WHAT DO DREAMS TELL US?

WHAT DO DREAMS TELL US?

                From time to time I am awakened in the morning by dreams that become the subject that I write about. Usually in my dream I am teaching a crowd with great passion about some subject, some new insight or other. The dream is powerful enough and urgent enough that it wakes me up and so I go and write about it. But these dreams seem to be coming more frequently these days.

                I think the Lord is trying to tell me that I am an old man. After all, in Joel chapter 2 he tells us that in the last day’s old men will dream dreams. Maybe there is a double message there, the other message being that we are in the last of the last days.

                At any rate, my dream was very short this morning. In my dream there was something that the Lord wanted me to let go of and I wouldn’t let go. I left the house and stepped into a hail storm and Bam! I got hit by a piece of hail and the only part of me that got hit by the hail was the one thing that I had not been willing to let go of. Otherwise the hail didn’t hit me.

                Such a short and simplistic dream it was and yet there is a message in it for somebody, I would imagine. I do know this: we are heading into a storm for which most Christians are unprepared. I listened for a while to Paul Begley yesterday. Bonnie and I have listened to him for a number of years because he covers the news from a biblical perspective and we support his ministry because the Lord is using him to win anywhere from 20 to 50 souls a day.

                The Bible tells us that when we help a prophet, we will share in the prophet’s reward and so we sow into a few important ministries that the Lord has put on our hearts. When we get to heaven, we will be surrounded with people whom we have led to the Lord, or encouraged in one way or the other. There will be people coming up to us that we have no idea we affected their lives and they will be thanking us for what we did or said that helped guide them in the right direction.

                I have listened to any number of near death experiences from Christians who were clinically dead, but revived by doctors or by someone praying for them. As they entered heaven, a crowd of people met them made up of those friends, loved ones and others that they had helped bring to the Lord. In most cases they did not want to come back from that glorious place, but the Lord sent them back because He had something important for them yet to do on earth.

                I like to think of these as the great cloud of witnesses that Hebrews 12:1 says surrounds us.

                Paul experienced heaven at one time, and I suspect that it was at that point in Lystra when the people there took him out and stoned him and left him for dead. Whatever the case may be he had this to say: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain. But if I am to live on in the flesh, this will mean fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which to choose. But I am hard-pressed from both directions, having the desire to depart and be with Christ for that is very much better; yet to remain on in the flesh is more necessary for your sake.” Phil. 1:21-21

                Whatever Paul’s experiences were it changed his perspective for in spite of his impressive list of credentials he said: “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that , I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish in order that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Then Paul goes on to say that forgetting what lies behind I press on towards the goal of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Phil. 3:7-11, 14, 15

                Our lives are like a book full of things both good and bad. We can keep reading its pages over and over again clinging to things that we don’t want to let go of, or we can close the book and put it all, the good and the bad, under the blood of Christ’s forgiveness and we  can move ahead toward the goal of our high calling in Christ Jesus.

                As for me, I am learning to be faithful to those dreams that the Lord gives me. He knows better than I do what people need to hear. I do know this, we are entering into a new era and we have never passed this way before. Jesus told us that it would be a time such as we have not seen since there was a nation on this earth so great will it be and the interesting thing is that Paul Begley, who used to be an ardent preacher of the pre trib rapture has become like many other prophecy preachers.

                He is beginning to qualify his rapture statements and to warn us that we really have no idea how much we will have to go through before the rapture happens. We are headed deep into tribulation territory and the Lord is telling us to unload our baggage and to press forward to our high calling in Jesus Christ. We don’t know the day or the hour of His coming and even if there is a pre-trib rapture, we have no idea how many birth pangs we will have to endure before He comes. After all, Jesus calls many of the things in Mt. 24 “the beginning of sorrows. In other words, we need to toughen up and to prepare for persecution because it is coming and persecution is one of those things listed in the beginning of sorrows. Christians throughout time have had to suffer for their faith and we are no exception.

                It is evident that people in other lands are experiencing tribulation right now and millions have died for their faith already… now in our time. So we hope for the best, but we prepare for the worst and if times are going to get tough, we don’t want to be carrying a lot of baggage simply because we are unwilling to let go of it in the blood of Jesus.

                It was for freedom that Christ has set us free. Let us not remain victims of the yoke of slavery that this world has placed upon us. Even our own sins and mistakes can be lost in the blood of Jesus and we can yet run the race without chains. Selah.