Dreams, Visions And Experiencing God

Summary

We have been talking about visions, night visions and dreams, and how God uses those to communicate with us.

Sometimes He uses them to communicate to us personally, where the message is for the person who experiences the vision. There are a lot of different types of personal communications that God may choose to do through a vision or dream. God speaks to individuals in dreams and visions to show them their destiny, to commission them, to give them specific direction, or even to teach or correct them. God also uses visions to bring some form of inner healing to His servants.

And God will use visions for non-personal communication too. He will release prophetic words in visions, where the person receiving the vision becomes a messenger to deliver the word to someone else.

God seems to have a lot of diversity and creativity in when and how He releases visions. Sometimes visions happen when the person is awake and other times they happen when they are asleep. And sometimes God will even wake up a sleeping person to give them a vision. Sometimes visions are very literal and other times they are highly symbolic. Sometimes we understand the vision as soon as we see it and other times God has to explain the vision to us in order for us to understand what it means.

God is not the only one Who can use a vision to communicate something to us. The devil can give visions and our own desires can cause us to think we have seen a vision from God when we really have not. So it is important that we judge and evaluate our visions just like we judge and evaluate personal prophecies. We need to take them back to God and discuss them with Him. He will be faithful to confirm what is from Him and to help us understand what type of response He is looking for from us. And if the vision was not really form Him, then He will communicate that to us as we bring it back to Him and dialogue with Him about it.

Modern Day Examples Of Visions

God has this amazing sense of timing in terms of how He works in our lives and how He does things. I wanted to write this series some weeks before He would allow me to start on it. God gave me the idea for this series sometime ago. But every time I would go to start on it, He would tell me "Wait" or "Not yet."

He finally allowed me to start on it about two weeks before we were going to have a special guest speaker at our church, a man from Malawi named Surpresa Sithole. I knew we were going to have this guest speaker, but it never crossed my mind that one of the things he would talk about a lot was the very subject I was writing this teaching series on -- visions from God.

Surpresa is from Mozambique. There is this really big revival going on there and spreading to neighboring countries. They have planted over 6000 churches, comprised of new converts, in six years. The Gospel is spreading there like wildfire. God is releasing all sorts of signs and wonders and miracles in this revival, so that the lost might be won. And Surpresa is one of the four international leaders of this revival.

His personal testimony is really amazing. Here is just a little piece of it. He was the unsaved teenage son of the local witch doctor. God spoke to him in a vision one night and woke him up and told him to leave his parents home or he would die. So he left in the middle of the night and just started walking. He walked for some number of weeks (three I think) until he met someone who led him to the Lord. He has been serving God ever since then and has all sorts of visions from God.

I would like to share three stories about Surpesa and visions in closing out this teaching series. These are true stories that have happened very recently in his life. The first is a story Surpresa told us at one of his meetings. The second is a story that was told to me by one of Surpresa's friends, who spent some time ministering with Surpresa and Rolland and Heidi Baker in Mozambique. The third is something I heard and experienced personally at one of his meetings.

Surpresa is currently based in South Africa. This story takes place when Rolland met with him in South Africa. They woke up in the morning and had breakfast. Suddenly Rolland decided they needed to go to this certain village in Malawi. So they got in the plane and went there. Where they arrived, they found a huge crowd gathered, waiting for a crusade meeting to begin. The crowd was composed of both believers and unbelievers, and none of them seemed surprised when Rolland and Surpresa arrived. Some of the people gathered there had walked for two or more weeks to be present.

Surpresa said to several of the people, "I did not even know that we would be coming here until this morning. How did you know to come?" They all replied something along the lines of having received a dream or vision telling them to come to this location to hear Rolland and Surpresa preach to them. And some of them -- unsaved Muslims -- had walked two or three weeks (one direction) to come hear the preaching because of their vision or dream.

Wow.

Of course, most of those who arrived unsaved went home saved.

There is the other story, related by Jim Paul of Ontario Canada. Jim is an internationally recognized prophet and he is also one of the directors of the GodSpeak ministry. He is someone who has permission to speak into my life and we talk from time to time. I had been telling Jim about a vision I had shortly after Surpresa prayed for me at one of the meetings. In response, Jim began to tell me about how Heidi Baker relies on Surpresa's visions during their outreach crusades. Surpresa often would not come out of his room until about noon -- not because he was lazy or sleeping late, but because he was on his face before God, seeking God for specific and detailed direction for the day's meeting. God would give Surpresa visions each day of the outreach. Before the meeting began, Heidi would ask Surpresa what his vision was for that meeting. And she took his answer very seriously. For instance, one day the Lord gave Surpresa a vision of a man in a red shirt standing under this certain tree in a certain portion of the meeting ground. Heidi kept her eye peeled on that tree. She just did general stuff at the meeting and did not start anything important until she saw the man with the red shirt standing under that tree. Then she said, "The Lord just showed up" and they began to pray for the sick and see the miracles that are necessary to convert the Muslims.

The third story is one of my experiences during Surpresa's ministry. It was at a pastors' monthly fellowship meeting, where all the pastors in the city meet once a month for lunch and fellowship and exchange of information about what is going on. I had made two announcements at that meeting that day, both pertaining to prophetic events. The majority of the meeting was Surpresa speaking to us, and at the end he prayed for us. We stood in line waiting our "turn" for prayer. Surpresa would ask each person their name and then pray for impartation -- mostly signs and wonders and miracles and evangelism.

When it came to my turn, Surpresa looked at me for a second and said, "Teresa, right?" At first I was very surprised that he knew my name, then I realized that he had heard it in the meeting when Rodney invited me up to make my announcements. Still it was nice that he remembered my name. When Surpresa prayed for me, I could feel God's power very tangibly. The prayer was short but power-packed. He began to ask God to impart the prophetic to me -- a deeper level of hearing with my ears and a deeper level of seeing with my eyes.

I was surprised that he would ask God to impart into me the one thing I already had a strong anointing in. God heard my unasked question and answered it before I even had a chance to ask Him. This did not happen audibly, but I could hear Surpresa's voice running through my mind, repeating something he had said earlier during the meeting. He was talking about anointing and crying out to God for more, and he said something that will step on most Westerner's toes. He said, "You guys come to God and ask Him to fill you and impart into you. But you don't go use it. Instead you come back the next day and ask God for more. And He gives you more. But you don't go and use that either. Instead you go back and ask God for more. And why should God keep giving you more when you don't even use what He has already given you?" Then Surpresa went on to say, "The way to get more is to use what God has already put in you, then it will begin to grow."

All that flashed before my mind's ear as he prayed for me. I knew I was ministering in the prophetic and training and raising up others to move in the prophetic. And that was why God was having him pray for an increased impartation in the prophetic, because I was already using what I had in it. And in praying for a greater impartation, he was also praying for greater opportunities for me to use the gift. That made it real to me that God wanted to give me more, to take me to the next level. I started thinking about the level and nature of visions that Surpresa had and I began to get excited about what God was imparting to me. The prayer began to sound really good to me.

After Surpresa prayed for me, I wound up having a vision, which was sort of a personal destiny vision. I don't want to bore you with the details of that vision. What I really wanted to share in this story was the principle Surpresa taught: if you want more, then start by really using what you have.

If you want God to speak to you in dreams and visions, then there are two things you can do to help facilitate that. The most important thing is to make sure you obey the stuff God has already spoken to you. This may be something the Holy Spirit quickened to your spirit as you read His word. Or maybe it came as a personal prophecy. Or perhaps God has already given you a personal vision. It doesn't really matter how He spoke it to you. What does matter is that you obey whatever He said to you. That is "using what you already have."

The other thing you can do to facilitate it is to begin asking Him to speak to you in visions. Matthew 7:7 says, "Ask and you shall receive." And James 4:2 says, "You do not have, because you do not ask God." So if you really want a vision from Him, try asking Him for one. He just might give it to you.