The Power of a God-Given Dream (Chester UMC)

We started talking last week about dreaming and, and what

dreams we might or might not have for the year that's coming.

This week we're reading about dreams and, and more than one

dream we're taking a look at today.

But this dream of, of Jacob that he had, it was at a low point in

his life. He was running away because he'd

lied to his father. He'd cheated his brother and his

brother was threatening his life.

Anyone have family problems? I hope you haven't arrived at

the point where you're having to leave town because a sibling is

threatening your life. But that's where Jacob was.

And and all of this in spite of or in some ways because of the

vision that God had given to his mother Rebecca when she said

that Jacob would rule over his older brother Esau.

Now he's are now Jacob again is on the run.

He's sleeping outdoors. The best thing he can find for a

pillow is a rock. And he lies down and he dreams

the dream that Devin just read to us.

So we're talking about that dream and and other God-given

dreams because it is clear that this dream came to Jacob from

God himself. It wasn't bad burrito, it wasn't

stress and anxiety over his family situation.

It was divine inspiration, God working in his life, sharing

with some, sharing something with him that would have power

in his life because Jacob's dream, Jacob's dream was

God-given and God-given dreams have power.

Now before I go any further than that, I want to talk about, just

take a little bit of a moment for a disclaimer here.

God-given dreams are frankly rare.

This is not something anyone that is a follower of God,

whether Jewish or Christian or otherwise.

Anyone that's a follower of God would expect to get a God-given

dream every night. There's a lot of folks that

don't get God-given dreams their entire life.

It's a rare kind of occurrence. One of the great spiritual

writers and, and thinkers in the Christian faith is, is Teresa of

Avila, Saint Teresa of Avila. And she had visions, she had

dreams. She wrote these things down at

the direction of her superiors and shared them with others.

And one of the things she said is that it's a dangerous thing

in the Christian life to live for those kinds of things, these

these dramatic spiritual experiences, whether it's dreams

or visions or other kinds of spiritual experiences like that,

that are, that are not typical and not ordinary.

And one of the risks is we can come to live for those things

instead of for God. We start seeking the experience

rather than seeking God himself. One of the other dangers is that

we can think that if we don't get those kinds of dreams, then

God just must not speak to me or God must not care about me.

God speaks to us in many different ways.

God speaks to us through scriptures.

God speaks to us through other people.

God speaks to us through through impulses and inclinations that

might come to our hearts and to our minds.

God speaks to us, hopefully through preaching and teaching

of people around us. God can speak to us through

books. God speaks to us through current

events and, and I almost said newspapers, but I'm not sure

even God speaking through newspapers anymore, you know,

Internet. God speaks to us in many, many,

many different ways. And, and one of the clearest

ways is through the poor and the helpless and the outcasts who

are around us. So if you're not having dreams,

if you're not having dramatic spiritual experiences, that

doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.

It means those kinds of things are rare.

The early desert fathers, some of them taught that these

experience. This might have been Teresa as

well that these types of experiences, dreams and visions

and and and the very dramatic things God only gives people

whose faith is so weak that they need something extra.

So, so Jacob having a dream and others having dreams and having

big dramatic spiritual experiences is not if if you

don't get that, it's not a sign that there's something wrong

with you want to say that because I've encountered folks

that kind of had felt over the years like, oh, this kind of

thing never happens to me. Am I, am I not really following

Jesus? If you're following Jesus, God

doesn't necessarily for everyone who's following Jesus

communicate in this way. So don't sweat it, don't worry

about it. But when we see these dreams,

when we hear of these dreams, it is important for us to take note

and to pay attention because partly because they are so rare,

Jacob has had this dream. God felt fit for it to be

included in the writings of Scripture.

So it's something important for us to pay attention to.

We're going to do that now as we look at the power of a God-given

dream. And there's lots of different

ways we can look at the power of a God-given dream.

We're going to look at two ways here this morning.

One of those, and the first is this, that the power of a

God-given dream is hope. Here's Jacob fleeing for his

life, running to find relatives that, as far as we know, he has

never met before, in another land, in another country,

traveling by himself through the wilderness, A dangerous prospect

at any time. He had apparently had didn't

have enough time to take much of anything with him at all.

Because again, he's lying on the ground with a rock for a pillow,

and God meets him there, and he has this dream.

And in this dream, God renews for him, shares with him the

covenant that he gave to his grandfather Abraham and to his

father Isaac, men who probably had an almost mythical status in

his mind. The stories that he must have

heard from his father about his grandfather Abraham, the stories

that he heard about his own father, Isaac and the things

that he had done and the wonders that God had worked around and

through him. And here's Jacob running for his

life, having been told by his mom, hey, you're inheriting the

covenant, the promise that God made to your grandfather and

your father. And, and, and he's, but he's

done these things. He's, he's, he's cheated his

brother, he's stolen from his brother.

He's lied to his father. Now he's on the run.

And maybe he's wondering, have I blown it?

Am I out that I disqualify myself sometime?

We don't really know what was going on in his mind, only his

present circumstances. But they're in the midst of

this, in the midst of running away, in the midst of camping

out by himself in the wilderness with no one to protect him, no

one to watch his back, no one to keep watch at night while he's

sleeping. Nothing to lie on, nothing to

pillow his head but the ground and a rock.

And God says, Jacob, Jacob, this land that you're lying on now,

it's all going to belong to you. The covenant I made with

Abraham, the covenant made with Isaac, I make with you.

This land will be yours and your descendants forever.

You'll have descendants that that spread numerous as the

stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore.

All of this I promise to you. And Jacob woke from that dream

with hope. A vision of the future that

didn't include him running for his life with no one to watch

his back and nothing to cover him as he slept on the ground.

A vision of God providing and caring.

A vision of a legacy of descendants, of people who would

follow after him and come through him and be a blessing to

the world. His circumstances, his present

circumstances, had not changed 1 little bit.

He was still alone in the wilderness.

He still had nothing to cover himself.

He still had no one to watch his back.

He was still going to a place where he had never been before

to seek help from people that he had never met.

But now he had hope. He had this hope, this dream of

a future that was given to him by God.

There's power in that. There's power in a God-given

dream. There's hope in a God-given

dream. There are dangers in a God-given

dream as well. And we have to be aware of those

risks because when these dreams come, we can.

I'm going to make sure. I might have forgotten

something. Nope, I didn't forget.

I just moved it. That's all right.

I was like, oh, OK, forget that. I didn't forget the dangers in a

God-given dream. There's a couple.

One of the dangers in a God-given dream is when we get

that dream and when, whether we hear it directly from God itself

or whether someone else is sharing their dream like Martin

Luther King Junior did 1963. Part of the reason we have the

celebration and the holiday this weekend, that that dream that

comes from God, there's power in it, there's hope in it.

But part of the danger in those kind of dreams is that rather

than hearing it and receiving it as a dream and the hope that it

gives as a promise from God, God gave I, God gave Jacob a promise

in that dream of something that God would do in and through and

for Jacob and his descendants. One of the dangers is, is when

we take that dream and turn it into an assignment.

I've got this dream. I have to make it happen.

Human dreams are like that. When humans have dreams, whether

whether you know, you're Elon Musk or or someone whose dreams

are on a lot smaller scale, you got to dream about flying to

Mars or a dream about owning your own home.

When we have human level dreams, generally speaking, we have to

work to make those things happen.

Those kind of dreams, you know, are are assignments that we give

ourselves to make something happen, to bring about the

future that we are dreaming of. But when it's a God-given dream,

that's not an assignment that we have to accomplish.

If Jacob had woken up from that saying, all right, I got to get

a bunch of land. I got to figure out how am I

going to buy all this land? Or maybe I should raise an army

and conquer this land. And I got to start having a lot

of kids. He did end up having a lot of

kids. If I'm going to have all of

these descendants in these future generations, what do I

need to do to make this happen? Now suddenly, Now suddenly Jacob

is setting on a trajectory to try to accomplish for himself

what God has said he's going to do.

And anytime we put ourselves in God's shoes and try to

accomplish for ourselves what only God can accomplish and what

God has in fact promised to accomplish, we tend to just get

in the way of what God is doing. Doesn't necessarily keep God

from doing it, but it can make our life and the lives of the

people around us a whole lot more stressful and a whole lot

more of a headache than it needed to be.

I think that's a little bit of why Jacob was on the run.

His mother, Rebecca, had this vision that she probably shared

with Jacob. AI know you're the second born.

I know the first born inherits the the, the covenant and

inherits the blessing, but God told me you're going to inherit

that. And then they proceeded to get

to those things through deceit, through lies, through treachery.

And now their family is divided and at war with itself, trying

to make happen what God has promised He will do.

So when we hear these dreams, our job isn't to make them

happen. The church has messed this up so

many times in so many ways throughout history.

We read the Book of Revelation of how God gathers his armies

and God defeats the forces of the enemy, Satan, the beast, the

dragon, however you want to name him.

And we say, ah, that's what God wants us to do.

Let's gather our armies and defeat the infidels, defeat the

savages, kill the people that are heretics, all of these

things to make God's Kingdom come on earth just as it is in

heaven, like we pray about every Sunday.

And that's not the way to do these things.

God has promised one day Jesus will return.

One day Jesus will establish his Kingdom in full view for

everyone to see here on earth as it is in the heavens right now.

One day that will happen. God has not given us the

assignment of making it happen. And every time the church has

taken that attitude, we have done awful, awful things in the

world, things from crusades to genocides to, to torture to, to

execute the attitude of Christians fighting Christians

in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and, and into even into

modernity of, of when we go into a town, we have to kill all of

the heretics. Or what if we kill some actual

faithful believers in the process?

And the policy was kill them all and let God sort them out

because we've got to make God's Kingdom come.

We've got to make sure that God's will is done on earth as

it is in heaven. Those are extreme examples, but

we can do similar things in much smaller ways that are still very

hurtful and destructive. When we have the hope of a

God-given dream, our hope should not be in our capacity to make

it come true, but in God's faithfulness and God's power and

God's willingness to make it come true.

That's the power and the danger of a God-given dream.

We're going to avoid those dangers.

We're going to avoid those dangers.

We do need to know what is our part of it.

I mean, God didn't just give a dream just to make Jacob feel

good, just to make Jacob, you know, happier about his present

situation. It wasn't simply an act of

comfort. I don't think God-given dreams

are just acts of comfort. If we're going to avoid these

dangers, one of the things we need to do is look at the other

part of the God-given dream, which is purpose.

Purpose. By having that dream, Jacob

could see that God's plan, God's purpose for him was more than

just him living his life and doing his thing.

He was part of a bigger story. His life was going someplace and

the trajectory of his life was not was going to extend not just

to the to the point where he breathed his final breath, but

beyond that for generations and generations and generations.

God-given dreams give us purpose.

They help us find our place in the story and see the kinds of

things that we need to do. Now one of the other dangers I

should have mentioned this under the danger slide of a God-given

dream particular if we take it as an assignment is that that it

can become overwhelming. I can never do that.

I can never accomplish that. Jacob could have been

overwhelmed by that dream. God, how can I ever possess all

of this land when I'm all alone? I don't have kids, I don't have

an army, I don't have anything, I don't have the money.

How am I going to do this? And my own brother's trying to

kill me. I can't even take, you know,

over the inheritance that now belongs to me.

How can I get all of this other way?

We could be paralyzed by a dream that's overwhelming if we think

it's our responsibility to fulfill it.

There was a monastic desert father, early Christian

monastics before the church split into Catholic and

Protestant and all of this kind of stuff.

There were a group of men and women that went off into the

wilderness. They did this after Christianity

became legalized and and for the 1st 400 years of Christianity,

being a Christian was a risky proposition.

There was not constant persecution.

Christians weren't constantly hiding from Romans or from

others, but there was periodic persecution and there was often

social problems and social outcast.

And it was to become a Christian, it cost you.

In those days you, you would lose respect, you would lose

status in society, you would lose some relationships, you

would lose some position. It cost you.

And at times it could cost you your own life.

And then the emperor converted to Christianity and Christianity

became the the dominant and preferred religion of the

empire. And now becoming a Christian got

you something in a temporal sense beyond being part of God's

family. It got social blessing and

social approval and opportunities for social

advancement. And and there was a whoa, boy, I

hope I didn't break that. There was a movement within the

church at that time that said some people felt we still need

to show the world that following Jesus costs you and and some

men, some women, some on their own, some in groups, went out to

live lives of severe self-discipline and personal

deprivation. They never claimed that was

God's call for everyone. In fact, most people that came

and said hey, I want to join you, they would talk them out of

it and say no, you really don't want to join me.

This isn't for everyone. This is, you know, unless God's

called you to it, that you don't even want to try it.

And, and they, there's a lot of surviving stories from those

folks and, and they're, some of them are really, really cool.

And this is one of those stories.

It was about a father who was a landowner and, and he had

purchased a new piece of property.

And that property was covered with thorns and briars.

It was a large piece of property.

It was adjacent but distant from where they lived, adjacent to

the land they owned, but distant from where they lived.

And he gave his son, who was becoming an adult, the

assignment of clearing that property.

You got to go in. You got to clear out all of the

thorns. You got to clear out all of the

briars. So it becomes arable land.

Whether they wanted to graze on it or plant crops on it, I don't

know. But he needed to clear it.

And the son went out. He was proud to receive the

assignment. He was glad to do it.

He walked to the edge of that property.

He got there. He looked out from a hilltop and

saw this vast stretch of land absolutely covered in briars and

thorns. You know, I just got to get to

it. And he spent an entire day

clearing land. And at the end of the day, he

had a space that was about, you know, 6 by 610, by 10, not very

big at all. He worked hard.

He worked hard and he was overwhelmed.

He said, I'm never going to get this done.

I'm never going to get it done. He went back home.

His dad asked him how it went when great dad, he slept that

night. The next day he went back out

and he got there and he looked around again and he said there's

no way. And he was so overwhelmed by how

big the project was that he found himself immobilized.

And instead of spending the day working, he laid down on that

patch that he cleared the day before.

And he went to sleep. And he did that day after day

after day, week after week after week, for months.

And then to his horror, one day when he got up, his dad said to

him at breakfast, hey, I'm going to come out and check and see

how things are going. And the son knew he was in

trouble. And he walked out and he was

trembling all the way and he wasn't talking.

And he was. And they got out there and the

father looked out and saw this vast stretch of land still

covered in briars except for one small patch on the edge.

He looked at his son. What happened?

His son told him it was so big I was overwhelmed.

And so I've just been coming here every day and sleeping.

And his dad said to him, Son, don't you know that if you had

just cleared a patch big enough to sleep on every day that you

would be done by now? That's our role too, as we read

about God's Kingdom coming and God's will being done on this

earth as it is in heaven. That's our role, to do just

enough work every day to make just enough progress every day

that we can lay down and sleep at night and rest and be ready

for more work the next day. There's another dream that, and

I mentioned it before, Martin Luther King Junior's I have a

dream speech is famous. I'm going to read a portion of

that here today. And it's it's an extended quote.

It won't take too long, but I want to read it and I'm not even

going to try. I'm not going to try to imitate

King's cadences or delivery. I'm just going to read you the

words I say 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 in 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 racist, with its governor having

his lips dripping with the words of interposition and

nullification, one day right there and Alabama, little black

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

little white boys and little 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 mountain shall be made low, The rough places will

be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight,

and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed in all flesh.

Shall see, shall 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 up 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 a 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.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we

let it ring from every village and every hamlet and 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

the words of the old Negro spiritual.

Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free

at last. These dreams, Jacob's dream,

like King's dream, was a massive big project.

And a big step was taken in 1963 with the passage of the Civil

Rights Act. And things are much better now

than they used to be. But there's still work to do.

There's still division, there's still hostility.

There's still the fighting of person against person along this

line and that line. And, and you know, just hearing

folks talk about that this morning, not necessarily on

racial division, but in all of the division that there is in

our country right now. All of the hatred, all of the

hostility, all of the fear, all of the anxiety, this ongoing

sense of hopelessness of how can we get better?

How can we improve? How can we claim that that one

day God's Kingdom is coming and God's will will be done here on

earth just like it is in heaven. We can claim it because God has

promised it. We can believe it because God

has promised it and and we can't make it happen.

We can't, we can't make it happen.

We can't force other people to live into it.

All we can do, all we can do is do our work on a daily basis.

The little things that God puts in front of us, loving our

neighbor is ourself. Showing compassion and kindness

to others even if they're different than we are.

Responding to hatred with love. Responding to hostility with

compassion. Responding to antagonism with

kindness. Just like Jesus did.

And is any one of those acts going to change the world?

No, no, but as followers of Jesus we were.

I did breakthrough remote control well, or at least I

damaged it a little. Jesus is our purpose and our

hope. The covenant God made with Jacob

is not the same covenant that God made with us.

God made a land covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with

Jacob. God promised real estate.

God has promised us life eternal, no matter what the

people of this world do to us. God has promised us Jesus is

Lord and King forever, and one day his Kingdom will come and

his will will be done on this earth as it is in heaven.

Jesus is our purpose and Jesus is our promise.

So we like Nathaniel, we like Peter, we like all of those

other disciples, Mary and, and Joseph and James and who all of

these other folks that we're following after Jesus.

Our purpose, our hope is Jesus to follow in his footsteps, to

live as much as possible that we can like he lived.

And sometimes that's going to involve some dramatic action

with great risk and, and, and, and, and, and occasionally maybe

even spectacular results. But most of the time it's just

going to be the day-to-day stuff done in the name of Jesus with

an eye toward the future that God has promised as we share

love and compassion in simple ways with ourselves and with the

people around us. In Jesus name, Amen.

Amen. Oh, oh, I forgot, I forgot to go

back. I take back the amens, Niemeh.

I guess that's Amen backwards. There we go.

You will see Jesus said this. You will see heaven open up in

the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

Jesus was referencing eyes or Jacob's dream at that moment

when he was talking to that brand new person, his brand new

disciple, just first committed to five, just signed up for the

job. And you will see the angels of

God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

But he tweaked the dream a little bit.

Jesus is the latter. Jesus is now the gateway, the

one that connects heaven and earth.

Jesus is the one. That will bring heaven to earth

and will bring earth into heaven, if we.

Keep our focus on. Him and keep Him as our purpose

and Him as our hope and day-to-day follow Him, because

even small acts of justice, mercy and love reveal the truth

and goodness of Christ's Kingdom and a broken world.

Now Jesus name, Amen. Amen.

Let's stand sing together. My hope is built.

Fixed. My hope is.

Built. On nothing less than Jesus blood

and righteousness I cannot trust.

Sweet as framed, but wholly lean.

On Jesus name on. Christ the solid.

Rock I stand on the ground is sinked all up sinking.

Sand. When?

Darkness. Veils his lovely face.

I rest on His unchanging grace in every.

High and stormy Gale. My anchor holds within.

The. Veil on Christ the.

Solid. Rock, I stand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

His oath is. Coven and his blood support me

in the whelming flood, when all around the soul gives way.

Heathen is all my hope and stay on Christ the.

Solid. Rock, I stand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

And I shall come with trumpet. Sound O may I then in Him be

found pressed in his righteousness alone, for us to

stand before the throne on Christ the.

Solid rock, I stand all. Other ground is sinking sand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

We have these God. Given dreams in front of us,

even if we haven't dreamed of ourselves, those who have gone

before us have. Jesus has given us this vision.

This has given us this dream of God's Kingdom come, God's will

be done. One of the terms Martin Luther

King used for that was God's beloved community, that the

earth becomes God's beloved community.

The hope that we have is not in our capacity to make it happen,

but in God's faithfulness to keep His promise that one day it

will happen. In the meantime, we live into

that hope. We live into that future by

doing daily the things that Jesus taught us to do, loving

our neighbor, loving God, serving others with compassion

and kindness and gentleness. In Jesus name, Amen.