Paula White

You can trust God to bring it to pass--as long as you don't settle for less than his best.

Many of us are pregnant with a word that God has spoken to us either directly or through someone else. But if we have been carrying the word for a season with no indication that it is about to be birthed, we can become discouraged.

What promise has God proclaimed to you personally? Is it the restoration of your family? A ministry that mends the brokenhearted? Or a business that prospers and produces?

Probably the best advice my mother ever gave me came when I was finishing my senior year of high school. We were in one of those mother-and-daughter heated discussions because I had made some decisions that were breaking her heart. Like a broken record, she had repeated her speech over and over. It went something like this: "You lie in the bed that you make."

Faced with my "Oh, no, here we go again" attitude, my mother was completely frustrated. She blurted out, "You can come in here and fool me, Paula. You can fool your family and your friends, but you'd better be honest with yourself!"

I knew she was right. She had hit a nerve, and eventually, it proved to be the advice that would change my life.

PROCURRING THE PROMISES OF GOD REQUIRES PERSEVERANCE. ARE YOU WILLING TO PRESS THROUGH ADVERSITY TO FULFILL YOUR DESTINY?

Joseph is the perfect example of a man who was pregnant with promise and yet had to walk through the processes, trials and hurts of life to attain his destiny. He was the son of Jacob and Rachel (see Gen. 30:22-24). Because Joseph "was the son of his old age," Jacob loved him more than he did his other children, and he gave him a coat of many colors (Gen. 37:3, NKJV).