Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I'm Candace Long with Lessons in the Ladder Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we're living in. Today's topic highlights one of the major signs that we are living in the very end of days. It's called When God Speaks in a Dream. If you are having vivid dreams and wonder what's going on, what on earth is God saying? I want to share seven things that you need to know about the significance of a God dream.

Number one: God is fulfilling biblical prophecy about the end of days. In the second chapter of Acts, the Holy Spirit has just been poured out on the apostles and believers that were gathered in Jerusalem after Jesus rose from the dead. Suddenly, a rush of wind and tongues of fire came upon them, and they began speaking in a language they did not understand. Peter stood up to explain what was happening and quoted what the Old Testament prophet Joel wrote about this time.

He said, "In the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams." This is that time, and God is speaking to people all over the world in a whole new way. Why? To signal the end of days is at hand and to get ready for what lies ahead.

Number two: God is teaching you His language of pictures. Hearing God in a whole different way can be unsettling, but you need to understand that dreams and visions are God's language, and they are very biblical. The word dream in Hebrew is the word chalam, and it means to cause to dream. It is not something that we can make happen, that we can do ourselves. This is something that is done to us.

Did you know that dreams and visions comprise a third of Scripture? There are 224 references to them, and every major turning point in the history of God's dealing with His people involved dreams. Let me give you just a few examples. Through a dream, God told Abraham that his descendants would go into captivity for 400 years. God told Joseph in a dream how to acquire wealth from his father-in-law Laban.

He told one Joseph in a dream that he would one day rule over his brothers, and He told another Joseph to take Mary as his wife. Through a vision, God told Peter not to treat Gentiles as unclean, that He was to be their God too. He directed Paul to Macedonia through a vision, and the entire book of Revelation was a vision given to the Apostle John.

Dreams and visions are God's metaphorical language that can communicate to people in any nation, in any language, to a small child or to a genius. That's why God speaks in pictures. Number three: Dreams are a unique way that God trains His people to hear Him. In the book of Numbers, chapter 12, the Lord called Miriam, Aaron, and Moses aside to tell them something very important. Here's what we read in God's word.

Guest (Male): And the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud and stood at the door of the tent and called Aaron and Miriam, and they both came forward. And he said, "Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, make myself known to him in a vision; I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses. He is entrusted with all of my house.

With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in dark speech, and he beholds the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?" And the anger of the Lord was kindled against them, and when the cloud removed from over the tent, behold, Miriam was leprous, as white as snow.

Candace Long: Now there are a lot of lessons in this one passage alone, but a few things need to be pointed out here. First, dreams are God's language, and He uses dreams to communicate with those that He is training to speak for Him. Now sadly, many Christians believe that we don't have prophets today, but this isn't the time to debate that topic. Let me simply say that if God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, has He stopped communicating in dreams?

Jesus said in John 16, "I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now." Now does our Lord have nothing to say to us by way of instruction, or warning, or direction during the most critical time in all of history, the time right before the kingdom? A second thing I want you to notice is that God told Miriam and Aaron that He speaks to prophets in one of five ways.

He speaks to them in a dream, a vision, in dark speech, which in Hebrew means a puzzle. He speaks mouth to mouth or face to face. Five ways. Jesus often spoke in parables, in dark sayings filled with symbols and analogies. Now if you think about it, this means of communication is very eastern. You see, we Westerners speak assertively and often in-your-face, just tell it like it is, whereas people in the Far East speak indirectly.

Discourse to them is more polite and waits to be received by the listener. In like manner, our Lord often speaks to us in symbols and visual pictures, waiting for us to ask for more. But you need to know that He will never say in a dream something that is contrary to what He has already revealed in His word.

Guest (Female): Our early church fathers highly regarded the belief that God speaks in dreams. Polycarp was the Bishop of Smyrna and a disciple of the Apostle John. He dreamed that he would be killed in Rome, and he was, and God prepared him for that. I want to remind you that one of the jobs of the Holy Spirit is to tell us the things to come. Tertullian wrote, "Almost the greater part of mankind derive their knowledge of God from dreams."

Cyprian, who was the Bishop of Carthage in AD 258, used his dreams to gain practical guidance in making daily decisions. Augustine listed several of his dreams in his writings and declared they were an important way in which God spoke to mankind. And Jerome, who ended up translating the Latin Bible, was converted to Christianity as a secular scholar by a dream.

And then came Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who maintained that anything not tangible and logical is irrelevant. This dark Hellenistic mindset plunged the Western world into darkness, and we turned a deaf ear to God's revelatory voice. We no longer valued or invited the Lord God to speak to us in any other way than our religious minds told us was logical and reasonable. And that influence, sadly, is still very strong in the church. Kings of every nation once searched the world over to find men and women gifted in hearing from God and interpreting their dreams.

Candace Long: Number four: God uses dreams to reveal ideas the world needs. Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity using only a pencil and a piece of paper because he was inspired by a dream. He was wired to hear a fundamental, God-inspired universal law of how the world works. Elias Howe invented the sewing machine because he saw it in a dream. Handel wrote The Messiah from music he heard in a dream.

And I especially love the story of Sarah Breedlove, who had a dream that changed her life and the lives of millions of African American women. She had been crying out to God because her hair was falling out. And one night in a dream, God showed her a formula made of ingredients that came from Africa. So she saved up some money and sent for those ingredients, mixed them up, and put them on her hair.

The results were so extraordinary that she began selling it. She became known as Madam C.J. Walker, and her God-inspired idea resulted in a hair dressing formula that revolutionized the hair care industry for women of color and employed thousands of people.

Guest (Male): Napoleon Hill lived in the early 1990s and wrote the best-selling book Think and Grow Rich. He was commissioned by the late Andrew Carnegie to interview the most successful people in the country at the time and develop the science of success. People like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and countless others over a 20-year period.

He discovered that all of these successful idea people viewed the ideas that they were given with reverence, knowing they came from a divine source. He tells a story about R.G. LeTourneau, whose engineering feats were legendary, even though the man had little formal education. Earlier in his career, a business venture subcontracting the Hoover Dam ran into an unexpected layer of rock, and LeTourneau went broke fulfilling his end of the contract.

But Napoleon Hill wrote that instead of brooding over his loss, LeTourneau prayed and thanked God that he still had a sound body, a strong pair of hands, and a brain that could think. Hill spent time with LeTourneau, who by this time had developed into a gifted inspirational speaker. On one trip in his private plane, LeTourneau went to sleep soon after his pilot took off.

After about 30 minutes, Hill saw him take a little notebook from his pocket and write several lines in it. When the plane landed, Hill asked him if he remembered writing something down, and he did not. Immediately, LeTourneau pulled the notebook from his pocket and looked at it and said, "Here it is! I've been looking for this for several months. Here's the answer to a problem that has kept me from completing a machine that we are working on."

Candace Long: Number five: God uses dreams to direct our steps. I remember reading a newsletter from Steve Douglas, president of the evangelistic organization Cru, who reported the following story from one of their area leaders in the Middle East and North Africa. And here's what the leader wrote: "I was on a trip debriefing with staff who crisscrossed the country sharing the gospel."

"They were on their way to a village they had never been to, trusting that they would have an opportunity to share God's love with the people. They lost their way and could not find the village and stopped in the middle of nowhere to regroup and decide which way to head next. Out of a nearby group of trees, they saw a man approaching their car, and they thought it was strange because, to their knowledge, they were miles from any village."

"As the man came closer, he became more and more excited, waving his hands and yelling, and our staff in the car became a bit concerned because he was acting crazy. As the man got closer, they heard him yell, 'You are them! You are the men in my dream! Can you tell me the truth?'" They found out that several evenings before, the man had had a dream in which he had seen some men that he was told would bring him the truth.

He left his home in search of these men, and the reason he became so excited as he approached the staff in the car is that he recognized them as the men in his dream. So they took the man back to his village, where he owned the local tea house where all the men in the village gather. That evening, they were able to share the Jesus film both in the tea house and later in the man's home. It was a story right out of the book of Acts. He and his household made decisions for Christ that evening.

Now this story is not an isolated incident, but what do we make of it? Theologically and doctrinally, we might say, "Oh yes, God can speak to us in many ways," but what happens when He does something completely out there and speaks to you in a dream? Number six: God uses dreams to plant seeds of destiny in your spirit. In Genesis 37, we read about Joseph who was given a dream when he was just 17.

In the dream, his brothers all bowed down to him. Now sadly, he made the mistake of telling his brothers, and that landed him in a pit and he was sold into slavery for years and years. But that dream was an important seed that God planted inside the young man, to sustain him with hope that one day God would lift him into the leadership position he was destined to have.

Guest (Male): Once I was speaking to a woman who had been a dedicated Christian for many years. She was a dyed-in-the-wool Baptist and she said, "I don't know what's going on. I'm having very vivid dreams almost every night. I know God may be speaking to me, but I don't know what He's saying." As she and I talked, I shared with her some of the Hebraic principles of dream interpretation that the Lord had been teaching me since 2002.

Sadly, we rarely hear these principles in churches. As I listened to her dream and broke it out using these principles, she knew in her spirit what God was saying to her and how He wanted to use her in these last days. She was blown away by hearing the voice of God coming to her in a visual, metaphorical language that He personalized just for her.

And number seven: God uses dreams to train certain ones that He has called to be able to hear Him through the dark days ahead. This training, though, may be unsettling. You see, God loves to tear up the box that we have put Him in by speaking in a whole new way. In the mid-1990s, Jack Deere was a respected professor of theology at Dallas Theological Seminary. That meant his specialty was the study of God.

He knew all about God, or so he thought. One day he was invited to come to Kansas City and meet what was described to him as real prophets like in biblical times. His theology did not allow him to accept that there were people able to hear from God like Samuel and Elijah did. Let me share this encounter in Jack Deere's own words from his book, The Gift of Prophecy.

"That morning when my wife Lisa and I arrived at the church, we were led into a little room with green carpet and orange plastic chairs arranged in a circle. Five friends had come with us. They wanted to encounter God; I wanted to evaluate men. Our host and four new faces were waiting for us. The first of those new faces met me at the door. He was a six-footer with an athletic build, dressed as if he had just walked out of an Eddie Bauer catalog."

"His face, though, was the kind of face you would expect to see on someone more at home in a camel hair tunic and sandals. He had longish graying hair, a salt and pepper beard, and disturbing, deep-set eyes. And then he spoke. 'Oh, I didn't expect to see you here this morning.' Pretty cocky, I thought. Already I did not like him. 'What do you mean? I don't even know you,' I said."

"'Well, I know you. It was eight nights ago. I had a dream. I woke up at three in the morning. I thought it was important, so I wrote it down. You were in the dream. Would you like me to tell you what the Lord showed me about you?' 'Yes' is what I said. What I thought was, 'Try me. Take your best shot. I'm not going to be deceived. I've been warned about you prophets.'"

"So we took our seats in the circle. I knew about cold reading, a skill used by gamblers and palm readers and probably by false prophets as well. So by careful observation of your clothing, expressions, and mannerisms, skilled people can read you without knowing you. So on this morning, I knew that no matter how skilled in the art of deception this guy might be, I would give him no signs to read. I hardened my face like stone."

"He said in a soft Southern accent, 'You have a prayer, but it's more than a prayer. It's one of the major dreams of your heart.' And then he told me the prayer I had prayed that very morning in the hotel. It was a prayer I prayed almost every morning, and he was right. It was the dream of my heart. The man said, 'God said to tell you that this dream is from Him, and you will get what you're asking for.'"

Jack Deere continued his story by writing, "My eyes remained placid, not a flicker of joy. He was getting no clues from me, but inside my heart was exploding with joy. I had not cried since I was 12 years old. It took a superhuman effort not to cry now. Until that moment, I had never understood the expression tears of joy. How could I be so special to God that He would put such a dream in my heart and then tell me He would make it happen?"

Candace Long: Throughout his book and several more, theology professor Jack Deere explained how his life was interrupted and forever changed by hearing the revelatory voice of God in a way that pierced into his very being. God interrupted my life with dreams after I had undergone a personal and financial crisis. I share it in the episode, When Life Falls Apart.

But like Jack Deere, I had put God in a box, and God smashed the box. Beginning in January of 2002, He began to flood my mind with vivid dreams almost every night. I didn't know what was happening. At that time, I had walked with the Lord for over 30 years and was very comfortable hearing God in a certain way, certainly not in dreams. I recall one particular dream where there were two dead cats floating in my toilet. One was full grown and the other appeared stillborn.

The water was swirling around in the toilet because I was flushing them away. And just as they were about to vanish down the toilet bowl, the larger cat's head lifted up. I was startled. Oh my goodness, it's not dead! Some weeks passed, and I was playing the piano, which often helps me release feelings that need expression. Suddenly, in the midst of one particular song, the image of the cat swirling around the toilet flashed in my mind, and the Lord spoke to my spirit.

He said, "You thought your music was dead, and you were ready to flush it out of your life. But look at it: It is still alive." God used a dream, a visual image, to say something very personal to me. He was saying, "Don't give up. Your music is not dead." This is a time for you to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what God purposed for your life. He has one for you, you know.

I once heard an insightful statistic that 85% of your dreams have to do with you, your calling. It has never been more important for you to understand the gifts and talents that God gave you to make a difference in this world, since we are so close to the kingdom. We need to use every bit of time we have doing what the Father put inside of us to do. I don't know about you, but the words that I most want to hear from Him is, "Well done."

If you'd like to refer this program and this series to others, you'll find it under my podcasts on my resources page at candacelong.com. My desire is to encourage you that this is your finest hour, and God may use a dream to seal it inside your spirit. I'm Candace Long. Thank you so much for taking your time and being with me today for Lessons in the Ladder Days. God bless.