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A Dream Interpretation Journey
<page 11>One of the reasons I encourage people to read Exploring the World of Dreams is that it carefully lays out cautions we should take while interpreting dreams.[8] It is easy to make mistakes.
Be humble. Be cautious. Don’t be hasty. A dream may not be from God, or your interpretations may be wrong. Judge by the written word of God. Submit to godly authority.
Do not make a major life decision based on a dream alone.
God speaks in many ways. Learn to hear Him in all the ways He speaks. This will help you to be more accurate with your dreams.
Most dreams are symbolic; be careful about treating a person or thing in a dream as literal.
Here is what happened at about the time I dreamed the Art Katz dream. I began to memorize several verses a week from Proverbs, and much to my delight, Proverbs was revolutionizing my understanding of everything. It was as if scales were coming off my eyes. I perceived the mistaken foundations of thought that had led to my instability, and I sensed sanity entering my heart. It was incredible to find such help from the word of God!
Proverbs encouraged me to continue to study – the exact opposite of what I had thought the Art Katz dream said. How should I make sense of that? Exploring the World of Dreams had told me to be humble and cautious. I should not make a major life decision (like backing away from studying) on the basis of one dream. Instead, I should hear God in the many ways He was speaking.
Looking at the sum of what God seemed to be saying, I decided to continue my pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.
Three months after the Art Katz dream, another dream, one which is my favorite so far, supported this decision:
I was praying and had a vision of the Lord Jesus. He walked toward me, and I reached out to Him. He also reached out to me and walked right past my outstretched hand and into my heart. I began to have “spiritual feelings.” At first I thought, “This won’t be too big of a deal,” but then the feelings became incredibly strong. Eventually, they felt so good that I think I may have experienced a touch of what heaven will be like.
Somehow, the Lord was both outside of me and inside of me, and from the outside He said, “Go.” I repeated, “Go.” After a short silence that started to feel awkward, I said, “You don’t have to tell me this, Lord, but where should I go?”
He said, “Go to the Bill Gothard mountains.”
<page 12>I repeated everything He said. I was excited to be commissioned by God. I reached out to shake His hand. He shook back and smiled at my enthusiasm.
The vision then faded and I said, “Did He say Bill Gothard or Bill Gaither?” In the dream, my wife was with me, along with others who had either heard or seen the vision. They all said, “Bill Gothard!”
In my mind I pictured the place of ministry being a small village in the mountains. I thought about the fact that it was not a big money-making position. It might not be warm. I wondered if people from my church would come and minister with me. I saw myself being largely alone. Finally, I thought to myself, “It’s OK if these things aren’t the way I would like them to be. I am a slave of Jesus.”
I have written down thousands of dreams, and this is the only one I remember where Jesus appeared to me in non-symbolic form. It is almost as if He was saying, “This is really important. I want to make sure you get the right message.”
Obviously, the dream showed Jesus entering me in order to commission me to do something. That doesn’t need much interpretation. The question is, “What was He commissioning me to do?” The answer was found in the symbol of the Bill Gothard Mountains.
Bill Gothard is a man who had a ministry called Basic Youth Conflicts. I attended one of his conferences back in the early 1980s, and I knew that he was a person who focused on principles.
To be honest, I was not a big fan of his ministry, because I believed he went too far with principles. He taught that rock music, even Christian rock music, was inherently harmful and should be avoided. He also taught that it was wrong for Christians to date. I didn’t mind him pointing out principles about how rock music or dating could be dangerous, but I thought it was wrong to add hard and fast rules to the Bible. Christian freedom is incredibly important for spiritual growth, and when we add to the Bible’s rules, we lose something (Galatians 5:1).
I should also point out that Bill Gothard was much later accused of inappropriate behavior. If I had known this would happen when I dreamed the dream back in 1991, it is unlikely that he would have shown up as a symbol in this dream. My view of him would have been too negative.
My past and future concerns with Bill Gothard, however, were not important for interpreting the dream back in 1991. When a person appears as a symbol in our dreams, God is not making a statement about the person; He is picking a picture that will mean something to the dreamer. The importance of the Bill Gothard symbol was that I viewed him as someone who focused on principles. The image spoke to me, because I was memorizing my way through Proverbs, which was all about principles. The dream was a picture of how Jesus was revolutionizing my life by entering me and commissioning me through His word.
In the previous chapter, I said, “Your dreams help you interpret your journey, and your journey helps you interprets you dreams.” The Bill Gothard dream helped me to interpret what was happening as I studied Proverbs. At the same time, what was happening as I studied Proverbs helped me to interpret the Bill Gothard dream. God’s work in my “awake world” and His work in my “asleep world” were two pictures of the same message. Putting them together gave me a fuller understanding of both.[9]
Just for fun, let me point out that I love the part of the dream where Jesus said “Go,” and then left me hanging. I was standing in the dream thinking, “Jesus just said ‘Go,’ and it seems like He should say something about where I should go. …Should I ask a question or keep waiting?” I also love the Bill Gothard or Bill Gaither question. It was a clever play on the fact that the two names sound similar. It was significant for me because Bill Gaither was a Christian musician, and I sometimes ministered in music. I was asking if I should focus on wisdom or music – Bill Gothard or Bill Gaither? The emphatic answer was “Wisdom!”
<page 13>Finally, notice the statements at the end of the dream. This wasn’t going to be a big ministry; not much money; not a warm place; not as much support as I might like. I didn’t know what that meant, but it ended up being a prophetic picture of my future.
Four months after the Bill Gothard dream, I stopped recording my dreams. For more than six years after that, I only wrote down a few of them. Why? There were a couple of reasons. First, most of my dreams were not as easy to understand as the Bill Gothard dream. They weren’t even like the Art Katz dream, where the dream seemed significant even though it confused me. I tried to interpret my dreams but had little idea how they related to my life.
Second, studying the scriptures, reading books, and listening to teachings were much more helpful than my dreams were. When I read and listened to theologians, it was as if I had found a missing piece of myself. Theologians asked the same sorts of questions I did. They reasoned in the way I did, and they found the answers that I longed to find. I found so much help from them that I lost interest in dreams. My dreams involved too much work with too little return on investment.
I tried to share what I was learning about wisdom with people in my church, and this went pretty well for a time. Then the Toronto Blessing occurred.[10] Suddenly many people were more interested in getting blasted by the Holy Spirit than in learning a system of doctrine. Some had been uneasy with my teachings for a while; they thought I was becoming too intellectual. The renewal in Toronto seemed to confirm that I was headed in the wrong direction (or at least I feared it confirmed it in their minds).
Yet I believed I was going where God was leading me! I was following what He had spoken to me in the Bill Gothard dream and what He still seemed to be speaking to me. …Yet how could I reconcile this with the fact that friends who I respected were headed in a different direction?
I couldn’t make sense of it, so I eventually doubted whether it was possible to hear God prophetically at all – or at least whether it was possible to know that we were hearing from Him. Some people would sense He was saying one thing; others would sense He was saying something different. Who could possibly decide between us?
Before long, I felt as if I lived in a different world from my closest Christian family. I spent my time pursuing principles, and they spent their time pursuing prophetic power. For the past two decades, we had been on a shared journey – we were exploring the depths of God’s love together. Now that had changed, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it.
Though I had forgotten the end of the Bill Gothard dream, it had told me that this would happen:
In my mind I pictured the place of ministry being a small village in the mountains. I thought about the fact that it was not a big money-making position. It might not be warm. I wondered if people from my church would come and minister with me. I saw myself being <page 14>largely alone. Finally, I thought to myself, “It’s OK if these things aren’t the way I would like them to be. I am a slave of Jesus.”
It wasn’t until many years later that I reread the Bill Gothard dream and understood its final paragraph. I had followed Jesus into wisdom, and it had left me feeling as if I was by myself, away from my closest Christian family.
To be honest, my real-life reaction was not nearly as positive as my reaction in the dream (“I am a slave to Jesus”). It took me years to slowly die to myself and find contentment in being Jesus’ slave. At one point, prophetic ministry became so upsetting to me that when people who tended to get prophetic words for others came to visit our church, I wore what I called “prophet-proofing” – a jeans jacket that made me look like I was barely saved. I was testing the speaker to see if he would see through the “disguise” and prophesy over me.
I was tempted to find a different church – and an opportunity presented itself. It even looked like it might include a step into full time ministry! I had a friend in a traditional church who occasionally invited me in to teach in his Sunday School class. Then, the pastor of his church moved to work in a church in another city, and I was the first guest speaker invited to fill the pulpit. My sermon went well, and after I finished, a person came up and said, “That was great! Maybe you could be our new pastor.”
I mentioned his words to my friend, who also happened to be in charge of the committee that was selecting the new pastor. He asked, “Is that a possibility?” He told me that if it was, they would consider me.
I told him I would get back to him. When I prayed about it, I realized I wasn’t really qualified. I had spent most of my life in a Charismatic church, so I knew very little about what went on in non-Charismatic churches. Even worse, one of my motivations for applying would be the hope of getting away from Charismatic churches. That seemed like a dangerous reason to become a Pastor. Everything considered, I decided not to offer myself for the position.
I stayed with my home church, and we did our best to work through our differences. We kept the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Ephesians 4:3), and God slowly helped me to resolve my concerns. We learned how to honor each other and share our lives together.
It took until 1998, seven years after the Art Katz in the attic and Bill Gothard Mountains dreams, before I really regained a hunger for the prophetic, yet I was afraid to try to move in it. I remembered the instability I associated with it from my past, and I couldn’t figure out how to be both wise and prophetic at the same time. Still, I began to make baby steps in its direction.
In all of this, God was fulfilling the message of the Art Katz dream. He had been building stability into me, and this was setting the stage for me to experience prophetic power in the way I had always longed to. He was about to surprise me and change my life forever.
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