You all know the
feeling. It is halfway through the
sermon – not one of mine, certainly – and your eyes are starting to get heavy,
and your head is starting to droop, and your chin is bobbing against your
chest. You’re falling asleep in church. Maybe you were up all night with kids or
sickness or just couldn’t sleep. Maybe
you just came in from work. Maybe it’s
gotten a little too warm in here and your seat is just a little too comfy and
the preacher – again, not me – is a little boring or dry or monotone, and it’s
all you can do not to drift off completely.
There is a little game I
like to play from up here as I look around and see people with heads bowed and
eyes closed – the name of the game is “Who’s Praying, Who’s Sleeping?” One little girl was once asked why we should
be quiet in church, and she thought for a minute and said, “Because, people are
sleeping!”
The next time the person
next to you falls asleep in church, you may be tempted to throw an elbow or
wake them up. But think twice, before
you do. You see, God has a long-standing
and well-documented history of speaking to people in their dreams. God speaks to us in our waking and in our
sleeping, in our going out and our lying down.
God speaks to people when they take a rest, in their sleep, in trances,
and through their dreams.
In fact, this was so
well-known that people would go to the temple and intentionally fall asleep, in
the hopes that God would speak to them in their dreams. And so, when I look around and see you
starting to nod off, I don’t take offense, I just assume that you are
participating in a great Biblical tradition.
When the person next to you starts to nod off, let them sleep – God may
have something to say to them as they dream.
We have already talked
about how God speaks to us in silence – and how we need to intentionally turn
off the noise and stop making noise so we can hear the still, small voice of
God. We have talked about how God speaks
to us through other people – in the particularities of each and every voice,
but always and consistently with the accent of love, grace, mercy, and
forgiveness.
Hearing from God requires
a simultaneous tuning out and tuning in.
Tuning out other distractions, tuning in to what God. Given that, it should be no surprise that God
might speak to us in a dream. Dreams
happen in our subconscious, with our eyes closed and parts of our mind taking a
rest, perhaps the perfect place for God to get our attention when we might not
have been paying attention, otherwise.
The Old Testament prophet,
Samuel, is one whom God first called in his sleep. Turn with me in your Bibles to 1 Samuel
3:1-10:
Now the boy Samuel was serving the Lord under Eli. The
Lord’s word was rare at that time, and visions weren’t widely known. 2 One
day Eli, whose eyes had grown so weak he was unable to see, was lying down in
his room. 3 God’s lamp hadn’t gone out yet, and Samuel was
lying down in the Lord’s temple, where God’s chest was.
4 The Lord
called to Samuel. “I’m here,” he said.
5 Samuel
hurried to Eli and said, “I’m here. You called me?”
“I didn’t call you,” Eli replied. “Go lie down.” So he
did.
6 Again the
Lord called Samuel, so Samuel got up, went to Eli, and said, “I’m here. You
called me?”
“I didn’t call, my son,” Eli replied. “Go and lie down.”
(7 Now Samuel didn’t yet know the Lord,
and the Lord’s word hadn’t yet been revealed to him.)
8 A third
time the Lord called Samuel. He got up, went to Eli, and said, “I’m here. You
called me?”
Then Eli realized that it was the Lord who was calling
the boy. 9 So Eli said to Samuel, “Go and lie down. If he calls
you, say, ‘Speak, Lord. Your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went and lay
down where he’d been.
10 Then the
Lord came and stood there, calling just as before, “Samuel, Samuel!”
Samuel said, “Speak. Your servant is listening.”
Samuel – Through
dreams, God calls us to action
Samuel is a young boy, no
more than 12. He is drifting off to
sleep, and a voice calls to him in the night: “Samuel! Samuel!”
Obediently, if not somewhat begrudgingly, the boy jumps out of bed and
says, “Here I am! You called me!” as he scurries into the room of Eli, the old,
blind priest. “Silly boy! I didn’t call you! Now quit bothering me and go back to bed!”
The scene is vaguely
familiar to anyone with children in the home.
The adults are tired and the child won’t stay in bed. In slapstick comic fashion, not once, not
twice, but three times the child shows up in the adult’s room when he should be
in bed. But as the rusty gears in Eli’s
brain finally engage, he remembers that the Lord sometimes does this sorta
thing. In verse 9, he says, “Go, lie
down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is
listening.’” Dottering old Eli’s eyes
were almost dim, but not quite - there was still enough of a flicker of God’s
Holy Spirit within him to help young Samuel hear the call of God.
When the word of the Lord
is far too rare and where visions are not nearly widespread enough, it is not
that God has ceased speaking, it’s that humans have stopped listening. The absence of a word or vision from God has
more to do with our human refusal to listen than with any divine reluctance to
speak. To hear from God, we, like
Samuel, may need to lie down in the dark and be still, and say, “Speak, Lord,
for your servant is listening.”
That drowsy, quiet place
might be what God needs to get our attention, to speak our name, to make God’s
dream our dream. As God did with Samuel,
God may use that dream to call us into action to bring God’s dream to fruition. God may use a dream to call us into action.
The tricky part is that in
order to have the time and space to dream, we need to take a break from the
action. A story is told of Henry Ford,
some years after he began assembly line production on the Model T, he hired an
efficiency expert to help him run the operation better. They made a few tweaks to the assembly line
itself, and how the workers did their work.
Then they came to the administrative office. The efficiency expert said, “There’s a man
down the hall – every time I pass his office, his feet are on the desk, he’s
kicked back in his chair, and his hands are folded behind his head. He’s wasting space here – you need to fire
him.”
Henry Ford said, “He came
up with an idea that saves me millions of dollars a year. If I remember right, his hands and feet were
in the same position, then.”
Having the time to dream
is important, but in response, we’re then called to action. A God-given dream that is never acted upon is
a wasted dream. God will always call us
to action. God is not one to say, “Well,
what I want YOU to do about it, is
absolutely nothing.” God’s dream is not for us to be lazy, comfortable, and
contented. That may be our dream, but it certainly isn’t God’s
dream for us! If you think the message
you’re getting from God is “sit this one out,” then check again, because that
most certainly is not a dream from God.
God uses a dream to call us into action.
Joseph – Through
dreams, God shows us a preferred future
God also uses a dream to
call us to show us a preferred future. A
famous example of this is Joseph, who had several famous dreams of his own, and
who famously interpreted the dreams of others, including the king, the Pharaoh
himself. Let me read the story from
Genesis 41:
15 Pharaoh
said to Joseph, “I had a dream, but no one could interpret it. Then I heard
that when you hear a dream, you can interpret it.”
16 Joseph
answered Pharaoh, “It’s not me. God will give Pharaoh a favorable response.”
17 So Pharaoh
said to Joseph, “In my dream I was standing on the bank of the Nile. 18 In
front of me, seven fattened, stout cows climbed up out of the Nile and grazed
on the reeds. 19 Just then, seven other cows, weak and frail
and thin, climbed up after them. I’ve never seen such awful cows in all the
land of Egypt. 20 Then the thin, frail cows devoured the first
seven, fattened cows. 21 But after they swallowed them whole,
no one would have known it. They looked just as bad as they had before. Then I
woke up.
25 Joseph said
to Pharaoh, “26 The seven healthy cows are seven years, 27 The
seven thin and frail cows, climbing up after them, are seven years.
29 Seven years
of great abundance are now coming throughout the entire land of Egypt. 30 After
them, seven years of famine will appear, and all of the abundance in the land
of Egypt will be forgotten. The famine will devastate the land. 31 No
one will remember the abundance in the land because the famine that follows
will be so very severe.
Because of Joseph’s interpretation of that dream, he was put in charge of
all the affairs of the country. Sure
enough, there were seven years of abundance, followed by seven years of
famine. But during those years of
surplus, Joseph had the extra stored away in barns so that when the seven years
of famine hit, they had saved up enough food to make it through.
Friends, God can speak through our dreams to prepare us for a preferred future.
God’s dream necessarily has a future component to it, the hope of something
that is yet-to-be-fulfilled, but by the grace of God, can and will be. God’s dream is rooted in the past, a
testimony to the unfailing faithfulness of God, a witness to who God always has
been and what God has always desired, but God’s dream is never to simply reset
the clock and go back to the past.
No, God uses our dreams to show us a preferred future, and then to prepare
for that future. It’s one of the things
that really excites me about where we are as a church right now. In so many of my conversations with you, you
are dreaming about our future, and I believe that God is the one giving you
those dreams. There is some beautiful
synergy in your dreams, and the more I see what you express lining up and
layering over each other, the more our God-given preferred future is revealed. You see, if I talked to you and your hopes
and dreams for the future of the church were all over the map, those might be
our personal dreams, but when all the
dreams start to hit the same page, it tells me we are getting very close to
God’s dream.
Friends, if God gives us a dream, God will also provide every resource we
need to fulfill that dream. It doesn’t
mean God will spoon-feed us – we may still have to use our God-given abilities
to think and plan and strategize – but whatever resources we need, be they
money or people or ministries or relationships or facilities or land or
whatever it is as we move into God’s preferred future, but if God gives us the
dream, and we catch it and move toward it, I know our God will provide. Amen?
Further, no one gets the whole of
God’s dream. We each get a piece. The prophet Joel said that when God’s Spirit
is poured out on all people, our sons and daughters will prophecy. The old will dream dreams, and the young will
see visions. To this day, anywhere God’s
Holy Spirit is found among God’s people, there will be dreams and visions.
So to back it up, let’s be
sure we’re praying to receive the Holy Spirit.
Praying for the Holy Spirit to be poured on us. We pray to feel God’s presence in
unmistakable and life-changing ways. And
then, where the Spirit is, there will be dreams, and there will be
visions. Visions and dreams from
everyone – old and young, sons and daughters, newcomer and
long-established. Catching God’s dream
requires us to listen to each other. We
need each other! The dream of God’s
preferred future is given to all of us, and we realize the fullness of God’s
dream when we listen to and learn from each other – each of us bringing what we
see, what we hope, what we envision.
Another aspect of God’s
dream is that God’s dream is big. As a
kid, I remember taking a large portion of food when the dishes came around, and
sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, not being able to finish it. My mom would look at my dad and say, “Looks
like somebody’s eyes were bigger than his stomach.”
When it comes to God’s
dream, of seeing and preparing for a preferred future, we may be tempted to
keep the dream manageable and only bite off as much as we can chew. That’s a very reasonable, rational approach,
and if we follow it, we will completely short change what God wants. God’s dream is big, God-sized. God’s dream is so big it will require faith
beyond our own abilities and what we ourselves can manage. If we’re dreaming of something we can
accomplish with relative ease on our own, then our dream isn’t big enough. And so, as we discern and act on God’s dream,
let’s make sure we’re pursuing a big, God-size dream. A big God gives big dreams. What’s the thing that we’re pursuing that we
will desperately have to rely upon God to accomplish? What’s the thing that if God doesn’t show up,
it’s never gonna happen? What is the
thing that makes us a bit queasy and sick to our stomachs to think about
attempting it, the thing that pushes us further outside of our comfort zone
than we’ve ever imagined – because that’s the kind of dream that comes from
God.
Dreaming is not just for
the pastor or the leaders or just for the folks who’ve always been here or just
for the young people. What any of us
wants to do needs to take its place in light of what God wants us to do. Yes, we are all called to dream, to dream
God’s dream. God’s dream is the most
important one around here, and it’s the one we’ll follow.
The word of the Lord was
rare, and visions were not widespread, until Samuel laid down and said, “Speak,
Lord, for your servant is listening.”
It’s not lying down on the job.
It’s getting ourselves in a place to hear from God, to dream dreams and
see visions. It’s lying down, so we can
do the job.
Remember, God has not
called us to settle into cozy little cocoons of comfort and complacency. That is not God’s dream. God’s dream calls us to action, and it leads
us into a preferred future. God’s dream
is God-sized. Keep dreaming until yours
is, too.
Speak, Lord, for your
servants are listening.
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