Dreams, Visions And Experiencing God

There is not a clear Scriptural precedent for what I am going to teach in this lesson. There is nothing unscriptural about it, but you won't find a clear-cut precedent in Scripture for doing it either. So if you are not comfortable with what I present here, please feel free to discard it.

I am going to talk about a technique of meditating on Scripture that some people practice. It has been around for centuries and centuries, so it is not something new that I have come up with. It comes from a time in church history, dating back as far as the end of the first century and continuing through medieval times where the presence and power of God had gone out of the services. All they had was faith, form and ritual. There is nothing wrong with faith -- it is a very good thing. In fact, you can't please God without faith.

But God has always intended for our faith to be accompanied by a deep and intimate relationship with Him. He always intended for us to hear His voice (John 10:27) and to regularly experience His nearness and fullness, as per Eph 3:17-19: "That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height -- to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God."

During this spiritually dry time in church history, there were groups of believers who rediscovered "experiencing God." They came up with some techniques to assist them in this process. Some of those were weird and died out over time. Others were truly helpful and are still practiced today. One of them is a form of meditation on God's word to help the word become alive to you. It is called several different names, such as "Christian Meditation," etc. I like to call it "Holy Imagination" or "Godly Imagination," because it involves using your imagination to the glory of God.

It is based on the concept of meditating on Scripture. There are many verses in the Bible that encourage us to do that. Joshua 1:8 tells us, "This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success." The books of Psalms mentions meditating on God's word several times: Psalm 1:2, Psalm 4:4, Psalm 63:6, Psalm 77:6, Psalm 77:12, Psalm 119:15, Psalm 119:23, Psalm 119:27, Psalm 119:48, Psalm 119:78, Psalm 119:148, Psalm 143:5 and Psalm 145:5. It is also mentioned in Malachi 3:16, Philippians 4:8 and 1 Timothy 4:15.

The Bible does not exactly explain how we are to meditate on God's word. Some people think that "meditating on God's word" means memorizing it and recalling it frequently, so that it begins to affect and change our behavior. Some people think it means studying it and breaking it down and really understanding what it means and how to apply it to our lives today. Both of these are good things and I encourage you to practice both of them.

But I want to share another technique that these early Christians came up with. It is another way to meditate on Scripture, to make it come alive to you. Their technique was to pray and ask God to sanctify their imagination; to use their imagination to His glory by applying it to His word. Then they would choose a section of Scripture and apply their imagination to it, to make it "come alive" to them. This practice was their interpretation of how to apply Philippians 4:8, which says, "Christian brothers, keep your minds thinking about whatever is true, whatever is respected, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever can be loved, and whatever is well thought of. If there is anything good and worth giving thanks for, think about these things."

For instance, they might read the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. And they might ask themselves, "What was this like from Isaac's perspective?" They might imagine the child's excitement at being invited to come with his father to travel to a mountain to do the sacrifice. They might imagine what the walk up the mountain felt like to Isaac, where he was carrying the wood and maybe running ahead of Dad from time to time in his excitement to get there. They might imagine what it was like to realize that they forgot the sacrifice. They might imagine Isaac's surprise and maybe fear when his father bound his hands and lifted him on top of the altar. They might imagine Isaac's relief when the angel appeared and told Abraham that he did not have to go through with the sacrifice. How might this experience have effected Isaac's personal walk with God?

In short, they would ask God to sanctify their imagination and then apply it to some Bible story or situation in a godly way. They might imagine what it felt like to Paul when he had to write letters of rebuke and correction to a church he had planted. Stuff like that.

When you do a "holy imagination" you do not let go of reality. You are aware that you are imagining what it might be like rather than really experiencing it (say in a vision). But you are trying to apply as many of your senses as possible to the Bible passage, to make it come alive to you. And you don't do this in a vacuum, you do in from a place of prayer and drawing near to God. And God helps you to apply your imagination to the Bible passage so that comes more alive for you.

Sometimes the holy imagination might get launched from a real life experience. You experience something and you think, "Oh, this is what it must have felt like in Bible times..." Let me share an example from my life.

I take my dogs hiking with me from time to time. One day when they were still puppies (about 10 months old) and bounding with energy, we did this really steep trail in a park. I was huffing and puffing and trying to make my way up the steep, mountainous trail. The dogs were chasing each other and darting in/out of my legs as I tried to walk forward, and almost tripping me at times. That morning I had read from Exodus where Moses was tending sheep when he saw the burning bush on the mountain. The dogs darted in front of me and came to a halt, making me break my stride. (That is not a comfortable thing to do when you are negotiating a steep trail.) That incident got me thinking -- "I wonder if it was like that for Moses when he was herding the sheep. Did the sheep, or maybe the sheepdogs, get underfoot and make it harder to walk up the steep, mountainous trails?" From there, I began imagining what it might have been like for Moses that morning, driving his sheep up the hill and unaware that he was about to have a life-changing encounter with God.

Occasionally, God will launch us into a vision from a holy imagination, but that does not happen very often. Most of the time we simply ask God to sanctify our thoughts and imagination, and then apply it to some Bible story.

Let me share one of my personal "Godly Imagination" experiences with you so that you can get an idea of what it is like, just in case you might want to experiment with this technique of meditating on Scripture.

One time I was reading the story of how God delivered Israel from Egypt's captivity. I came to the part in Exodus 14 where God parted the Red Sea for the Israelites to pass on dry land, and Pharaoh forced his army to pursue them through the parted sea. I found myself wondering what it must have been like from the soldiers' perspective. I mean, God was a pillar of fire standing between them and the people they were chasing. Chariot wheels were falling off, slowing them down. They were marching between giant walls of water towering over them. I wondered what it was like from their perspective, since they were enemies of God.

I felt God telling me to let my imagination run with that. So I mentally "became" one of the foot soldiers chasing the children of Israel. I remember feeling very nervous about entering the tunnel between the ocean as the water towered over my head on either side of me. But I knew that I'd face instant death if I did not move forward, because my commander would thrust me through with his sword. So I pressed in. Somehow in the midst of all this, I ended up somewhere near the front of our line. When I saw the pillar of fire form before me, I suddenly realized that this was really a powerful God. I found myself wishing that I could know this God, Who cared so greatly for His people and protected them in such powerful ways. I found myself dropping to my knees before this God. I knew that I would get run through with a sword from my commander if I did not get up, but somehow knowing this God seemed more important than life itself.

(Let me explain that this was simply applying my imagination to the story. I knew it was not real. I knew that in reality I was sitting in my prayer room, but I could still sense and identify with the feelings and emotions of this imaginary foot soldier. I use the word "pretend" to describe this type of imagined scenario where I get a feel of what someone might have experienced. I could sense and identify with the feelings and emotions of this "pretend" soldier much more than if I were watching a movie in a theater.)

In my pretend, I found myself praying, "Oh God of the Israelites, I want to know you. Is there anyway that this is possible?"

Just then, flames from the pillar of fire shot out and devoured the soldier who was advancing toward it on my left. I did not move, but remained kneeling before God. I could literally feel His presence and His holiness (just like I have felt His presence in a vision or other times when He chose to manifest Himself to me in a tangible way. I knew this was pretend, but God's presence in it was real. I sort of pulled out of the pretend scenario, becoming frightened now that God seemed to show up in this way. God spoke to me and told me it was OK; He was with me. He told me to allow my imagination to continue and to get to experience Him from this perspective.)

So I allowed the pretend to continue. I remember feeling surprised that my captain never ran me through with my sword. The other soldiers near me began to retreat after the one was consumed by the flame. But I remained kneeling before this God. I felt the same terror I once felt in a "real vision" when I was transported before God's throne and saw some measure of His glory. I knew that in the pretend, the blood of Jesus was not covering this foot soldier. I expected the fire to devour my "character." But instead God began to speak to the soldier. He said that He would accept the soldier as His own if the solder desired to honor and serve Him. The soldier would have to lose his physical life with the other soldiers, but God would grant him eternal life if he believed on God. Still pretending to be the soldier, I expressed a very real commitment to His Lordship in my life, whether I was to live or die. I remember feeling astonished by the grace that God had for those who turned to Him, even back before Jesus came to die for mankind.

The pretend continued a bit longer, but you don't need to know all of the details. The point is that God used my imagination to allow me to feel and experience things (knowing they weren't really happening) in a seemingly "real" fashion. It made me experience God's character and His nature and His grace from a different perspective, and the end result was that I became even more in awe of Him and felt even closer to Him.

Let me emphasize again, the elements in my pretend -- the Egyptian soldier converting when he got near God and going to heaven when he died in the Red Sea -- that probably never happened. My personal nature would be to convert and want to serve God once I saw what He was like. So my nature shined through in my imagination of the incident. It was sort of a hypothetical "this is what it would have been like for me" if I was there as an Egyptian soldier in that story.

The goal is to apply our imagination to Scripture in a way that glorifies God and draws us closer to Him. During the whole process, we are aware and understand that this is not really happening; we were just creating the story in our minds, applying our imagination to it. This technique is not for everyone, but it can make a passage of Scripture really come alive to us.