Today is the Day to Give God Your Dreams

One thing that makes humans unique is our ability to dream.  No, I’m not talking about the kind of recurring dream where you’re at school and you can’t remember your locker combination or you look down and figure out you forgot to put on clothes…  I’m talking about the dreams where you think of the future, your plans, and where you’d like to be in five years, ten years… 

I remember sitting in a hot tub with my best friend – talking about the future, about where we’d be.  Lucrative jobs, money flowing in, fast cars…  Guess what?  Neither of us is living that dream. 

I’ve talked to a bunch of brides who don’t have any affiliation with a church (or, for that matter, a real belief system at all), but they want to have a “church wedding” because they’ve always dreamed of walking down that aisle.

Many of us have dreams. What kind of dreams do you have?  What is your goal?  Where are you heading?  Now understand that the reason we have dreams is because God made us that way.  God made us to be dreamers.  God made us to be people who boldly strike out to seek fulfillment of our dreams.  This past week we celebrated the life of a man who boldly proclaimed “I have a dream” – a dream of racial equality in America. 

What happens when you’ve dreamed, you’ve done everything, and yet you’ve not seen any results?  One of my friends, Becky Piatt, is a United Methodist pastor in Westerville, and she has traveled the journey of waiting for God to fulfill her dream.  Check out her story. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8huNm1B4s1Y

Becky stood in line with other famous women in the Bible: Sarah, Abraham’s wife, who was ninety years old and barren; Hannah, Samuel’s mother, who poured out her soul to the LORD, asking for a son; Elizabeth, whose husband, Zechariah, the priest, doubted the word of the angel Gabriel, who told him his (elderly) wife would give birth… women whose prayers God heard, women who God granted that dream of being a mother.

But that isn’t always what happens.  I am fairly certain that each of you knows someone who has never realized his or her deepest dream.  In fact, that person may be you.  You know the woman who is crushed every mother’s day because she hasn’t had the child she has been praying for.  You might be the person whose loved one died, even though your dream was to grow old together.  Maybe your dream died so long ago that you don’t dare to dream anymore. Maybe you can relate to Becky’s story as you wait for an answer to your prayer, fulfillment of your dream.

This morning, let’s look at dreams – how to give your dreams to God like Becky did. First of all, remember that there are many kinds of dreams.  Some are God-given dreams, but others aren’t.  Last week I told you Mike Yaconelli’s story about a girl in his congregation who dreamed of her church offering radical hospitality to the carnies who came to town every year.  Clearly a God-given dream.  My dream of hitting a three-pointer at the buzzer to win a national championship… probably not a God-given dream.

Now, this might sound counter-intuitive, but one of the keys to following and achieving the dream that God has given you is to surrender your dream to God. 

I cannot stress enough how important it is to surrender your dream to God.  Becky shared how she had to surrender the dream of giving birth to her own child – how she and her husband had already decided to pursue adoption and how she was able to celebrate all of the youth she got to “mother” – and because she had surrendered her dream to God, the route of adoption would not have been merely “second best” but true fulfillment in her life.  In his book The Dream Giver, Bruce Wilkinson stresses the importance of giving your dream to God. “If you don’t surrender your dream, you will be placing it higher on your priority list than God.   You will go forward from this moment with a break in your relationship with your Dream Giver. Your dream will become an idol.  But your dream – no matter how big – will make a tiny god. Your dream is meant to be about more than itself or you. A God-given dream brings you together with what God wants to do in His world through you. You are meant to be a river of blessing, not a puddle drying in the sun.”

I’ve told you multiple times how going to seminary meant giving up my dream of coaching soccer.  But once I had chosen to follow His plan, He gave me the soccer coaching gig, too.

Maybe your dream is something you’ll be working toward for all of your life – maybe you were meant to only be a part of the dream and someone else will come along after you and they will see the fruition of what you set out to accomplish.  When I returned from my mission trip to Russia in 1993, one of the debriefing questions I was asked was, “What are you going to do next?” meaning – how was God calling me to use what I’d learned and how I’d grown while on the mission field.  My response was short-term; I was going to start a Bible study in my fraternity.  I had a dream of reaching my fraternity for Christ.  We started with four of us; me, Drew, David, and Weasel (my roommate whom I forced to come).  I led the study for a year; we started out meeting in my room at the fraternity house.  Then it grew a little bit, and more than four really wouldn’t fit in my room, so we moved upstairs to the library.  We still hadn’t “reached the fraternity” though.   
The next year I graduated and turned leadership over to Drew.  Sometimes during that next year, I’d come back and visit Drew’s Bible study, which had outgrown the library and now was so large that they had to meet in the living room.  Which enabled them to reach new guys… I had the dream, but it wasn’t about me – it was about God. And I stood in line with the heroes of the faith, who did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. (Hebrews 11:13)

When it comes to your God-given dream, remember that God has planted it in your heart.  You might be thinking that it’s overwhelming, that you can’t accomplish it, that you’ll never see the fruit of your dream.  This week I got a phone call from Asbury Seminary – they call their alumni every year to keep in touch and to ask for prayer requests.  After Nancy (the caller) prayed for me and told me about the neat things that were going on, I asked how I could pray for her. She is an empty-nest, second-career seminary student, and she doesn’t know where God is leading her.  But she is sure that she is following a God-given dream of becoming a pastor.

Sounds overwhelming, but here’s the thing: God-given dreams often seem overwhelming at the outset.  Why?  Because God loves to take “little” people and accomplish great things with them. Little people like Gideon, the runt of the litter, of the weakest family of the smallest tribe of Israel. Little people like Moses the stutterer.  Little people like David the shepherd. Little people like Peter the fisherman.  Little people like you and me.

And God uses little people to accomplish great things for Him.  This is an important reminder when we’re looking at God-given dreams; if they are truly God-given, they will serve God’s bigger plan in the world.  I practiced that last second shot in my backyard all the time, but that wasn’t going to serve God’s bigger plan; it was all about me getting carried off the court in victory.  Now, this isn’t to say that sports can’t be a God-given dream; I lived in central Kentucky when Cameron Mills helped lead UK to the NCAA championship.  Cameron Mills was an excellent basketball player, but he saw his stardom and celebrity status as simply a means to an end.  His real goal was to share Jesus Christ, and being who he was in a UK basketball crazy state, he had an excellent platform to share.

Unfortunately the obstacles to following God-given dreams are huge.  Any of us could find thousands of objections or reasons why you can’t reach your dream. And most of us have plenty of negative voices telling us we can’t do it.

Bruce Wilkinson outlines five types of negative voices in his book The Dream Giver. There’s the bully who beats you down. There’s the alarmist telling you “it’s not safe.” There’s the traditionalist saying “that’s not the way we do it” or “we’ve never done it that way.” The defeatist says “it’s not possible.” And there’s the antagonist making sure you know that “I won’t let you succeed.”  I wonder which of these negative people had frustrated the paralyzed man in our scripture today.  Jesus asked him “Do you want to get well?” His response: “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” (John 5:6b-7)

Did you notice that this guy never answered Jesus’ question?  He never said, “Yes, I want to be healed.”  Instead he focused on the objections, why he hadn’t achieved his dream of healing. I wonder if those weren’t all of his objections.  Like, what happened if he did make it into the water and nothing happened?

Sometimes the fear of failure itself can paralyze. All of those negative voices keep adding up.  This is too big for you to do it.  We know who you are – you’re just a nobody.  Nothing good could ever come from Millersport.  Or Perry County.  This is exactly what they said about Jesus.  Jesus told Philip, “Follow me.” So Phillip went and found his friend Nathanael and told him, “We’ve found the Messiah!!! The one Moses wrote about!  The one the Prophets foretold! And he’s from Nazareth!” That was the wrong move.  Nazareth was a backwater.  A nothing. Nowhere. Nathanael’s response: “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?”  (John 1:43-46 paraphrased).

Instead of focusing on how impossible your dream is, focus on the God who gave you the dream.  Keep praying for the result you’ve dreamed of.  For 38 years the paralyzed man had hoped for healing.  Have you ever dreamed a dream for so long that you don’t even believe in it anymore? Elizabeth and Zechariah’s story is a great reminder that God is still listening.  I love what Becky had to say about this: the only thing that is impossible for God is to do nothing. Even if every obstacle stands in your way, God is still working on your behalf.  So continue to pray and pour your heart out to God. Here’s the thing: God doesn’t just do miracles for the sake of showing off.  Jesus was clear about this.  In Matthew 12, the Pharisees demanded that Jesus do a miracle for them.  He told them no, and then he gave this strange speech. “When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.  Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there.  And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.” (Matthew 12:43-45).

Unless the result of a miracle is that the person surrenders their life to Jesus and allows the Holy Spirit to fill them, in the end, they will be worse off than they started out.  This holds true for you and your dreams as well.  Give God your dreams and allow Him to fill you.  Or another way to put it is this: seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:33).

As you focus on God, believe that He will fulfill your dream, and behave as if God is fulfilling your dream. Becky referenced the “nothing is impossible with God” scripture from Luke 1 – but shortly before that scene was the scene where God told Zechariah that he and his wife Elizabeth, well along in years, would have a child.  Now, we know that Mary’s pregnancy was miraculous – that she conceived having never slept with Joseph.  This wasn’t the case with Elizabeth and Zechariah.  Luke 1:23 says When his time of service [in the Temple] was completed, he returned home. After this, his wife Elizabeth became pregnant… You see, they had a part to play in the fulfillment. 

When I’d moved to New Knoxville, I was sad to leave my soccer team, and I dreamed that God would give me the opportunity to play.  So when I first arrived there, I took my soccer ball and walked down to the city park, where I met a couple of people who I quickly became friends with, a teenager from the high school team (who is now in the Air Force in Afghanistan) and a parent of teenagers who was disillusioned with the institutional church.  Two people who I could reach out to with God’s love.  Meanwhile, I was getting to play soccer.  I simply lived out what I knew to be true. 

So if you believe God is really working on your behalf, what does that mean for you?  For Nancy, the woman from Asbury Seminary to whom I spoke this week, it meant researching the next steps for a career change and taking the time to take seminary classes toward her degree.  For Cameron Mills of Kentucky basketball fame, it meant a whole lot of time in the gym shooting jump shots and free throws (as well as even more time in the Word of God and prayer). 

What might your life look like if you were to behave as if God is working to fulfill your dream? What part might you need to play?  If you dream of raising Godly children, your part might be to become the spiritual leader that God is calling you to be in your family. Are you modeling Christlikeness in front of them?  Do they see you spending time in the Word and in prayer? If you dream to be at the center of a ministry that reaches our community, you might need to start with small acts of service. If your dream is for your cell group to be a meaningful, growing part of the body of Christ, maybe you need to start by opening up and sharing your struggles and what God is teaching you through them.  If your dream is to see our church grow, you need to share Jesus with someone – maybe invite them to church or to your cell group.  God sometimes intervenes miraculously, but usually He asks little, ordinary people like us to take a step of faith to accomplish the dreams He has given us.

So, what are your dreams?  What’s it going to take to see them come true?  I’ll invite you to spend some time prayerfully reflecting about that and asking God to show you next steps.  Write it down.  Have you surrendered your dream to God?  Or has the dream become an idol for you? Are you willing to step away from your dream if stepping away will accomplish God’s plan for you?  Are you totally focused on God?  And are you working toward accomplishment of the dream?  Today is the day to Trust God with Your Dreams.