Seeing the Voice of God: What God Is Telling You through Dreams and Visions (21 page)

The Interpreter Within

The Holy Spirit within you is the best interpreter of your dream or vision. While it is true that God often gives one person the dream or vision and another person the interpretation to keep us needing one another, there are times when no friend, pastor or dream dictionary can help you. And on the occasions when you look up a symbol here and it does not “click” in your heart, my advice is to keep seeking and praying. God has concealed it in this manner to draw you unto Himself, so go to Him. Listen to Proverbs 25:2: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter.”

The teacher of my first class on the prophetic taught me that verse back in 1994. He used to advise us to ask ourselves after a dream, “What am I left with?” He taught us to examine the emotions we awake with and use them as signposts in our journey toward interpretation. So I ask you the same. Do you feel peace? Or are you left with fear? Any dream where you awake in fear is not of God. If you or your child suffers from
nightmares, pray each night before bed and declare that your bed is a peaceful place where only the Holy Spirit is allowed to speak to you.

Finally, journal. Prophet James Goll says that journaling is stewarding revelation. In his new book
Exploring Your Dreams and Visions: Receive
and Understand Your Dreams, Visions, and Supernatural Experiences—Your Personal
Revelatory Journal
(Destiny Image, 2012), he says, “Journaling is a tried and tested spiritual tool that will help you retain revelation and grow in your capacity to discern the voice of the Holy Spirit. I have tried it, and it works!”
2

I suggest that you start a log—what I call a Lookbook—for all of your seeing experiences, both dreams and visions. Keep it by your bedside and carry it with you to church. But be careful not to let it replace your emphasis on God’s Word. Goll warns,

Some believers express concern that journaling is an attempt to put subjective revelation on the same level of authority as Scripture. This is not the case at all. The Bible
alone
is the infallible Word of God. Journaling is just another tool to help us retain and be more faithful with what He speaks to us.
3

As for sharing your dreams with others, I will leave you with this hard-and-fast rule that I set for myself years ago and have taught others along the way: “Revelation without interpretation hinders application.” Nothing is worse for your reputation than telling someone about your “blue pig on a pink fence” dream and expecting them to be edified when you yourself are clueless as to its meaning. Pray about what you see. Journal what you interpret. If the dream or vision is for someone else, pray for his or her heart to be prepared before you ever come to the person. Remember, timing is everything.

Cryptic Does Not Mean Crazy

You gotta love Ezekiel. The visions he saw were nothing short of hallucinogenic, yet his nation would not have survived without them. And he still feeds us today. Wheels full of eyes? Creatures with four faces? Seriously? I sometimes think he was seeing sky images he had no contextual words for at that time, like airplanes and helicopters.

What if Ezekiel had dismissed all of that important information as a pizza dream? Impossible, since pizza was not even invented for another fifteen hundred years, but I guess this is a prophet we are talking about. Thank goodness he did not dismiss what he saw. He chose to “perceive” it as the voice of his Lord. Ezekiel saw the voice of God.

My brain is pretty concrete, so Ezekiel-type dreams require divine wisdom for me to interpret for someone. I say “for someone” because I rarely have them myself. Oh, I dream in plenty of symbols almost nightly, but not creatures with multiple faces and eyes. And I cannot take credit for wondering if Ezekiel’s creatures were airplanes, because years ago someone planted the thought in my head, and many commentaries later, I decided to mention it here so that I could persuade you to do as Ezekiel did—“perceive” when God is speaking to you and do not dismiss something because it seems incoherent. Cryptic does not always mean crazy.

Ezekiel’s contemporaries were the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, but while Jeremiah’s book is all doom and Isaiah’s book is all consolation, Ezekiel’s provides a beautiful mixture of both, beginning with doom and ending with comfort. I believe “Ezekiel seers” have this same mode of operation. They often see visions that contain stipulations and conditions: “If you will do this, then God can do this for you.” So while the front end of the message (or “advice,” if this seer is just your friend) may seem a little negative, a positive outcome is on its heels. If you cannot see that, then who is really the one being negative?

If you yourself are an Ezekiel, be very careful of what you put before your eyes in terms of movies and images, especially at night if you are a dreamer. And do not be discouraged when you are misunderstood, isolating yourself from the people whom God wants to grace you to serve. They need you! Some pastor somewhere needs you! It is vital that prophetic people respect the office of pastor in the local church. If there is ever an incident where they feel they cannot respect the man himself, they must maintain a reverence for the office he holds. To disrespect that office will clog your visionary filter, because I am telling you, God loves His shepherds and
will
stop the prophetic flow to you if you do not respect them. Never leave where you are to move to the “wounded seer’s island.” Before you know it, all pastors are traitors and organized religion is evil.

Whenever I see one of these loud-mouthed, organized religion haters—and now I am speaking of those who are not Christians at all—I see through the roughness and mourn the calling the person has missed. God gifted such people with the nature of a prophet, but either some religious fool put a bad taste in their mouths when it comes to Christianity, or they got offended at the concept of needing grace and denied it. But I personally love these types. The Church needs more tenacious revolutionaries to lead us, but if, in asking them to unite in a common faith, we ask them to conform to a cookie-cutter personality, we will lose them. We have lost so many. These types usually wind up shipwrecked and alone. Do not be among them, especially if you are a seer.

If Counsel be your cousin

And Prayer, your trusted twin

Then Wisdom is your brother

And Discernment, your close kin

© Laura Harris Smith, February 2013

PRAYER

Let’s pray out loud together:

God, interpretations belong to You, as do the dreams and visions You send. In the interpretations are the messages You want me to pray with and live by, so I thank You that as I seek You diligently in prayer, I will find You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

IMPARTATION

Right now, I release and impart to you the ability to discern God’s will with what you see in your dreams and visions. I also call forth godly counsel for you to turn to as you process what is revealed. Finally, I pray that faith is ignited in your heart as you trust God with what you see and let it find its way into your life. (Now open your hands, shut your eyes and receive it.)

S
o far we have spent about 40,000 words discussing your eyes (I guess you could say that is about 20,000 per eye), and now it is time for us to turn our full attention to your ears. We have discussed how God can bypass deaf spiritual ears with vivid dreams and visions, but I would be a bad friend if I did not investigate the reasons why you are not hearing His voice, or are not hearing it as clearly as you would like.

Have you ever wondered what clogs your spiritual ears? You will remember we learned in chapter 1 that God is not a silent, muted God, so even in seasons when His voice is inaudible, that does not mean He is not speaking. He is just on a different frequency, and you have somehow gotten on the wrong channel. Becoming aware of how you got there is the first step toward getting back on the same wavelength with God’s voice.

S-T-A-T-I-C

Static is one of those irritating nuisances that impede communication. If you have ever owned a phone, a television or a radio,
you know it is true, even in today’s digital age. The transmitter may be in perfect working condition, along with the reception device itself, but if there is static or any other kind of interference in between them, the signal will be lost. What is the static that comes in between you and God? In between His voice and your ears? Here is how I define
static
:

S
in

T
ime

A
mbivalence

T
rials

I
lliteracy (not reading the Word)

C
ompeting voices

Sin

Appropriately, this comes first because not only is it the most vicious hindrance, but it is the hindrance that must be dealt with first if you want to hear God’s voice (or see it). You could rid yourself of all the other static, but if you disregard this one, you will see no change. So let me pull out all my big guns and devote some seriously blunt attention to this one, more than to any of the others.

Sin will keep you from hearing God because it keeps you
from
God. It produces disfellowship, and if left unconfessed and unchanged, it mass-produces it. God is holy and cannot dwell where there is sin, so it stands to reason that if you are too far from God, you are out of earshot. But the real dilemma is that humankind is sinful by nature; how do we ever have a fair shot at a relationship with God, period? That is why He sent His Son in human form, so that by having walked in the same shoes as we do in this fallen world, He is immediately compassionate about the temptations we weather.

But God did not just send His Son to be compassionate. He sent Him to take your place at death’s door so that when you
get there one day, you can cross that threshold into an eternity in God’s presence without having your debt of sinful humanity be an issue. But that does not happen if you get to the door and He does not know you. If you did not invite Jesus to be a part of your life, then why would He be a part of your death? He is a gentleman and will never force Himself on you or anyone.

God also did not just send Jesus to be a moral teacher. Consider this example: You are sinking in the ocean and a boat comes by. As you flail around, you wait for someone to save you. You do not need compassion because compassion alone will not rescue you. And you do not need a teacher to tell you how to tread water faster, or even a coach to encourage you to hang in there. What you need is a savior. That is what Jesus is—or what He wants to be for you.

So first, you need to make sure that you have truly been saved. Can you name the date when you received Christ into your heart? Not when you were baptized, your parents baptized you or you joined a church, but when you prayed for salvation and saw a sweeping life change.

If you cannot name a date, make sure that you did not just begin living a lifestyle without the new life inside of you. We must fully repent of our wrong living and be born again. Only after that birth can God truly be your Father and can you know His voice. “Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God” (John 8:47
NIV
). Wow. “You do not belong to God”? The New King James Version says, “You are not of God,” and
of
is the Greek word
ek
, which also means “by.” In essence, this verse is saying you do not hear God because you are not “by” Him. Again, you are out of earshot.

Once you are saved, there is no substitute for holiness in your life. Unless you say yes to walking wholeheartedly in the Holy Spirit, you will never activate holiness. Romans 8:5–6 says,
“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”
Holiness
is the Hebrew word
qodesh
, meaning “set-apartness,” and in the Greek it is
hagiosyne
, which among other things means “moral purity.”

Some people counter, “I can do this-or-that and still be a Christian,” and that is true. But come on, we are all smart enough to see from the previous biblical definitions that true holiness means that your conduct is set apart from the way the world lives and that you possess a moral purity the lost do not. Your life should look very different from the lives of your lost friends and family members. So should your refrigerator’s contents, the media that enters your home and the language you use. So different that the lost all would be highly uncomfortable around you if it were not for your limitless love and irresistible laugh. A dinner invitation to your home should generate in your unsaved friends an internal confrontation between wanting to elude you and being utterly unable to live without you—a clashing of conviction and curiosity. (And curiosity always wins.)

Moral impurity will not necessarily keep you out of heaven, but it will keep you from hearing God’s voice clearly before you get there. True, sin is sin is sin, but later in this chapter we will check out a passage that lists specific sins that are red flags you are not walking in God’s Spirit, but in your flesh. Remember, without walking in God’s Holy Spirit, you will never be holy, and without being holy, you will never be “by” God, and without being by God, you cannot hear Him.

You can sense the pleading in the apostle Peter’s voice in 1 Peter 2:11 (
KJV
): “I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.” Same for the apostle Paul when he wrote, “Because we have these promises, dear friends, let us cleanse ourselves from everything that can defile our body or spirit. And let us work toward complete holiness because we fear God” (2 Corinthians 7:1
NLT
). Now
let me ask you, what would you say are the things you do that defile your body or spirit?

I am confident that the moment you read that question, the Holy Spirit whispered something to you. If not, He will. You need to give that very thing to God and not take it back. Is it really worth it? Do not mess around with sin. Delayed obedience is disobedience. And do not dismiss what you heard as not being God’s voice, because Scripture is very clear that the more you dismiss it, the less you will hear His voice. Hebrews 3:13–15 says,

But exhort one another daily, while it is called “Today,” lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end, while it is said:

“Today, if you will hear His voice,

Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion. . . .”

A hard heart breeds clogged ears. Do not mess around with sin or with ignoring God’s voice today. You might not hear Him tomorrow.

Time

Another reason you might not hear God is due to the distractions of your busy schedule. Work meetings, school deadlines, children’s needs, parents’ needs and even relationships can eat up our time and leave none for God. And let’s not forget all ministers suffering from STLS (“Serving-The-Lord-Syndrome”), who never stop to sit at His feet to listen. We spend so much time ministering to Jesus’ Body that we never look up just a few inches to gaze into His face. He is the head. We cannot only love Him from the neck down.

But let’s face it—we cannot blame work or ministry. The truth is that we even go on vacation and still struggle to find 30 minutes to sit alone with God. With 1,440 minutes each day, you would think we could give Him a puny 30. Why not 60? But
Jesus knew that friendship with us would be challenging. You could hear it in His voice when He asked Peter, “Could you not watch with me one hour?” (Matthew 26:40–41).

If STLS is truly a disease, then I had a fatal case. A homeschooling mother of six, a grandmother of then four, an ordained minister, Creative Arts Conservatory director, teacher, author, wife, daughter and more. And I was not like Martha, who got mad at doing other people’s jobs for them. I
loved
doing other people’s jobs. But coupled with the sleep debt I confessed to you in previous chapters, I was headed for trouble, in utter oblivion. But boy, did God get my attention.

Imagine you come home one day to an email from a stranger who lives ten thousand miles away, does not even speak your language, and claims in very broken English that God showed her your face in a vision, gave her your foreign name and sent her to tell you to slow down and spend more time with Him. Hello! Maydi, a Spirit-filled Indonesian college student half my age, had never heard my name before, but while she was in deep worship one day, God showed her in a vision my face, my name and my city on a map. She googled her way to my website, where all three finally aligned.

God supernaturally led Maydi to me because He was jealous for me. He missed me. But despite feeling happy about being so loved and cherished, I breezed right past lovestruck and landed in sobriety, making drastic changes to my priorities. For a year, Maydi continued to prophesy from the other side of the world with visions God gave her of me, one of which directly led to the writing of this book. But even then, with me ready to begin, God still wanted me to Himself for a while before releasing me to another project. Soon after, I preached a sermon at church on this very topic—“Trading Distractions for Prayer”—and as I packed up my MacBook Pro laptop to take it home after church that day, it crashed to the ground. It felt as if someone had literally grabbed it out of my hands. “Macbeth” was a goner. Maydi said it was “an attack by Satan allowed by God.” I wondered.

Immediately, I bought another one, and it, too, mysteriously broke. Then in one week, my nice, large screen HD TV broke, my cell phone died and my car went kaput. Finally, I got the hint. I was going to have to practice what I preached that Sunday, confess my distractedness and get focused in prayer. “Listening prayer” I began calling it. I could not go anywhere, do anything, call anybody or write anything. I was entirely hidden. I was entirely undistracted.

With no computer to use to write creatively, edit videos, email people or even do church correspondence, I unplugged from life. For one whole year God kept my finances tied up in other worthwhile family needs, which prevented me from getting the laptop I needed. All I had was time and Zinnia seeds, so I invited my three grandsons over and planted a big Zinnia patch. Avery and Ezra (twins then five) and brother, Trevor (then four), helped me find my way back to center that summer. All I did was plant flowers, cut flowers, make lemonade and pray. I had to borrow one of my children’s computers to post pictures on Facebook just so people would know I was not dead.

The next year, some dear friends offered to buy me the exact laptop I needed (all $4,500 of it), and it was custom-made and had to be built overseas by Apple. Lo and behold, it arrived at my house one year to the day from when I had preached that sermon on prayer that led to my computer crash. Only God could orchestrate that timing. It was His way of saying He had given me a full year off to test my obedience, help me rest and heal, focus in prayer and prepare to write.

The computer came, the book outline was produced and pitched to an editor and I had a book deal—all before the book was even written, which is another thing only God could orchestrate. Next came the sleep doctor interview that made me
realize God had saved my life by forcing me to rest that summer, and it put me on a mission to convince others. Hopefully, you were one of them. Take time to rest and be still to hear God’s voice. Deal with your distractions before God does, because trust me,
He will.

Ambivalence

There is nothing like ambivalence to quench faith fast and interfere with your spiritual hearing (and sight). To be ambivalent means to be uncertain, unsure, doubtful, indecisive, inconclusive, double-minded, undecided, torn, on the fence, hesitating, wavering or vacillating. Let’s say you pray to hear God’s voice better, but then waver and doubt if you ever really will. Then He speaks, but you do not perceive it because you were on the fence, still torn about whether or not hearing God’s voice is even possible. He tries again. You think you hear it this time, but you are uncertain if it was for real, so you tell no one. What a cycle! You asked, He answered, but you do not believe. It is as if you cannot take yes for an answer.

Also, wrong teaching can leave us ambivalent about hearing God’s voice. Perhaps we have not heard what the Bible really says about it because our leaders did not want to get our hopes up. Maybe they themselves were ambivalent, so we never heard. But if we do not hear, how can we believe? Consider Romans 10:14, 17:

How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? . . . So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Submerge yourself in Scriptures that remind you God wants to talk to you. Memorize Jeremiah 33:3 (
NIV
), “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.” Remind yourself that God’s first item of business after creating mankind in Genesis 1:27 was to speak
to them in verse 28, establishing His voice with them so there could be relationship. And even before that, in the opening verses of Genesis 1, God used His voice to create the world itself: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). He did not wave a wand or “think” it all into existence; He used His voice. God has a voice. So do you. They were predestined to recognize each other.