Seeing the Voice of God: What God Is Telling You through Dreams and Visions
Read Seeing the Voice of God: What God Is Telling You through Dreams and Visions Online
Authors: Laura Harris Smith
Tags: #REL079000, #Dreams—Religious aspects—Christianity, #Visions
© 2014 by Laura Harris Smith
Published by Chosen Books
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
Chosen Books is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Ebook edition created 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6367-4
Unless noted otherwise, all poetry copyright Laura Harris Smith
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified ASV are from the American Standard Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations identified ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2007
Scripture quotations identified NASB are from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations identified NCV are from the New Century Version®. Copyright © 1987, 1988, 1991 by Word Publishing, a division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified NET are from the NET BIBLE®, copyright © 2003 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. www.netbible.com. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.
www.zondervan.com
Scripture quotations identified NLT are from the
Holy Bible
, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Cover design by Lookout Design, Inc.
“God has been speaking through dreams and visions for generations and promises to pour out His Spirit in the Last Days. What will that look like? How can we know? Laura Harris Smith has done our homework for us. This book is a must-read for the hour we live in!”
Terry Meeuwsen, co-host,
The
700
Club
“I am so glad that my friend Laura has written this eye-opening book about a subject that intrigues me and that the Church should not ignore.”
Mac Powell, lead singer, Third Day
“Laura has a passion to pray, communicate, converse and simply listen with expectancy. Her gentle spirit is evident, and I’m a blessed man to have seen and experienced God’s heart in a very practical and biblical way in Laura—with passion.”
Kerry Woo, former regional director, Promise Keepers
“Laura’s character is defined by integrity, commitment, consistency and quality; she’s a gifted writer and talent. Laura has touched so many lives, and I highly recommend this book for anyone seeking an authentic relationship with God.”
John Niec, producer, JTV; former producer, Shop at Home TV, HSN and QVC
“This book is a unique treasure.
Seeing
the
Voice
of
God
reveals how to unlock the answers you’ve needed to life’s most pressing issues even while you sleep!
Just think, all that time at night that you thought was only good to rest your body is actually His gift to you to reveal mysteries. It is well-researched and deeply scriptural. You can use it both in your personal life and as a manual to teach and train. I love this book!”
Cindy Jacobs, Generals International
For Sheila, who smiled and listened to everything I first saw.
Cover
1
Title Page
3
Copyright Page
4
Endorsements
5
Dedication
7
Foreword by James W. Goll
13
1. Is God Ever Silent?
17
2. When Your Dreams Are for Now: Five Types of Prophetic Dreams for the Present
37
4. Audible Dreams (“Dark Speeches”)
3. When Your Dreams Are for Later: Five Types of Prophetic Dreams for the Future
53
4. Sleep: The Mattress of Dreams
71
Laura’s ABCs for ZZZs Sleep Tips
5. Dream Recall
93
Vitamins, Minerals and Dream Recall
6. Visions
119
7. Interpretations and Dream Dictionary
141
8. 20/20 Hearing
177
9. Deaf and Dumb, but Not Blind!
199
10. Discernment of Spirits
225
The Psychic Realm: An Interview
Top 10 Frequently Asked Questions
247
Notes
249
About the Author
253
Back Cover
255
I
am constantly on the search for next-generation voices that carry content full of the Word of God, walk in the present-day anointing of the Holy Spirit and have character to carry the gift. One of these leaders is Laura Harris Smith. She is a godly woman with her priorities straight.
Living in the Nashville region now for the past several years, I have become a friend and adviser to Eastgate Creative Christian Fellowship, which Chris and Laura Smith co-lead. It is a passionate, Spirit-filled church cultivating the arts as an expression of the faith. I shout a loud AMEN to that!
Balance with an Edge
Seeing
the
Voice
of
God
is a prophetic, progressive book with a cutting edge of truth, yet filled with so much Scripture and life experience that it is uniquely balanced as well. So I call this book “balance with an edge.”
Looking for a source that is biblically centered? Looking for an author who lives her message? Looking to be stretched out of your present comfort zone into new light of the Holy Spirit?
Then look no further. You are holding a balanced book with a sharp edge.
Impartation
If you want to grow in the area of dreams and visions, the gifts of the Holy Spirit and especially discerning of spirits, then your wait is over. Listening, waiting and watching are keys to growth in the things of the Holy Spirit.
The following Scripture exemplifies the content in this book:
For from days of old they
have not heard
or perceived by ear, nor has the eye seen a God besides You, who acts in behalf of the one who waits for Him.
Isaiah 64:4
NASB
, emphasis added
Notice the emphasis in this great Word. Eyes . . . ears . . . are all filled with the revelation of the Holy Spirit. After all, God acts on behalf of the one who waits for Him! Impartation happens when we cooperate with His ways! God acts on behalf of the one. . . . Who is that one?
God is an equal opportunity employer. That one He acts on behalf of can be you. Yes, you can come into a new level of activity of the Holy Spirit!
Fruit That Remains!
The thing I know for sure is that Laura Harris Smith wants to see fruit that remains to the glory of God! Learn the hindrances and move forward with keys to greater growth.
From a deep place of esteem, it is my great honor to commend to you the life, ministry and now writings of Laura Harris
Smith. May your eyes see and may your ears hear the Word of the Lord for such a time as this.
Dr. James W. Goll, director,Encounters Network and Prayer Storm; author,
The Seer
,
Dream Language
,
The Lifestyle of a
Prophet
,
The Coming Israel Awakening
and many others
Is God Ever Silent?
I
t was early 1997, and I had a choice to make and about ten seconds in which to make it. I was in North Carolina at Chimney Rock State Park near Asheville, and my hike up to the top of Hickory Nut Falls had temporarily separated me from the rest of the pack when I had decided to dart into a small, recessed, craggy cave. But it was not just any cave. It was the famous cave behind the 404-foot waterfall featured in the final minutes of the 1992 epic film
The
Last
of
the
Mohicans
, the cave that the entire all-star cast filed into to hide, resulting in a heart-stopping escape that required jumping through the falls from the backside and plummeting into the river below.
I stood there looking at the backside of the waterfall, which was about 15 feet in front of me, and within seconds I was damp from the deafening mist. There was no guard rail, no attendant and most dangerously, none of my family standing there telling me not to go for it (the way they do when I express my desire to go skydiving). I could not believe the peace and fearlessness I felt. It was not as if I did not know where
I would land, because just before heading up the mountain, I passed right by it.
All of a sudden, it was not 404 feet in my mind, but just 5 seconds. Tops. So that I could get a running start, I backed up a few feet, and without a moment’s hesitation, I was off. I do not even remember hitting the wall of water. Just the fall. Arms and legs flailing, it felt like 5 minutes of free fall, not 5 seconds, but the rush was indescribable! And then it happened. What I wish had not. I woke up.
But just before I did, on the way down in the dream, I had heard a booming voice say, “You are going to have a great fall.” It is actually what jolted me awake, not the cold river itself, which I never reached. I sat up in bed with a gasp and immediately shook Chris, my levelheaded husband. Foregoing the cinematic details, I told him about the booming voice in the waterfall, which gave new meaning to John the Revelator’s words, “His voice was like the sound of many waters” (Revelation 1:15
NASB
). Fearfully, I repeated what I had heard: “You are going to have a great fall.”
Without even opening his eyes, Chris calmly said, “Autumn, Laura. You’re going to have a great autumn.” Then he rolled over and went back to sleep. That precise interpretation instantly took me back to the misty peace and fearlessness I had felt just before my leap of faith about 5 seconds and 404 feet before.
It was indeed a great fall that year, and knowing it was coming made the hard summer more tolerable as autumn began to unfold play-by-play following that riveting dream. The adrenalized leap of faith I had experienced at the waterfall (which I later discovered integrated a man-made set in the movie for internal cutaway shots to the cave scenes) perfectly mirrored the plunge we had taken about a month before the dream, when Chris had made the decision to leave his corporate job after a successful, nearly two-decade music career in the Christian record industry. The emotions of the jump were the same as in the dream: peace and fearlessness on the front end and giddy terror immediately following. God had told us to trust Him and jump, but counting all the additional perks and public opportunities (like TV
appearances) that came with his job, it meant going from a six-digit income to zero overnight.
Not to mention that we had five children, the sixth being born during our free fall.
I start with that waterfall dream because it is a classic prophetic dream. Vivid during, stirring afterward and just plain ole pesky. Whether it is an encouragement, a warning, apocalyptic in nature or just giving practical life direction, a prophetic dream has a “gnawing drawing.” You cannot shake it. We will discuss the various types of prophetic dreams in chapters 2 and 3, but the most important thing to remember is that they are invitations. The Holy Spirit Himself is handing you a written invitation to seek Him. For interpretation. For application. For motivation.
Just as light can eventually produce sound,
1
a true prophetic illumination during the night will talk to you all day long.
I call my waterfall dream a prophetic dream, but before we delve further into exactly what that means, let me just say this about personal dreaming: One of the standard definitions when discussing prophecy or prophets in the Hebrew language is the word
nabi
, whose Arabic root word,
naba
, means “to announce.” Thus, a personal prophetic dream is merely God announcing something He is hoping to do through, for or to you.
After trudging through a financially trying summer, I decided to start my “great fall” (the autumn of 1997) off right in anticipation of God’s promise in my waterfall dream. We felt He had directed us to start a Christian management company with a vast artisan roster. Not just musicians, but also actors, artists, dancers and more, and while we already had one solid artist generating revenue, it was not enough to feed our huge family. We wondered why God was not speaking and telling us what else to do. Were our ears clogged? Was He playing hide-and-seek?
I started noticing swarms of Christian books being published on what to do when God is silent. It really started the wheels turning in my head. Was God truly ever silent? Who wants to serve a God who will not talk to them? Did He really see me down here begging for answers and just turn His head and ignore me? If so, I had to figure out why. If not, then all these books on a muted God had to deeply sadden Him. I had to know.
Five Days
More than 5 percent of the world’s population is deaf or has disabling hearing loss—an estimated 360 million people.
2
But ask any Christian, and 100 percent of us will admit to experiencing disabling spiritual deafness, a much more startling figure. Undoubtedly, you have experienced seasons when the heavens were bronze and God seemed silent. These seasons are dangerous to the heart because they can cause it to wander and waver. That is exactly where I was headed. Proverbs 13:12 (
NIV
) says it best: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Finally, while praying one day, I heard God’s voice! But He spoke the most random phrase that had nothing to do with the answers I needed. I heard, “Five days.”
All at once—and I do mean all at once—this plan just laid itself out in front of me, accompanying the random phrase. I felt God saying that I was somehow going to read the Bible in five days, and that I was going to do it with one question in mind: “Is God ever silent?” I would do it not to study any doctrinal or historical context along the way, but just to see if God ever took an uncommunicative posture with mankind. It was as though He was going to settle this in my mind once and for all by taking me through the totality of Scripture to see how He interacted with every now-famous Bible character. When the answers you need are big, no self-help book will do. You have to go to the Author of authors.
But aside from wondering how on earth a mom of then five could steal away for that long, and aside from wondering how on earth a person could read the Bible in five days, there was the other question of where I could go to do this. For free. My father had just built a tiny prayer cabin in the woods on his 250-acre farm, and he agreed that I could be his first guest.
Before leaving for the farm, I did an experiment and timed myself by reading one average-sized Bible chapter to see if this goal was even feasible, because it sure seemed impossible to me. It took a little over two minutes for one chapter. Of course, some chapters are longer, but others are shorter, like Psalm 117, which is 2 verses long and contains fewer than 30 words. I then multiplied that 2¼ minutes by 1,189—the number of chapters within the 66 Bible books. The time came out to only 44¾ hours. That meant only a 9-hour reading day over 5 days, which was really no different from working a 40-hour workweek! I was thrilled at this attainable goal. Here was how it panned out in the end:
Day 1: Read Genesis through Numbers, 153 chapters @ approximately 2¼ minutes each = 5¾ hours.
Day 2: Read Deuteronomy through Esther, 283 chapters @ approximately 2¼ minutes each = 10½ hours.
Day 3: Read Job through Ezekiel, 414 chapters @ approximately 2¼ minutes each = 15½ hours.
Day 4: Read Daniel through Acts, 196 chapters @ approximately 2¼ minutes each = 7½ hours.
Day 5: Read Romans through Revelation, 143 chapters @ approximately 2¼ minutes each = 5½ hours
Total: 66 books (1,189 chapters) in 44¾ hours within 5 days.
I did not “chew” on each verse, but read continuously, stopping only to write in a journal about any passages related to God’s mouth or man’s ears. God had given me this insatiable desire to read through the Bible with one question in mind: “Is God ever silent?” The books dealing with this topic were
selling like hotcakes, and it seemed to me that they were putting words in God’s mouth out of desperation in a hearing drought. I wondered if God was frustrated at the assumption that He would zip His lip and withhold direction from us. I found that contradictory to His benevolent nature. My hopeful hunch was that these authors were using such titles as a tease, and then leading their readers through steps on rest and perhaps repentance that would unclog their ears.
Surely no author would waste two hundred pages defending the argument that God has a mute button.
Those five days changed my life. In a prayer cabin with only a wood stove, chopped wood and an oil lamp, I read through the entire Bible and answered my question without a doubt: “
No
—God is
never
silent.” I found plenty of verses that put the burden back on the shoulders of mankind, such as, “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the L
ORD
will not hear me” (Psalm 66:18
KJV
). But I found nothing to imply that God becomes deaf and mute and withholds His counsel when we are walking uprightly in Him. Psalm 50:3 (
NIV
) even says, “Our God comes and will not be silent.” That was answer enough for me. God will
not
be silent.
There was a period referred to as the “400 years of silence” that took place between Malachi (the very last of the Old Testament prophets) and Jesus’ birth. But both Jews and many Christian groups view this period as one in which the prophets were silent nationally, but not as a time when God Himself was silent. Luke 2:36 mentions that the prophetess Anna was very old at the time of Jesus’ birth, so clearly God was still speaking and prophets and prophetesses were still prophesying during those 400 years. God did not speak Scripture during this time, but He spoke individually and congregationally. Likewise, God did not speak Scripture during the time humankind was in the Garden of Eden, but He was still speaking. In fact, He has not
spoken Scripture for more than nineteen centuries, but He has still been speaking. He will not be silent.
So then, if God is never silent, why did it seem as though God was not speaking to my family and me lately? We had scraped the sides of our hearts clean a hundred times, humbly seeking Him. And then it hit me. If you have done the last thing God told you to do and are hearing nothing new, then you are perfectly within His will and can relax until the next step comes. We had, and we did.
To this day I hold that cabin journal in my hands and marvel at what God did during that “great fall.” A quote from my journal says, “I believe these five days in God’s Word are key days in this fall saga. I am expectant at what God will do during this season, at who He will be for me for the first time and who I will become in Him that will affect my lifetime.” That woman was right. Through a dream, He had used her eyes to open her ears.
He wants to do the same for you.
Four Eyes and Four Ears
Every Christian has four eyes and four ears. You are given one set when you are born and another set when you are born again. Through prophetic dreaming, God can communicate direction to you that perhaps you would not be able to hear while awake in your distracting environment. This is the entire basis behind the idea of this book about
seeing
the voice of God, because it involves communication without speech. We all know it is possible to communicate without words. Baseball players do it. Participants in a game of charades do it. Animals do it. Even babies do it.
Why, then, should God be limited to using only our ears to communicate with us? Did He not also give us four other senses with which to experience Him? He can speak to us through touch, taste, smell and, most certainly, sight. He created them
all, and everything He created is intended to help us comprehend Him. And besides, just as in my waterfall dream, oftentimes dreams do contain spoken words, so the spiritual ears are engaged. It is as if through dreams, the person who claims to have a hard time hearing God’s voice suddenly hears with undistracted precision. Job 33:14–18 confirms this:
For God may speak in one way, or in another,
Yet man does not perceive it.
In a dream, in a vision of the night,
When deep sleep falls upon men,
While slumbering on their beds,
Then He opens the ears of men,
And seals their instruction.
In order to turn man from his deed,
And conceal pride from man,
He keeps back his soul from the Pit,
And his life from perishing by the sword.
“In a dream . . . He opens the ears. . . .” There you have it. We can hear with our eyes! Thus, dreams are an essential tool for people who question their ability to hear the voice of God. Visions, too. I often find that when people say they cannot hear God’s voice, they are actually seers in training and do not know it. It is as though God is bypassing their ears and going straight to their eyes, which may become their strongest line of communication with Him. They have an enhanced prophetic eye through dreams and visions, and God wants to grow them in that.
As you can tell by now, I believe that God wants to speak to you at night. (If you are someone who works at night and sleeps by day, these promises are still just as much yours.) If we spend a third of our day in bed, and thus a third of our life in bed, then that means a 60-year-old woman has been asleep for 20 years of her life. With this math, it means that you yourself are asleep about 122 days out of every year. Why would God waste so much of your lifetime by being out of touch with you during those precious hours?