Our scripture reading today is Genesis chapter 28, verses 10 to
17. Just to keep in context here,
Isaac, Abraham's son Isaac married Rebecca.
Rebecca had their twins, Jacob and Esau.
Esau was the older, but God had told Rebecca that Jacob would
rule over Esau and that Esau would serve Jacob in the
meantime. Well, since after birth and then
through their growing up, Jacob became Rebecca's favorite son,
Esau became Isaac's favorite son and and Jacob bargained for
bought his brother's birthright with a bowl of Stew.
And then later, after Isaac had become old and was blind, Jacob
and Rebecca deceived Isaac and tricked Isaac into giving Esau
the blessing he had planned to give to Esau.
He gave to Jacob instead. So now, having lost his
birthright and lost his father's blessing, Esau is understandably
miffed, and he has decided that the best way to handle this
situation is to kill his brother.
And then there's only one brother to inherit anything.
And Jacob is fleeing for his life.
He's leaving his family. He's leaving the only home he
has ever known, the only region, as far as we know, that he has
ever known, to go to a distant land to find his mother's
relatives and hopefully receive help and care from them on his
way. He's traveling alone, alone
through the wilderness, and this is dangerous.
He's got no one to watch his back.
He's no one to got no one to keep watch while he sleeps.
He's got nothing to sleep on, apparently, except the hard
ground, and nothing for a pillow except a stone.
And when Jacob lies down to sleep, this is what he what
happens. Jacob left Beersheba and set out
for Haran. When he reached a certain place,
he stopped for the night because the sun had set.
Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay
down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a
stairway resting on earth, which is with its top reaching to
heaven. And the angels of God were
ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord.
And he said, I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham, and
the God of Isaac. I will give you and your
descendants the land on which you are lying.
Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you
will spread out over the West and to the east, to the north
and to the South. All the peoples on earth will be
blessed through you and your offspring.
I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I
will bring you back to this land.
I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised
you. When Jacob awoke from his sleep,
he thought, surely the Lord is in this place and I was not
aware of it. He was afraid and said, how
awesome is this place? This is none other than the
House of God. This is the gate of heaven.
May the Lord add His blessing to the reading and the hearing of
His Word. We are continuing talking about
dreams, dreams for a new year. And last week we talked a little
bit about something to dream about, or rather really
something not to dream about. And today we're talking about
God-given dreams. Because human dreams are one
thing. Human dreams can be scary.
Human being dreams can be fun, exciting.
Human dreams can, can motivate us.
Human dreams can, can can, you know, do a lot of different
things for us. But God-given dreams are
something different entirely. Now, they can still have some of
those same effects. They can scare us, they can
motivate us, these kinds of things.
But God-given dreams are something special.
And God-given dreams don't happen very often, at least not
as often as regular old human dreams and human visions can.
So we're going to talk about today the power of a God-given
dream, and Jacob's God-given dream is the one we're starting
with. Jacob again, here he is.
He's out in the wilderness, he's alone, he's running for his
life. His mom had told him at some
point along the way, hey, I know you're the second born, but God
told me you're going to receive all the blessing of the first
born. You're going to inherit your
father's covenant with God, your father's property, and receive
your father's blessing. All this is going to be good, no
problems, no worries. And now Jacob's running for his
life, fleeing to people that he might never have met before in
his life, hoping that they will receive him where his own
brother will not. This is Jacob's dream.
Jacob's dream. Before we go further, much
further though, beyond just Jacob's dream here, I want to
give a disclaimer the, the, this dream that Jacob had and, and
dreams like it that are genuinely God-given dreams.
And I'm, I'm using the word dream a little loosely today.
Jacob literally had a dream he was sleeping and all of this
happened in his sleep. Sometimes we can have dreams as
well and God-given dreams that come to us when we're awake, a
sense of vision or promise for the future.
And, and so that's how I'm using that term dream today.
Don't necessarily have to be asleep for it.
You can be awake for too, but if it's a God-given dream, there's
a message in it that we need to pay attention to.
The disclaimer is this. God-given dreams are rare.
They don't happen every day. They don't happen every night.
I've been told us human beings dream every night.
I don't. We don't remember them all, but
we almost always have them. God-given dreams are not like
that. And there can when preaching
about something like this, one of the things that I have
noticed and I've heard other people notice and talk about
over the years is that that some people that don't get spiritual
experiences like a God-given dream or or John Wesley talked
about having his heart strangely warmed by God.
And they think, well, maybe God just doesn't talk to me.
Or maybe God doesn't care about me.
Or maybe I'm not really a Christian, not really a follower
of Jesus, because I don't have experiences like this and that
simply isn't true most of the time.
This is not how God communicates to people, you know.
Most of the time, God, when God communicates, God communicates
through much more ordinary means, through the Bible,
through through conversations with other followers of God.
Maybe it's in in a Sunday school or a Bible study or, or
hopefully once in a while in a sermon, you hear some bald
headed knucklehead talking about ordinary ways like like an
insight or, or or a thought. And sometimes we get really good
thoughts in our heads. And sometimes those thoughts are
from God. Sometimes we get a sense of
shame or conviction that we've done something wrong.
And that's God talking to us and saying you blew it.
We got to deal with this now. So.
So if you don't have dramatic spiritual experiences, that's
OK. That's that's most of us most of
the time don't have that. And and some folks, some very,
very faithful followers of God will live their entire lives
without having a dramatic spiritual experience like this.
And that's all right, That's all right.
There's another disclaimer with God-given dreams, and I'm going
to get to this in a little bit later.
Well, actually I'm going to save that for later rather than a
disclaimer. That's more of a danger.
So I'll, I'll leave that there. So, so if you're someone going,
man, I never have dreams like this.
I never see visions. I never hear God's voices.
God really care about me. Yes, God cares about you.
Some spiritual teachers have said, and quite seriously, and,
and this was one, I think it was Teresa of Avila who had visions
and who had dreams and said the only reason God gives some
people visions and dreams, she was among them is because we're
too weak and too slow for God to communicate with us any other
way. And, and so if you've never had
a vision or a dream, maybe God, that means God knows you don't
need a vision or a dream to follow his lead.
So that's the disclaimer. Let's move on with the sermon
power of a God-given dream. I'm going to talk about two
significant elements of power in God-given dreams today.
The first one is purpose. God-given dreams have the power
of giving us purpose. Now as we're talking about God
driven dreams and purpose, I'm gonna put the remote down so I
don't keep hitting it. I'm gonna say we're gonna look
at another dream for a moment. And that's the dream that that
has given us the holiday that we celebrate this weekend.
Doctor Martin Luther King Junior Day is tomorrow.
And, and in 1963, he gave a speech before a very large group
of people in Washington, DC that has become known as the I Have a
Dream speech. And if you want to talk, if you
want to see an example of a dream that has and carries with
it a sense of power and a God-given dream, because we got
to remember Martin Luther King was not just doctor Martin
Luther King, He was Reverend Martin Luther King and he was a
pastor And, and his work as a pastor took him well beyond
church walls and that this is another one of those God-given
dreams and it carries with it a sense of purpose.
The speech is too long to read the whole thing, but I don't
want to read a a an extensive ended quotation from it.
As we look at purpose here today, I say to you today my
friends. So even though we face the
difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out
the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, the
sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will
be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, even
the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat
of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be
transformed into an Oasis of Freedom and Justice.
I have a dream that my 4 little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their
skin, but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down
in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor
having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and
nullification, one day right there in Alabama, little black
boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little
white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day
every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountains shall
be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the
crooked places will be made straight.
The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh will see
it together. This is our hope.
This is the faith that I go back to the South with.
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of
despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able
to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a
beautiful Symphony of brotherhood.
With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray
together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand
for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to
sing with new meaning. My country tis of thee, sweet
land of liberty of thee I sing land where my father's died,
Land of the pilgrims, pride from every mountainside.
Let freedom ring. And if America is to be a great
nation, this must become true. When this happens, we allow
freedom to ring. When we let it ring from every
village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we
will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children,
black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and
Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of
the old Negro spiritual. Free at last, free at last.
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.
Now, again, that wasn't the whole speech, just a, just a, a
portion of it. But you can hear in those words,
you can hear in that dream purpose that there's something
more out there. There's a direction we're
heading. There's a place where we're
going, not inevitably, not simply by the the natural course
of history, but on purpose. And again, I believe this is a
God-given dream and that God's purpose is for His Kingdom to
come, His will to be done, His justice to be done, His peace to
be had, and other places. Martin Luther King Junior called
described this as God's beloved community where men and women of
whatever skin color, of whatever background, of whatever
ethnicity, ideology, economic or educational background can treat
each other truly as sisters and brothers and live in peace and
harmony and justice and freedom together.
And the purpose in that was to work for and move toward and
move into that. This was spoken on on the cusp
of the the vote on the the 1963 civil rights legislation.
And and that's certainly part of the why that that king gave that
speech, hoping to inspire and encourage as many people to
support the passage of that legislation as possible, but
also to give a sense of why and their broader lives, lives
beyond simply political, purely political action.
But the why of how they live their lives and the purposes of
their lives on a day-to-day basis.
And that day-to-day basis is not.
The purpose is not to get what I can for me and my own, but to
live in solidarity with the people around us, lifting others
up, caring for others, treating all people with compassion,
giving all people the freedom that they need to be the person
that God called them to be, regardless of the color of their
skin, regardless of their gender, regardless of their
education or their political or geographic situation.
This is purpose. Purpose in this dream.
There was purpose in Jacob's dream.
Jacob had to have been. We don't, we're not told Jacob's
mental state there. I got to think Jacob was at a
low point in his life when he had that dream.
I was supposed to inherit everything from my father.
I was supposed to be the one in charge.
I was supposed to be to have blessing and favor and position
and power and status within our family.
And now I'm running for my life and I don't even have anyone to
watch my back while I'm doing it.
I'm all alone in the wilderness, and he lies down, he sleeps and
he has this dream. And the dream is about a future
again. Not a future that's inevitable
by the natural flow of history, but a future that will come on
purpose. And God says, I give you my
blessing, I give you my promise. The same promise I gave to your
grandfather Abraham, the same promise I gave to your father
Isaac. I give to you one day all of
this, this land on which you are lying with, and you're so poor
that you don't have a blanket over you and you've got a rock
for a pillow. One day it will all be yours.
Everything you can see as far as your eye can see, from the north
to the South and the east to the West.
One day you don't have a single child.
Now your children will number as much as the dust of the ground
on the earth, and all the peoples of the world will be
blessed through you. There's purpose in that.
He gave Jacob a sense of his place in history, his place in
God's story. And God's story was going
somewhere, and Jacob had a purpose in that story.
He wasn't a, was it non player character NPC.
I'm out of my depth when I'm talking video games.
Am I getting that right NPC? OK, all right.
He's not an NPC. He's got purpose.
He's got purpose in this world. And we all need that sense of
why. We need a reason to get up in
the morning. We need a reason to struggle
through the struggles that we have.
We all need a why. We all need a purpose, and God
gave that. He gave that to king and through
king, to an entire movement of people.
He gave that to Jacob. And through Jacob, my goodness,
through Jacob. We're sitting here today
something like 3000 years later. Purpose.
There's power in a God-given dream and part of that power is
purpose. There are also dangers in a
God-given dream. I'm getting caught up and I
can't forget. We got communion today, so I got
to keep moving. There's dangers in a God-given
dream, and one of the dangers, particularly on this realm of
purpose, one of the real dangers, is as we receive the
dream as an assignment, we have to make it happen.
We have to. We have to force the world into
the vision that we see in the dream.
That's what I think Jacob and Rebecca did and one of the
reasons why Jacob is now running for his life.
God gave a vision to Rebecca, spoke to Rebecca, said hey, the
younger is going to rule over the older, the older is going to
serve the younger. And Rebecca immediately began
favoring her younger son. And we don't know if she had
anything to do with him, with Jacob ripping his brother off to
get his birthright. But she certainly helped Jacob
deceive Isaac and steal Esau's blessing.
She took that vision as an assignment.
I if this is going to happen, I have to make it happen.
But God-given dreams are more promised than they are
assignment. They are a statement by God of
this is what I am going to do, this is what I am going to
bring. One day, Jacob, your descendants
will outnumber the dust on the ground.
I'm going to make that happen. One day, Jacob, all of this
land, everything as far as the eye can see, will belong to your
family. I'm going to make that happen.
God is making a promise through his dream.
When we turn it into an assignment, we run the risk of
doing truly awful things in the name of God.
That's that's the times when Christians have taken up arms to
kill the heretics, to bring God's Kingdom on earth by
killing the people that believe the wrong things.
That's the time when God's people have taken up arms and
committed genocide to free the world of the uncouth savages who
don't agree with God's way of doing things, awful things that
churches, awful things that Christians have done.
That's that's what happens when Christians take up arms and they
they stone or hangs or burn witches at the stake.
Thinking they're doing God's will in this world.
We've got to make it happen. We got to clear out the
Deadwood. We got to clear out the
heretics. We got to clear out the scum so
that God's Kingdom will come, can come, and God's will will be
done. And all along God is saying, you
don't understand. I have promised this.
One day Jesus will return. His Kingdom will be established
on this earth. My Kingdom will come.
My Kingdom will be done and there is a role for you to play,
but it's not in making this happen.
Even in King's dream. Even in King's dream there is
purpose and there is there is a role for every person that was
listening to play. But none of them had the power
to force the people of this nation into the vision that King
cast. The God-given dream that he had
of God's Kingdom coming and God's will be being done.
Where all people are treated as equal and stand before one
another as sisters and brothers all on the same side instead of
warring and dividing up amongst themselves into factions.
That that is a thing God is bringing about God that had
promised that in the Scriptures long before Doctor King
articulated it so beautifully in that speech and so powerfully
so. The danger is is we don't take
it as an as that. We might take it as an
assignment and then use that as a justification for doing awful
things in the name of Jesus. How do we avoid that danger?
We avoid that danger by remembering the other power of a
God-given dream, and that's the power of hope.
The power of God-given dream is hope in the darkness.
I don't know for sure, but there's a real good chance that
Jacob went to sleep with his head on that rock.
The one that can't get any worse than this.
I have no hope. But he woke up that morning with
hope. He woke up with that morning
with hope because he had a dream from God.
He had a promise from God, He had a purpose from God, and he
had hope that the God who had brought his grandfather through
and the God that had brought his father through would bring him
through as well. He had hope.
King had hope that one day that vision that he saw could come
true. And his hope was in more than
just political might and political power.
It was in God. This was God's plan and this was
God's purpose. Because if it's not God's plan
and it's not God's purpose, then the work we're doing is wasted
effort anyway. We have this hope so that we
don't get overwhelmed. Here's another danger of a
God-given dream. God-given dreams are always too
big for us to achieve on our own.
And so they can lead to a kind of a paralysis and immobility
when we face a problem that's so big and so daunting and so
great, and it's like there's nothing I can do.
And so we become immobile and we do nothing.
The other side of the danger of a God-given dream.
There's an old story that went like this of a a landowner back
in in ancient times. He had a very large piece of
property and he had just acquired new property on the
edge of his current property. The problem was this large piece
of new property was completely covered with briars and thorns.
And before it could be used for anything, whether planting or
grazing, all of those thorns had to be cleared out.
His son was coming of age. He gave his son the task.
Son, it is your job to clear the briars and thorns from this
field. That is my assignment.
I give it to you. And the sun went out the first
day full of them, full of vigor, full of energy to please his
father. And he got there and he looked
out from a hilltop on his father's older land and saw all
of the new land covered with all of those briars.
And he thought, this is a big project.
But he started and he worked all day long in the heat of the sun.
And he worked and he worked and he worked and he worked.
And by the time he was done, he'd cleared out the small space
about 6 by 6. Tough work, hard work.
He went home discouraged. He slept well that night because
it was exhausted. But when the next day, when he
got back, then he looked again and he saw how much work it had
taken just to clear out that one small patch the day before.
And he looked out and saw how many acres and acres and acres
there was left to clear. And he despaired, and in his
despair he could find not find the energy or the ability to do
anything. So he laid down that patch of
ground that he had cleared, and he went to sleep, slept through
the day, got up, went home, ate dinner.
Dad asked, how's it going going Great.
Went to bed that night. Didn't sleep so easy that night.
And that went on for day after day after day until it became
week after week after week until it became months.
And then the day that he'd been dreading for weeks and months
came and his dad said, I want to come out and take a look at your
progress, son. So that day, his father walked
with him as they went out and as they crested that hill and
looked down over that new land, and it was all still covered
with thorns. And then they walked down to
that one patch. And his dad turned to his son
and said, what happened? And his son said, it's too much.
I was overwhelmed. I worked hard the first day, but
it was too much. And so every day, I have to
confess I've just been coming and lying and sleeping on this
one patch I cleared on the first day.
And the son, the father looked at his son.
He said, son, don't you understand that to clear this
whole land, all you had to do was clear enough ground each day
to sleep on, and by now you'd be done?
That's the position we find ourselves in.
We look out on a Dark World full of violence, full of division,
full of hostility. There seems to be more of all of
that around these days than there did when I was a kid.
Seems like that that that 30 years ago you could at least
have a conversation with people you disagreed with.
And now you just don't talk about it.
And there's so much wrong and there's so much brokenness and
there's so much sin. And we hear again that dream by
King, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in
heaven. And we think, can't do it, can't
do it, that all we really have to do is clear out enough ground
so that at night we can have a good night's sleep.
Just enough, just enough for that.
Because God's the one that's going to make the dream come
true. Our job is just to do the little
things most of the time and occasionally some big things
along the way. You see, Jesus is our purpose
and our hope. And Jesus, at the beginning of
his ministry, when he's calling his disciples, he he, he cast,
he. He shared a dream with one of
his disciples. That is, that disciple already
knew and it was Jacob's dream. And this is what Jesus said.
You think you've seen? He told, he told Nathaniel, hey,
I know who you are. You were sleeping under a fig
tree before you came here. Like, Oh my goodness, he knew
where I was under a fig tree. That's amazing.
And Jesus said, you ain't seen nothing yet.
You ain't seen nothing. One day, he said, you will see
heaven open up and the angels of God ascending and descending on
the Son of Man. That's Jacob's dream, but Jesus
tweaks it or clarifies it, because there's not.
The latter is now Jesus himself. Jesus is the latter.
Jesus is the gate. Jesus is the very one who
bridges heaven and earth. Jesus is the one that will bring
the Kingdom of heaven to earth, and Jesus is the one that will
on earth establish his Kingdom like it is in heaven.
And he gives us work to do in that we're not just spectators.
We're don't sit by passively. We remember, though, that Jesus
is our purpose and our hope. It's not our job to make His
Kingdom come, but it is our job to live into His Kingdom, to
have the hope. Because we know that His Kingdom
is coming. We are as much as we can.
We're going to live into that Kingdom now.
We're going to live according to that Kingdom now.
We're going to follow Jesus in the way he lived now.
Because even small acts of kindness, small acts of justice
and mercy, reveal the truth and goodness of Christ's Kingdom in
a broken world. Most of the time we're not doing
dramatic stuff. Some of us live a whole life
without ever doing anything really very dramatic.
But it's not the dramatic stuff. Pulling weeds and cutting up
thorn bushes is not dramatic. Digging out roots is not
dramatic. It's just work.
And we don't have to get it all done all at once.
We just do our pit, our bit, every day.
And we trust that one day God will make it all, all of that
dream come true. Our hope is in Jesus that his
Kingdom he will make bring his Kingdom and it will come and he,
his will will be done. That's our hope.
And our purpose is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus to love
and serve and care without regard to all of those things
that the world wants to divide us up by, whether it's skin
color or gender or age or region or politics or language or
whatever. All of those things the world
wants to use to divide us. We say, sisters and brothers,
let's do some work together in Jesus name, Amen.
Amen.