The Power of a God-Given Dream (Rock Springs UMC)

Our scripture reading today is Genesis chapter 28, verses 10 to

Genesis 28:10–17

17. Just to keep in context here,

Isaac, Abraham's son Isaac married Rebecca.

Rebecca had their twins, Jacob and Esau.

Esau was the older, but God had told Rebecca that Jacob would

rule over Esau and that Esau would serve Jacob in the

meantime. Well, since after birth and then

through their growing up, Jacob became Rebecca's favorite son,

Esau became Isaac's favorite son and and Jacob bargained for

bought his brother's birthright with a bowl of Stew.

And then later, after Isaac had become old and was blind, Jacob

and Rebecca deceived Isaac and tricked Isaac into giving Esau

the blessing he had planned to give to Esau.

He gave to Jacob instead. So now, having lost his

birthright and lost his father's blessing, Esau is understandably

miffed, and he has decided that the best way to handle this

situation is to kill his brother.

And then there's only one brother to inherit anything.

And Jacob is fleeing for his life.

He's leaving his family. He's leaving the only home he

has ever known, the only region, as far as we know, that he has

ever known, to go to a distant land to find his mother's

relatives and hopefully receive help and care from them on his

way. He's traveling alone, alone

through the wilderness, and this is dangerous.

He's got no one to watch his back.

He's no one to got no one to keep watch while he sleeps.

He's got nothing to sleep on, apparently, except the hard

ground, and nothing for a pillow except a stone.

And when Jacob lies down to sleep, this is what he what

happens. Jacob left Beersheba and set out

for Haran. When he reached a certain place,

he stopped for the night because the sun had set.

Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay

down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a

stairway resting on earth, which is with its top reaching to

heaven. And the angels of God were

ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord.

And he said, I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham, and

the God of Isaac. I will give you and your

descendants the land on which you are lying.

Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you

will spread out over the West and to the east, to the north

and to the South. All the peoples on earth will be

blessed through you and your offspring.

I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I

will bring you back to this land.

I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised

you. When Jacob awoke from his sleep,

he thought, surely the Lord is in this place and I was not

aware of it. He was afraid and said, how

awesome is this place? This is none other than the

House of God. This is the gate of heaven.

May the Lord add His blessing to the reading and the hearing of

His Word. We are continuing talking about

dreams, dreams for a new year. And last week we talked a little

bit about something to dream about, or rather really

something not to dream about. And today we're talking about

God-given dreams. Because human dreams are one

thing. Human dreams can be scary.

Human being dreams can be fun, exciting.

Human dreams can, can motivate us.

Human dreams can, can can, you know, do a lot of different

things for us. But God-given dreams are

something different entirely. Now, they can still have some of

those same effects. They can scare us, they can

motivate us, these kinds of things.

But God-given dreams are something special.

And God-given dreams don't happen very often, at least not

as often as regular old human dreams and human visions can.

So we're going to talk about today the power of a God-given

dream, and Jacob's God-given dream is the one we're starting

with. Jacob again, here he is.

He's out in the wilderness, he's alone, he's running for his

life. His mom had told him at some

point along the way, hey, I know you're the second born, but God

told me you're going to receive all the blessing of the first

born. You're going to inherit your

father's covenant with God, your father's property, and receive

your father's blessing. All this is going to be good, no

problems, no worries. And now Jacob's running for his

life, fleeing to people that he might never have met before in

his life, hoping that they will receive him where his own

brother will not. This is Jacob's dream.

Jacob's dream. Before we go further, much

further though, beyond just Jacob's dream here, I want to

give a disclaimer the, the, this dream that Jacob had and, and

dreams like it that are genuinely God-given dreams.

And I'm, I'm using the word dream a little loosely today.

Jacob literally had a dream he was sleeping and all of this

happened in his sleep. Sometimes we can have dreams as

well and God-given dreams that come to us when we're awake, a

sense of vision or promise for the future.

And, and so that's how I'm using that term dream today.

Don't necessarily have to be asleep for it.

You can be awake for too, but if it's a God-given dream, there's

a message in it that we need to pay attention to.

The disclaimer is this. God-given dreams are rare.

They don't happen every day. They don't happen every night.

I've been told us human beings dream every night.

I don't. We don't remember them all, but

we almost always have them. God-given dreams are not like

that. And there can when preaching

about something like this, one of the things that I have

noticed and I've heard other people notice and talk about

over the years is that that some people that don't get spiritual

experiences like a God-given dream or or John Wesley talked

about having his heart strangely warmed by God.

And they think, well, maybe God just doesn't talk to me.

Or maybe God doesn't care about me.

Or maybe I'm not really a Christian, not really a follower

of Jesus, because I don't have experiences like this and that

simply isn't true most of the time.

This is not how God communicates to people, you know.

Most of the time, God, when God communicates, God communicates

through much more ordinary means, through the Bible,

through through conversations with other followers of God.

Maybe it's in in a Sunday school or a Bible study or, or

hopefully once in a while in a sermon, you hear some bald

headed knucklehead talking about ordinary ways like like an

insight or, or or a thought. And sometimes we get really good

thoughts in our heads. And sometimes those thoughts are

from God. Sometimes we get a sense of

shame or conviction that we've done something wrong.

And that's God talking to us and saying you blew it.

We got to deal with this now. So.

So if you don't have dramatic spiritual experiences, that's

OK. That's that's most of us most of

the time don't have that. And and some folks, some very,

very faithful followers of God will live their entire lives

without having a dramatic spiritual experience like this.

And that's all right, That's all right.

There's another disclaimer with God-given dreams, and I'm going

to get to this in a little bit later.

Well, actually I'm going to save that for later rather than a

disclaimer. That's more of a danger.

So I'll, I'll leave that there. So, so if you're someone going,

man, I never have dreams like this.

I never see visions. I never hear God's voices.

God really care about me. Yes, God cares about you.

Some spiritual teachers have said, and quite seriously, and,

and this was one, I think it was Teresa of Avila who had visions

and who had dreams and said the only reason God gives some

people visions and dreams, she was among them is because we're

too weak and too slow for God to communicate with us any other

way. And, and so if you've never had

a vision or a dream, maybe God, that means God knows you don't

need a vision or a dream to follow his lead.

So that's the disclaimer. Let's move on with the sermon

power of a God-given dream. I'm going to talk about two

significant elements of power in God-given dreams today.

The first one is purpose. God-given dreams have the power

of giving us purpose. Now as we're talking about God

driven dreams and purpose, I'm gonna put the remote down so I

don't keep hitting it. I'm gonna say we're gonna look

at another dream for a moment. And that's the dream that that

has given us the holiday that we celebrate this weekend.

Doctor Martin Luther King Junior Day is tomorrow.

And, and in 1963, he gave a speech before a very large group

of people in Washington, DC that has become known as the I Have a

Dream speech. And if you want to talk, if you

want to see an example of a dream that has and carries with

it a sense of power and a God-given dream, because we got

to remember Martin Luther King was not just doctor Martin

Luther King, He was Reverend Martin Luther King and he was a

pastor And, and his work as a pastor took him well beyond

church walls and that this is another one of those God-given

dreams and it carries with it a sense of purpose.

The speech is too long to read the whole thing, but I don't

want to read a a an extensive ended quotation from it.

As we look at purpose here today, I say to you today my

friends. So even though we face the

difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out

the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be

self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, the

sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will

be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, even

the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat

of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be

transformed into an Oasis of Freedom and Justice.

I have a dream that my 4 little children will one day live in a

nation where they will not be judged by the color of their

skin, but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down

in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor

having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and

nullification, one day right there in Alabama, little black

boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little

white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day

every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountains shall

be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the

crooked places will be made straight.

The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh will see

it together. This is our hope.

This is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of

despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able

to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a

beautiful Symphony of brotherhood.

With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray

together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand

for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to

sing with new meaning. My country tis of thee, sweet

land of liberty of thee I sing land where my father's died,

Land of the pilgrims, pride from every mountainside.

Let freedom ring. And if America is to be a great

nation, this must become true. When this happens, we allow

freedom to ring. When we let it ring from every

village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we

will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children,

black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and

Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of

the old Negro spiritual. Free at last, free at last.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

Now, again, that wasn't the whole speech, just a, just a, a

portion of it. But you can hear in those words,

you can hear in that dream purpose that there's something

more out there. There's a direction we're

heading. There's a place where we're

going, not inevitably, not simply by the the natural course

of history, but on purpose. And again, I believe this is a

God-given dream and that God's purpose is for His Kingdom to

come, His will to be done, His justice to be done, His peace to

be had, and other places. Martin Luther King Junior called

described this as God's beloved community where men and women of

whatever skin color, of whatever background, of whatever

ethnicity, ideology, economic or educational background can treat

each other truly as sisters and brothers and live in peace and

harmony and justice and freedom together.

And the purpose in that was to work for and move toward and

move into that. This was spoken on on the cusp

of the the vote on the the 1963 civil rights legislation.

And and that's certainly part of the why that that king gave that

speech, hoping to inspire and encourage as many people to

support the passage of that legislation as possible, but

also to give a sense of why and their broader lives, lives

beyond simply political, purely political action.

But the why of how they live their lives and the purposes of

their lives on a day-to-day basis.

And that day-to-day basis is not.

The purpose is not to get what I can for me and my own, but to

live in solidarity with the people around us, lifting others

up, caring for others, treating all people with compassion,

giving all people the freedom that they need to be the person

that God called them to be, regardless of the color of their

skin, regardless of their gender, regardless of their

education or their political or geographic situation.

This is purpose. Purpose in this dream.

There was purpose in Jacob's dream.

Jacob had to have been. We don't, we're not told Jacob's

mental state there. I got to think Jacob was at a

low point in his life when he had that dream.

I was supposed to inherit everything from my father.

I was supposed to be the one in charge.

I was supposed to be to have blessing and favor and position

and power and status within our family.

And now I'm running for my life and I don't even have anyone to

watch my back while I'm doing it.

I'm all alone in the wilderness, and he lies down, he sleeps and

he has this dream. And the dream is about a future

again. Not a future that's inevitable

by the natural flow of history, but a future that will come on

purpose. And God says, I give you my

blessing, I give you my promise. The same promise I gave to your

grandfather Abraham, the same promise I gave to your father

Isaac. I give to you one day all of

this, this land on which you are lying with, and you're so poor

that you don't have a blanket over you and you've got a rock

for a pillow. One day it will all be yours.

Everything you can see as far as your eye can see, from the north

to the South and the east to the West.

One day you don't have a single child.

Now your children will number as much as the dust of the ground

on the earth, and all the peoples of the world will be

blessed through you. There's purpose in that.

He gave Jacob a sense of his place in history, his place in

God's story. And God's story was going

somewhere, and Jacob had a purpose in that story.

He wasn't a, was it non player character NPC.

I'm out of my depth when I'm talking video games.

Am I getting that right NPC? OK, all right.

He's not an NPC. He's got purpose.

He's got purpose in this world. And we all need that sense of

why. We need a reason to get up in

the morning. We need a reason to struggle

through the struggles that we have.

We all need a why. We all need a purpose, and God

gave that. He gave that to king and through

king, to an entire movement of people.

He gave that to Jacob. And through Jacob, my goodness,

through Jacob. We're sitting here today

something like 3000 years later. Purpose.

There's power in a God-given dream and part of that power is

purpose. There are also dangers in a

God-given dream. I'm getting caught up and I

can't forget. We got communion today, so I got

to keep moving. There's dangers in a God-given

dream, and one of the dangers, particularly on this realm of

purpose, one of the real dangers, is as we receive the

dream as an assignment, we have to make it happen.

We have to. We have to force the world into

the vision that we see in the dream.

That's what I think Jacob and Rebecca did and one of the

reasons why Jacob is now running for his life.

God gave a vision to Rebecca, spoke to Rebecca, said hey, the

younger is going to rule over the older, the older is going to

serve the younger. And Rebecca immediately began

favoring her younger son. And we don't know if she had

anything to do with him, with Jacob ripping his brother off to

get his birthright. But she certainly helped Jacob

deceive Isaac and steal Esau's blessing.

She took that vision as an assignment.

I if this is going to happen, I have to make it happen.

But God-given dreams are more promised than they are

assignment. They are a statement by God of

this is what I am going to do, this is what I am going to

bring. One day, Jacob, your descendants

will outnumber the dust on the ground.

I'm going to make that happen. One day, Jacob, all of this

land, everything as far as the eye can see, will belong to your

family. I'm going to make that happen.

God is making a promise through his dream.

When we turn it into an assignment, we run the risk of

doing truly awful things in the name of God.

That's that's the times when Christians have taken up arms to

kill the heretics, to bring God's Kingdom on earth by

killing the people that believe the wrong things.

That's the time when God's people have taken up arms and

committed genocide to free the world of the uncouth savages who

don't agree with God's way of doing things, awful things that

churches, awful things that Christians have done.

That's that's what happens when Christians take up arms and they

they stone or hangs or burn witches at the stake.

Thinking they're doing God's will in this world.

We've got to make it happen. We got to clear out the

Deadwood. We got to clear out the

heretics. We got to clear out the scum so

that God's Kingdom will come, can come, and God's will will be

done. And all along God is saying, you

don't understand. I have promised this.

One day Jesus will return. His Kingdom will be established

on this earth. My Kingdom will come.

My Kingdom will be done and there is a role for you to play,

but it's not in making this happen.

Even in King's dream. Even in King's dream there is

purpose and there is there is a role for every person that was

listening to play. But none of them had the power

to force the people of this nation into the vision that King

cast. The God-given dream that he had

of God's Kingdom coming and God's will be being done.

Where all people are treated as equal and stand before one

another as sisters and brothers all on the same side instead of

warring and dividing up amongst themselves into factions.

That that is a thing God is bringing about God that had

promised that in the Scriptures long before Doctor King

articulated it so beautifully in that speech and so powerfully

so. The danger is is we don't take

it as an as that. We might take it as an

assignment and then use that as a justification for doing awful

things in the name of Jesus. How do we avoid that danger?

We avoid that danger by remembering the other power of a

God-given dream, and that's the power of hope.

The power of God-given dream is hope in the darkness.

I don't know for sure, but there's a real good chance that

Jacob went to sleep with his head on that rock.

The one that can't get any worse than this.

I have no hope. But he woke up that morning with

hope. He woke up with that morning

with hope because he had a dream from God.

He had a promise from God, He had a purpose from God, and he

had hope that the God who had brought his grandfather through

and the God that had brought his father through would bring him

through as well. He had hope.

King had hope that one day that vision that he saw could come

true. And his hope was in more than

just political might and political power.

It was in God. This was God's plan and this was

God's purpose. Because if it's not God's plan

and it's not God's purpose, then the work we're doing is wasted

effort anyway. We have this hope so that we

don't get overwhelmed. Here's another danger of a

God-given dream. God-given dreams are always too

big for us to achieve on our own.

And so they can lead to a kind of a paralysis and immobility

when we face a problem that's so big and so daunting and so

great, and it's like there's nothing I can do.

And so we become immobile and we do nothing.

The other side of the danger of a God-given dream.

There's an old story that went like this of a a landowner back

in in ancient times. He had a very large piece of

property and he had just acquired new property on the

edge of his current property. The problem was this large piece

of new property was completely covered with briars and thorns.

And before it could be used for anything, whether planting or

grazing, all of those thorns had to be cleared out.

His son was coming of age. He gave his son the task.

Son, it is your job to clear the briars and thorns from this

field. That is my assignment.

I give it to you. And the sun went out the first

day full of them, full of vigor, full of energy to please his

father. And he got there and he looked

out from a hilltop on his father's older land and saw all

of the new land covered with all of those briars.

And he thought, this is a big project.

But he started and he worked all day long in the heat of the sun.

And he worked and he worked and he worked and he worked.

And by the time he was done, he'd cleared out the small space

about 6 by 6. Tough work, hard work.

He went home discouraged. He slept well that night because

it was exhausted. But when the next day, when he

got back, then he looked again and he saw how much work it had

taken just to clear out that one small patch the day before.

And he looked out and saw how many acres and acres and acres

there was left to clear. And he despaired, and in his

despair he could find not find the energy or the ability to do

anything. So he laid down that patch of

ground that he had cleared, and he went to sleep, slept through

the day, got up, went home, ate dinner.

Dad asked, how's it going going Great.

Went to bed that night. Didn't sleep so easy that night.

And that went on for day after day after day until it became

week after week after week until it became months.

And then the day that he'd been dreading for weeks and months

came and his dad said, I want to come out and take a look at your

progress, son. So that day, his father walked

with him as they went out and as they crested that hill and

looked down over that new land, and it was all still covered

with thorns. And then they walked down to

that one patch. And his dad turned to his son

and said, what happened? And his son said, it's too much.

I was overwhelmed. I worked hard the first day, but

it was too much. And so every day, I have to

confess I've just been coming and lying and sleeping on this

one patch I cleared on the first day.

And the son, the father looked at his son.

He said, son, don't you understand that to clear this

whole land, all you had to do was clear enough ground each day

to sleep on, and by now you'd be done?

That's the position we find ourselves in.

We look out on a Dark World full of violence, full of division,

full of hostility. There seems to be more of all of

that around these days than there did when I was a kid.

Seems like that that that 30 years ago you could at least

have a conversation with people you disagreed with.

And now you just don't talk about it.

And there's so much wrong and there's so much brokenness and

there's so much sin. And we hear again that dream by

King, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in

heaven. And we think, can't do it, can't

do it, that all we really have to do is clear out enough ground

so that at night we can have a good night's sleep.

Just enough, just enough for that.

Because God's the one that's going to make the dream come

true. Our job is just to do the little

things most of the time and occasionally some big things

along the way. You see, Jesus is our purpose

and our hope. And Jesus, at the beginning of

his ministry, when he's calling his disciples, he he, he cast,

he. He shared a dream with one of

his disciples. That is, that disciple already

knew and it was Jacob's dream. And this is what Jesus said.

You think you've seen? He told, he told Nathaniel, hey,

I know who you are. You were sleeping under a fig

tree before you came here. Like, Oh my goodness, he knew

where I was under a fig tree. That's amazing.

And Jesus said, you ain't seen nothing yet.

You ain't seen nothing. One day, he said, you will see

heaven open up and the angels of God ascending and descending on

the Son of Man. That's Jacob's dream, but Jesus

tweaks it or clarifies it, because there's not.

The latter is now Jesus himself. Jesus is the latter.

Jesus is the gate. Jesus is the very one who

bridges heaven and earth. Jesus is the one that will bring

the Kingdom of heaven to earth, and Jesus is the one that will

on earth establish his Kingdom like it is in heaven.

And he gives us work to do in that we're not just spectators.

We're don't sit by passively. We remember, though, that Jesus

is our purpose and our hope. It's not our job to make His

Kingdom come, but it is our job to live into His Kingdom, to

have the hope. Because we know that His Kingdom

is coming. We are as much as we can.

We're going to live into that Kingdom now.

We're going to live according to that Kingdom now.

We're going to follow Jesus in the way he lived now.

Because even small acts of kindness, small acts of justice

and mercy, reveal the truth and goodness of Christ's Kingdom in

a broken world. Most of the time we're not doing

dramatic stuff. Some of us live a whole life

without ever doing anything really very dramatic.

But it's not the dramatic stuff. Pulling weeds and cutting up

thorn bushes is not dramatic. Digging out roots is not

dramatic. It's just work.

And we don't have to get it all done all at once.

We just do our pit, our bit, every day.

And we trust that one day God will make it all, all of that

dream come true. Our hope is in Jesus that his

Kingdom he will make bring his Kingdom and it will come and he,

his will will be done. That's our hope.

And our purpose is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus to love

and serve and care without regard to all of those things

that the world wants to divide us up by, whether it's skin

color or gender or age or region or politics or language or

whatever. All of those things the world

wants to use to divide us. We say, sisters and brothers,

let's do some work together in Jesus name, Amen.

Amen.