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A Dream Interpretation Journey
<page 19>At the start of the previous chapter I mentioned that in 1998 I suddenly understood how to fit prophetic insights into my life. At that point, I pulled out my old dream notebook and reread a number of the dreams I had written down years earlier. When I considered the Bill Gothard dream, I was stunned. It had foreshadowed the past seven years of my life!
I still didn’t really understand the Art Katz dream, but I could see that it also fit in with what had happened. God had fulfilled its message in spite of my limited insight. There is an important lesson in this. It is that God often helps us to live out the meaning of a dream even if we don’t understand it. As I wrote earlier, God tends to repeat Himself (Job 33:29-30); He wants to get His message across, and He will speak in different ways. If we don’t recognize a message in a dream, we may receive it in some other way.
God gives understanding to those who are willing to do His will:
If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority.
He who has My commandments and keeps (literally: to guard from loss or injury)[12] them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”
I had been willing to do God’s will, and I had chosen to guard the importance of His commandments by trying to obey them. As I responded to Him in this way, He revealed Himself to me in many ways, including the Art Katz and Bill Gothard dreams. Even though I didn’t understand everything He was saying, He manifested Himself to me in a clear enough way to accomplish His work in my life.
When that happened, my life became a real-life picture of what the symbols in the dreams had foreshadowed – and that, obviously, made the dreams much easier to interpret. The parallels between my life and the symbols shed light on their meaning. This illustrates what may be the most important principle I can share with you about interpreting dreams. It is that as we do our best to obey God, His will becomes clear to us, and this clarity helps us to see how our dreams fit in with what He is doing.
I am not sure that I could receive much from dreams without this sort of experience. As I wrote earlier: “your dreams help you interpret your journey, and your journey helps you interpret your dreams.” My dreams and my journey were two related ways in which God was speaking. I was able to compare the two in order to gain insights into both.
<page 20>Once I realized this, it brought up some obvious questions: “What should I do with this glimpse into a whole new world of extraordinary possibilities? If God had done so much without me understanding my dreams, what might He do if I understood them?”
My time of walking out the book of Proverbs told me what I needed to do next. I needed to turn to the burning bush! When Moses saw the burning bush in the wilderness, he turned to it and God spoke to him. In fact, the Scriptures describe this event in a way that makes it seem as if God would not have spoken if he hadn’t turned to it.
So when the LORD saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!”…
I treat this scripture as a metaphor for an incredibly important lesson in life. It is that if you notice God moving in some area, look closer to see if there is more going on than what you see on the surface. You might find that He is trying to get your attention so He can reveal Himself in a fuller way.[13]
I decided to see if the Bill Gothard dream was like a burning bush. God had brought it to my attention, and there was a chance that it was only a surface sign of something far deeper. In order to find out if it was, I turned aside to look by rereading Exploring the World of Dreams and listening to teachings by Benny Thomas on hearing God’s voice. Following his instructions, I put in place the following practices:
I asked God to speak to me in dreams.
I got a pen with a light on it so I could write my dreams down at night. (You can buy them online.) This allowed me to record my dreams in a notebook without getting out of bed. If you don’t write down a dream when you wake, you will probably forget most of it by the morning.
Any time I woke from sleeping, I looked into my mind to see if I could remember what I had been dreaming. Sometimes I didn’t know a dream was there until I looked. When I found one, I wrote it down.
During the day, I set aside time to consider my dreams before the Lord. I was extremely dedicated to this at first. I think I spent close to an hour a day looking at them. (I spend far less time now. There are a couple of reasons for this: First, God has given me skill, so I can interpret much faster. Second, I need to spend my time on other activities. At first, however, I knew that in order to gain some new piece of wisdom I needed to turn to the burning bush, so I did my best to pay attention.)
I slowly tested a theory about dream interpretation. It was that one of the mistakes I had made the first time I had tried to do it was that I expected God to speak to me without a good deal of <page 21>patient work on my part. I had hoped that He would quickly drop interpretations into my heart. When that didn’t happen, I became discouraged and gave up.
I now tried a new approach, one based on what I had learned from the book of Proverbs. Wisdom shouts in the street (Proverbs 1:20-21 NASV), but we must work patiently to hear her voice. I had gained wisdom through studying and practicing to live God’s word in my life. I had experimented, tried different approaches, and persevered until I gained skill. I now decided to see if that approach would work with dreams.
I found that Benny Thomas had a similar approach, one which can be summed up with a few Scriptures:
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter.
God loves to speak to us (Job 33:29-30), but He does so in a way that is concealed. As Benny Thomas teaches, “God loves a mystery” – and it is our job to search out that mystery! It often isn’t immediately obvious what He is saying, so we must investigate to discern it over time. This is similar to what Jesus taught:
Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.
The Bible gives us several pictures of what this looks like. One useful picture is found in the book of Daniel.
Inasmuch as an excellent spirit, knowledge, understanding, interpreting dreams, solving riddles, and explaining enigmas were found in this Daniel, whom the king named Belteshazzar, now let Daniel be called, and he will give the interpretation. (emphasis added)
The phrase, “explaining enigmas” is literally “to unravel knots.”[14] If we picture a complicated knot made out of string, a person might pull a little on one part. Then they will pull on another part and then yet another. After a while a section of the knot loosens, and the person is able to unravel a little bit of it. Then he or she will repeat the process with what is left, slowly opening different parts until it is fully untied.
Hearing from God is often like that. You study the Scriptures to gain foundational knowledge. You look at your circumstances and see the hand of God in them. You sense the Holy Spirit saying something in your heart. A dream may give you some symbols that help. As you carefully consider the pieces, God’s message gradually becomes clear. You rely on the Holy Spirit to help you as you untie one part at a time until the knot is unraveled.
The King James version translates “explaining enigmas” as “dissolving of doubts.” This also is a useful metaphor. If you put salt in a glass of water and stir it, the salt slowly dissolves. In <page 22>the same way, our doubts about what God is saying slowly dissolve as we stir our hearts to consider the different ways in which He may be speaking.
We get a good picture of what this is like in Acts chapters 10 and 11. These chapters show Peter “untying a knot” as he figured out what God was saying about His plan for the Gentiles:
Peter had a vision of a great sheet being let down from heaven containing unclean animals, and God told him to kill and eat. This was confusing for Peter, because the Old Testament Law told him that he wasn’t allowed to eat these animals. (Acts 10:9-16, 11:5-10)
Peter “wondered within himself what this vision which he had seen meant” (Acts 10:17). This shows him doing the activity I have been describing in this chapter. He was working at untying the knot by considering what the vision might mean.
Then the Holy Spirit told him that three men were seeking him; he should arise and go with them, doubting nothing. This was another piece of the mystery, and it also was an unusual one. The men were from the house of a Gentile named Cornelius, and Jews didn’t normally associate with Gentiles. (Acts 10:17-20, 28, 11:11-12)
The men took him to Cornelius’ house, and as Peter spoke to Cornelius, one part of the knot was untied. God showed him that the meaning of the vision was that he should not consider any man common or unclean (Acts 10:28). Obviously, the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus had changed the approach that Peter should take toward Gentiles. Yet he still wasn’t sure what else God wanted him to do during his visit. (Acts 10:24-29)
Cornelius told Peter that he had seen a vision of an angel, and the angel had told him that Peter would bring words by which he and his household would be saved (Acts 10:30-32, 11:13-14). This loosened another part of the knot; Peter now knew that he should preach the gospel.
As He started to preach, the Holy Spirit fell on the Gentiles. This was an unprecedented display of power toward them, and it finished untying the knot. Peter realized that God was calling the Gentiles into His kingdom. (Acts 10:44-48, 11:15-18)
God never directly told Peter that this was the conclusion. Peter discerned it one piece at a time:
Then Peter opened his mouth and said: “In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality.
Then I remembered the word of the Lord, how He said, ‘John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If therefore God gave them the same gift as He gave us when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God?
I carefully considered Benny Thomas’ teachings, and I tested them, both by the Scriptures and by observing the results of putting them into practice. I turned to the burning bush by seeking to untie the knot of how I should make prophetic insights a part of my life.
<page 23>Over time, the floodgates of God’s guidance opened to me, and I recognized a stream of messages coming from heaven. As I cautiously worked with this stream, it helped me to navigate a difficult path that was humanly impossible for me. I will tell the next part of that story in the following two chapters.
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