We’re nearing the end of our
sermon series, “Dream On”, looking at dreams and dreamers in the Bible. We’ve talked a lot about finding God’s dream
for us as individuals and finding God’s dream for us as a church. And I think we’d all agree that’s an
important thing to do. We all want to
follow God’s dream for us and for our church.
But here’s the thing: how do that
the dream we’ve found and that we’re ready to follow really comes from God?
In our reading for today, God is speaking through
Jeremiah, and God talks about false prophets, people who prophesy lies in God’s
name. God says, “They say, ‘I had a
dream! I had a dream!...I am against
those who prophesy false dreams.”
Now, there are
people who deliberately lie in God’s name.
There always have been. There
probably always will be. There are
people who will deliberately try to mislead us and try to get us to go the
wrong way and follow them rather than following God. And it’s important not to be fooled by people
like that.
But there are other people who honestly and sincerely
believe they are following God. They
truly believe they’re saying what God wants them to say and doing what God
wants them to do. They’re honest and
they’re sincere and they’re truthful, but they’re wrong.
You know, one of the most interesting things about the
church history courses I took in seminary was learning about the heretics in
the early church. We think, or at least
I thought, of a heretic as someone who’s just way out there, who’s actively
opposed to the church and opposed to God and who’s just advocating wild and
crazy stuff.
But the thing is, for the most part, that’s not
true. Most of the early church heretics
were people who were trying really hard to get it right. They wanted to follow God. In fact, a lot of them believed in
Jesus. They just had a different
understanding of who Jesus was. They had
a different understanding of who the Holy Spirit is and of how the trinity
works. Most of these early church
heretics were not bad people at all.
They were good people who were trying to get it right and just came to a
different conclusion than the rest of the church did.
So bringing that back to God’s dreams, there are a couple
of things we need to look out for. We
need to look out for the liars, for the frauds, for the people who try to get
us to follow false dreams rather than God’s dream. But we also need to look out for the people
who come across as honest and sincere, and who in fact are honest and sincere,
but who with the best of intentions are still trying to get us to follow false
dreams rather than God’s dream.
And you know who else we need to look out for? We need to look out for that person we see in
the mirror every day. We need to look
out for ourselves. Because we all have a
great capacity to fool ourselves, don’t we?
I know I do. I can be really good
at convincing myself that the thing I want is what God wants. I can be really good at telling myself that
my dream is God’s dream, even when it may be obvious to other people that it’s
not.
So, how do we tell when we’re being fooled, either by
someone else or by ourselves? How do we
tell the difference between a false dream and God’s dream?
Well, let’s look at some of the things we’ve already
talked about in regard to God’s dreams.
We started out by looking at Jacob’s dream and we said that quite often
God’s dreams for us are beyond anything we’d have ever dreamed for
ourselves. Then we looked at Joseph’s
dream, and we said that God often takes us on a long and winding road along the
way to making our dreams come about.
Then we looked at Gideon’s dream, and we said that we’ll only accomplish
God’s dream if God is with us, and that God often accomplishes God’s dreams in
a way that makes it obvious to everyone, including ourselves, that it was God
who did it, not us. Then we looked at
Solomon’s dream, and we said that God’s dream usually involves serving God and
serving others.
It seems to me that what we have there is a pretty good
checklist of what God’s dreams are and are not.
And if a dream does not fit into that checklist, then there’s a pretty
good chance it’s not God’s dream for us.
That does not necessarily mean that what we dreamed of would be a bad
thing. It might even seem like a really
good thing. But still, it would not be
what God wants. It would not be God’s
dream.
So, as we dream our dreams, and we try to figure out
whether they’re God’s dreams for us, here are at least some of the questions I
think we should ask:
1)
Is this a common, mundane, ordinary dream? Or is it a dream that’s beyond what we
would’ve dreamed for ourselves?
2)
Is this a dream that’s going to be easy to
accomplish? Is it going to take us on a
nice, smooth, straight road? Or is it
going to be hard, and take us the long way around sometimes, and are we
probably going to have some setbacks along the way?
3)
Is this a dream that we can accomplish on our
own? Or is it a dream that we can only
accomplish if God is with us and we get God’s help?
4)
Is this a dream that’s just going to benefit
us? Or is this a dream that will involve
serving God and serving other people?
Now, that does
not mean we should never do anything that does not fit this checklist. There are times when we have to do the
common, mundane, ordinary things. We
need to pay the bills. We need to do the
laundry. There are times when we need to
do a few things that are easy, if for no other reason, then just to give
ourselves a little breathing room and a little confidence once in a while. And, while there’s a sense in which we can do
nothing without God because of course God created us and all of our abilities
come from God, it’s also okay to do some simple things without specifically
asking for God’s help. And while we
generally should not do things that benefit us and no one else, there are times
when we take great satisfaction out of helping others and so it does benefit
us. And then, too, sometimes taking a
little time to ourselves refreshes us and makes us better able to serve others.
But while it’s
sometimes necessary to do all those things, none of those things is God’s dream
for us. God’s dream for us is probably
going to be something that’s beyond what our own dream is. It’s probably not going to be something
that’s easy and quick. It’s probably not
going to be something we can accomplish on our own. And it’s probably not something that’s just
going to benefit us.
Now, I should
also say that just because God’s dream is beyond our own dream does not mean
that God is necessarily asking us to go and do something great or heroic. For example, I believe God’s dream for me is
that I be a pastor. That’s not something
particularly great or heroic. But it is
something that was beyond what my own dream was ten years ago.
We need to keep
this checklist in mind, because there are a lot of people who are going to tell
us different. There are plenty of people
out there who’ll tell us that we should not dream big dreams. There are plenty of people who’ll tell us
that God’s dreams are going to simple and easy.
There are a lot of people who take the vending machine approach to God,
who say that if we just pay a certain price by being good and praying to God,
God will automatically take care of everything and we won’t have to do anything
ourselves. It’s very easy for us to
believe we can do things ourselves, rather than knowing we need God to do
them. And of course, it can be easiest
of all to convince ourselves that the things we want are God’s dreams for us just
because we want them so much.
So as we talk
together, and as we dream together, and as we try to figure out God’s dreams
for us, let’s remember this checklist.
Let’s avoid the false prophets who try to fool us and the false prophets
who are fooling themselves. And let’s
not fool ourselves, either. Let’s do
everything we can to make sure our dreams are God’s dreams, and let’s be
willing to change our dreams if they’re not God’s dreams. God always comes through. God came through for Jacob. God came through for Joseph. God came through for Gideon. God came through for Solomon. And God will come through for you and me and
for our church, too.
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