us that we should only trust in Him! He is the only unchanging thing! And so at one time or another, everything except Jesus Christ is going to fail you. The ministry will fail you. The church people are going to fail you. The boss is going to fail you. Your friend is going to fail you. Your money is going to fail you. Your self-confidence and ability is going to fail you. Why? Because God is reminding you that you cannot put your trust in those things. He is the only thing that never changes and He is always the same and always merciful and always loving and always right and always all-powerful!

The next time you find yourself in a bad situation or hurt by someone that you trusted the most, you ought to rejoice and realize the situation for what it is: God teaching you that only He can be trusted! And so take the moment to thank Him for His perfectness! Take the moment and confuse the devil by celebrating God's faithfulness when your Nile has failed! You can rejoice even in bad times and lean moments if you remember that it is proof that God is faithful and is a reminder that He will never leave you nor forsake you! He is the friend that sticketh closer than a brother! Your hurt is just a reminder that you can lean on Him and trust Him completely! My God will never let you down!

Let's move on to the most important lesson of Pharaoh's dream:

In Pharaoh's dream, the skinny ate the good. But in real life, Joseph -- a man who believed in God and doing things His way -- got involved and actually reversed the nightmare! When a Godly man realized what was going on and began to fight against the devourer, he was able to reverse the result and cause the skinny cows to be eaten by the fat and rich! The bad was swallowed up by the good!

You need to realize that there are many things that are devourers trying to consume the goodness and blessings of God in your life.

1. Life is a devourer. If you do not do things God's way, then God will let life come against you and devour the blessings of God. Look at a portion of scripture with me:

Tithes and Offering are more than just a scriptural principle, but in Old Testament times, it was a sacrificial offering to God. When you give according to the financial plan of God, you are worshipping! It is worship! So the way to get the devourer stopped in your life is to be faithful with your worship! That goes for tithes and offering but it also goes for other forms of worship and sacrifice such as our "sacrifice of praise" and the "living sacrifice of a holy body."

Some of you were wondering at the beginning of this message that if it rains on the just and the unjust, then what is the benefit of living for God? The benefit is that when you live and worship God's way, God begins to open up windows in heaven and you begin to receive blessings that the heathen doesn't receive. He also rebukes the devourer in your life. Money goes further. Your family begins to be put back together. Life becomes fulfilling so much that it's easy to let the good consume the bad that happens to come along! Studying the Bible and obeying it is not a pointless and boring exercise, because the closer that I get to God's Ways, the more the devourer of life is rebuked in my life!

2. Our mouth is a devourer

Did you notice that the skinny cows consumed the fat with their mouths in Pharaoh's dream? It's true: the bad consuming the good always begins with what we say!

We must guard our mouth. The reason that the bad in people's life devours the good so much is that they dwell and talk about the bad that has happened to them to everybody that the meet. If something good happens, they may testify about it at church but they aren't going to tell everybody. They have rehashed the bad so much that it begins to grow and begins to eat away at their faith and their blessings.

I've had to learn the hard way that the more you retell something the more engrained that it becomes. Usually when someone is having trouble "letting something go" or getting past something, it's because they have retold it and talked and talked about it so much that it has become permanently imbedded in their psyche. Remember that every time you open your mouth in negativity, you are allowing the skinny cows to take another bite!

Remember the potent words of James:

In other words, if you continue to gossip and to say whatever you feel without trying to control it and to spout off and sin with your mouth, it will consume and devour even the most religious experience and the most Godly lifestyle!

3. Hypocrites are devourers

4. The Devil is a devourer

The devil wants to devour our children, both physically and spiritually. We must guard against the devourer in these areas!

In the chapter, the child was Jesus Christ. The devil wants to consume Jesus out of our lives. He will do it through any means possible. We must guard our mouth, attitudes, worship, lifestyles, and priorities from being used by Satan to devour Jesus in our life. It only takes a Godly man or woman to stand against the devourer to reverse Pharaoh's dream in your life! As for me, I will choose to let the child live!