The position of your heart has to be in a perspective and a frame of reference that is eager to hear and expects to hear the voice of God speaking to you. Jesus did not die for you to not speak to you. There is more to you than you know.
If you open up your heart to him, he will show you. Technology does you no good unless you know how to use it. Having it available is not enough.
You got to know how to use it. For the next few moments, I want to just encourage you, let's preach. and more just teach and talk to you about the importance of us as God's people, not just having God's word available to us, but knowing how to use it. Listen to me more now than ever before. as our culture continues to be increasingly godless.
You and I are going to have to know how to do what the psalmist said. I hide God's word in my heart so that I might not sin against him. We got to use God's word. It's not enough for us to just have the Bible around our home. Because, you know, you got the big pretty one that's up on the mantle.
You've got the little small one that sits on your nightstand. You've got the one that's just for decor that might be like a coffee table book. And then...
And, you know, you have that one, that one that's got all the dog ears and it's got all the underlines and all the post-it notes. That's the one that you take to church with you so you can actually look, you know, holy like you use the Bible. We have all of these Bibles available to us.
But the Bible don't do us no good just sitting there looking pretty. It only does us good if we know how to actually take advantage of the truths of God, the fresh breath of God that is available to us through the scriptures. So I want to talk to you, to me. to us, challenge us about utilizing God's Word. Truth, everyone is saying, is so relative.
No one has a reverence anymore for the truth of God as declared in His Word now more than ever. If we're going to be unapologetic about our faith, if we're going to be able to stand firm against the schemes of the enemy, if we're going to be able, high school student and university student and mother and father, wife, husband, single woman, single man. entrepreneur, ministry, president, if we're going to be having the opportunity to stand firm, then we got to know the truth of God's Word. And we've got to be able to live off of every word that God speaks to us. We've got to be found on our knees in prayer and prioritizing our time in God's Word.
I want to tell you this before I share with you some principles that actually have transformed the way I spend time in the Word of God. God, the enemy wants to convince you. He wants to convince me that God has some sort of hotline connection between he and certain people, that it's just our spiritual leaders, our pastors, our Bible study teachers, the folks that are on staff, the people that are in full-time ministry, the folks that have, you know, a microphone on their jacket, the people that are in the spotlight, the folks who we go past their Instagram feed and we are admonished or encouraged because because they are teaching and preaching to masses.
The enemy wants you to think that it's a seminary degree that is required before you can actually have a fervent, ongoing relationship with God, where you yourself can open up the Word of God and know that the Holy Spirit can illumine the Scriptures and give you guidance and direction and insight and clarity and encouragement and comfort. wants you to think that that kind of fervent friendship with God is only for certain people because he knows that as long as you and I are not convinced that we can hear a fresh word from God for ourselves, then at best we'll be handicapped. in our faith because we'll always be waiting on somebody else to spoon feed us the word of God instead of knowing that we can have confidence in our friendship, in our relationship with God.
That person who you admire, rightfully so. There are people that I admire, their faith, their stability, their strength, their peace in the midst of the storm. There are people I admire, their prayer life. I admire how they are concrete in their faith and their belief.
beliefs, no matter what happens in culture. There are people I admire their ministry. I admire the fervency in which I see the presence of God operating in their life. So yeah, there are folks that we can admire, but just as quickly as we admire them, we have to be careful and guard ourselves against thinking that what they have access to is not also something that we have access to. The same Holy Spirit of God that lives in that person you admire is the same.
same presence and power of God that lives on the inside of you, to guide you into all truth, to illumine the scriptures so that you too can hear the voice of God. And so I want to encourage you to not wait until Sunday morning for a word from God. I want to encourage you to not wait until the next time your Bible study group can get together again in person before you engage in hearing the voice of God for yourself from the scriptures. I want to encourage you to not depend on God for the rest of your life. depend upon someone else to spoon feed you God's truth.
I want to remind you that you can hear God and we need to have a daily relationship with God through his word. Your stability is counting on it. Your peace, my peace of mind, particularly in the craziness and chaos of the culture that we're living in right now. If we don't have a relationship with God where we are prioritizing coming to him in his word, then we will find that we are not stable. We don't don't have peace of mind.
We don't have clarity, revelation, direction, insight, and encouragement to keep on putting one foot in front of the other and not be discouraged by what we see happening around us. So I want to encourage you to have a relationship with God through his word. I want to share with you what I call the five P's of Bible study, like the letter P. So, you know, if you'd like to take notes, I want you to get the notes out app on your phone or get a pen or a pencil.
I want you to write these five. five peas down. These peas have changed the way that I relate to God through his word. And I say the word relate specifically because it's not just about reading a book. Y'all, this just ain't no book.
It's not just a regular book filled with pages and papers and bound by leather. It's so much more than that. This book is alive. The Holy Spirit makes it so that he shines a spotlight in the place where where we most need to be fed, where we need guidance and direction so that God's present word leaps up off the page and gives us exactly what we need for the circumstances that we are facing right now. Don't know regular book, do that.
This book is alive. And so as we engage in it, we can relate to God through it because he speaks to us through his word. So these five Ps have transformed my relationship with the Bible. and with God himself.
And I want to share them with you because what this means is that after today, on a regular Monday, regular Tuesday, on a regular old Wednesday or Thursday or Friday or Saturday, you're not sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting until the next time a pastor preaches to you or a spiritual mentor helps to give you opportunity to rightly divide the word of truth. You thank God for those shepherds, but you're not twiddling your thumbs waiting on them. you know that you can have the privilege to go to God in His Word and hear Him for yourself.
The first P of Bible study is to position yourself to hear from God. Real simple. In fact, all five Ps are position yourself to hear from God. I'm going to say it again. Position yourself to hear from God.
There is power in your positioning. in your posture. Okay. I mean this in a spiritual sense, but I also mean it in a physical sense. I want to tell you about both.
When you come to God through His Word, that you're going to meet with Him through the pages of Scripture. So this is your own personal quiet time. You know, you maybe have just sat up in bed and you're going to have 10 or 15 minutes that you're spending with the Lord, or you're going to come out of your room into the kitchen table, maybe in the quietness of the morning or in the quietness of the evening when all the activity in your house has died down just a little bit.
You're going to going to position yourself over a portion of scripture. And I'll tell you in just a few moments how you can choose a portion of scripture to dive into. But when you make that commitment to posture yourself, to position yourself, I mean that in a spiritual way, meaning the position of your heart has to be in a perspective and a frame of reference that is eager to hear and expects to hear the voice of God speaking to you.
It's A.W. Tozer, a great theologian that put it this way. The person that does not expect to hear God won't. Because every single time God speaks, they'll just discount it as their own idea. They'll think that it was just a coincidence. They will attribute it to anything and anybody else except what it is.
God's breathed word coming to life through the power of the Holy Spirit to speak to you, to give you guidance and direction in your own personal life. And so you have to have a heart. I have to have a heart that is filled.
with expectation. that I am one of the sheep of God's fold and I can hear the voice of God. John chapter 10, Jesus said, my sheep hear my voice. Listen to that again.
He basically says the default position for anybody who's a part of the fold, the flock, the family of God, what my sheep do. Two is hear my voice. It's one of the schemes of the enemy to get you to think that you need to be something more, be something else, have a different perspective or a different personality or be someone other than you are to have excel. in some way, to not have made the mistakes that you've made. It's the scheme of the enemy to get us to think that we have to be anything other than a son or daughter to have this right, this privilege to hear God speaking to us through the Word.
So we have to pray and say, Lord, would you carve away anything in my heart that is a roadblock that's keeping me from having an expectation that in my own regular quiet time, while I'm in my pajamas or in my jogging suit, while I'm in my house shoes. Whatever I'm doing and no matter what I look like, I have the privilege to keep company with you, that you want to cultivate, Lord Jesus, thank you, a friendship with me, that you want to speak with me, that you gave me a love letter so that I can hear your voice and know you and know who you are. Thank you, Lord, for that privilege. And if my heart doesn't expect it, would you begin to mold in me a holy expectation that desires and anticipates that I I have the privilege to hear the voice of God.
Posture your heart with expectation. The psalmist put it this way in Psalm 27. It's one of my favorite verses, verse 13 and 14. He says, I would have despaired unless I believed that I would see the hand of the Lord in the land of the living. Did you see that expectation there?
He says, I would have despaired. I would have been hopeless. I would have been down. My countenance would have been downcast, man. And.
Except that I expect that I'm going to see God. I expect that I'm going to hear God so I can wait patiently on him because I have an anticipation, an expectation that God is going to come through on my behalf. The prophet Habakkuk spoke to this as well. If you look at his little book that is named after him in the Old Testament, you'll see that the entire first chapter of Habakkuk is Habakkuk calling out to God, mostly him calling out to God and saying, Lord, how long are you? you going to let this go on?
He's looking around him at the destruction that he is seeing happening in his culture, in his nation. Man, if that don't speak to us right now, I don't know what is. You and I can't flip past all that's happening on our Twitter feeds, our Instagram feeds, the news channels that we're watching and not see the vortex of chaos that is swirling all around us. Habakkuk knows exactly how you feel.
And he calls out to God and says, how long, Lord? It seems like you're just sitting back idly, letting all this go on. And so, Lord, I'm going to vocalize my concerns to you, my cares to you. I'm going to be authentic.
I'm not going to hold back. And that's the privilege we have in relationship with God. He lets us ask our questions, voice our concern.
He knows that in our humanity, we have some worries and some issues and some fears. And he lets us come to him and bear it all. But after Habakkuk...
bears it all. Chapter two, he says, now I'm going to climb up on the watchtower and I'm going to wait to see what it is that my king is going to say to me, how God is going to respond to me. Do you see that? He positions himself to hear from God. He says, I'm going to climb up on a watchtower.
Back in biblical days, there was a stronghold or a citadel that would sit at the front of a city. And it was designed so that a soldier or a watchman could climb up to the top of this watchtower, position himself above ground level circumstances. In other words, he was saying, there's too much chaos swirling around down here. I'm gonna be distracted if I keep myself positioned here. So I'm gonna climb up on the watchtower where I'm up above ground level distractions.
And I'm gonna position myself here because from this vantage point, I'll have a... clear view to the horizon and I expect that God is coming. I have expectation that there is someone coming who's going to deliver an answer for me. And so because of that expectation, I'm going to position myself in a place and in a posture where I can hear God, where I can see his hand, where I have clear view and there's nothing to distract me.
Position yourself, spiritual expectation and anticipation, but not just spiritually. Like Habakkuk, Position yourself physically. Do you see that? He climbed up somewhere.
He went to a place where there was some silence and some solitude. There's a whole lot of noise in life, isn't it? You've got your to-do list and I've got mine.
We're trying to check the things off that we got to do on our list when it comes to our kids and our marriage and what we're cooking for dinner tonight and the demands of the job that we have and the ministry. assignments that are before us and all of the things that we have to do that go into the regular rhythms of a 24-hour day. There are so many ground-level circumstances that aren't unnecessary.
They're critical. We've got to keep going from day... today, but there's got to be a moment of time where you decide, I'm going to climb up on the watchtower and have some space where there's silence and solitude so that for just a few moments, there is nothing standing in the way of me seeing the King who is coming to respond to me, of me hearing clearly what it is that God has to say to me. Now, this can be difficult.
I know it because your house is probably busy like mine is, many of you, or you've got, you know, your your phone buzzing and ringing and beeping and all the things that all of our devices do. So this is going to take some intentionality on your part. It's going to take you being proactive. It's going to take you, you know, setting your alarm to get up a little bit early or driving into the office space whenever we go back to office spaces and getting there, you know, 10 or 15 minutes before the buzz of the office starts. Or when you're in your car deciding that at this particular hour, because I'm running errands all the time, that I'm going to turn off talk radio or I'm going to turn down the music just a little while and I'm going to use that opportunity while I'm sitting outside of my kids soccer practice.
I'm going to use that as the 10 or 15 minutes or half hour that I'm going to devote to having some silence and solitude, pushing aside in my mind's eye. all of the demands that I have so that I can have an opportunity to have a clear perspective on what it is that God wants to say to me. Hi guys, I'm Stephanie E.K. Okafor, and today we're discussing the fascinating topic of dreams. Are they from God? What are nightmares?
Are dreams significant or are they random? Let's talk about what's really going on when we fall asleep. All dreams are not significant, and this is why, because dreams can come from God, They can come from the enemy and they can come from yourself, right?
But here's the thing, you wouldn't know it until you unpack the dream. And so I always tell people, even when it seems like it's a pizza dream or a random dream, write it down and bring it into the presence of the Holy Spirit. Spirit because it could be something that you might think is random actually is a parable.
It contains mysteries in it that the Lord can unpack for you. Now, when you want to know if a dream comes from the Lord, you know, in the book, I talk about the fruit reveals the seed if you're not a farmer and you just go to a field where they planted a bunch of orange trees you're not gonna know what's in the ground right because you are not the one who planted it but when they start to grow and you realize wait okay that's an orange fruit coming out of that tree then you can identify oh that is an orange tree right oranges were planted here and same thing with dreams who plants the message is revealed in the fruit of the the message. So I'll share something, you know, as an example, as a pastor, I think one of the most common things I get is where people say they had a dream about their spouse, right?
Very, very common. Now, how do you know if it came from God, if it came from Satan, or if it came from you? Here's a quick example.
A dream that comes from God about a future spouse, especially when it's not someone you're dating, the fruit of it leaves you feeling unbothered. You're not like when you receive the dream, you don't get into this obsessive mode, stalking mode, because with social media, you can create a fake account and start stalking the person like God told me this is my husband or God told me this is my wife and you start checking everything they do. No, because God will never give you something.
God will not give you a word that will validate an idol. He will not give you a word or he will not tell you something that will cause you to build an idol out of a. person.
That is not the nature of God. And so you will see the nature of God, even in the fruit of your actions with the message, right? And so how would you know if it came from you? If it's someone where we have to be honest with ourselves, self-awareness is key, knowing what comes from the soul. If it's someone you already have an interest in, someone you think looks good or X, Y, and Z, and that obsessive nature comes out, it's most likely coming from you.
Right? Where you start doing all kinds of crazy things and you start worrying and you start doubting or you're confused. The Bible says that God is not the author of confusion. Right?
So if you have a message that comes from the Lord and it leaves you in a place where you're like, but God told me this and da-da-da-da-da, God is not the author of confusion. How do you know it came from the enemy? Satan has his motto. He comes to steal, kill, and destroy.
What the enemy will do is show you someone, maybe an ex, someone you already like walked away from and you're, you know, you're thinking ahead and you're like, this was toxic. You start seeing that person in the dream and you start questioning, should I go back? Why?
Because he wants to steal your time. He wants to steal from you where you start trying to go back to something that is only going to cause damage. He comes to steal, kill and destroy. Right. So you have to when you understand the nature of God, the nature of the enemy, and you have self-awareness about you.
It's easy to recognize where the dream came from. planted the message. All over the Bible, you see many scriptures that support, you know, the power of dreams.
One of my favorite, I believe this is in Matthew chapter two, and this has to do with our Lord Jesus, Jesus as a baby. There were many encounters that his foster father, Joseph, had in dreams. There were two significant ones, but one in particular, Herod, the king at the time, when he had heard about... you know, this king is born. He was literally seeking the life of Jesus to kill him.
And the way the Lord warned Joseph, it, you know, concerning about, Hey, get out of this place because they're looking for Jesus to kill him was in a dream. You're talking about the warning message concerning the life of our savior was through a dream. This is how significant dreams are before the Lord. that when he needed to get Joseph's attention, hey, this family that I've entrusted you with for a time on earth, I need you to get them out of here because Herod is seeking to kill the child. Jesus as a baby was a baby.
Yes, he was always God. but he came on the earth as a man. And as a baby, he was vulnerable to the leadership of his earthly parents.
And so when God needed to get him from one place to the other for his safety, he sent a message through a dream. So when it comes to dreams, and you might be wondering, like, how do I engage more with dreams? Do I ask the Lord or what does that look like?
The first key thing to recognize is you. You are not just a physical being. You are. You have a body. You have a soul.
soul, you have a spirit. God interacts with your spirit. God encounters your spirit and your spirit translates that to your soul, right? Now the spirit never sleeps.
Remember there was a time where Jesus had his disciples and you know, they were falling asleep and the Lord is like, look, the spirit is willing, but the body is weak. Your spirit never sleeps. The understanding of this would change everything.
Because when you have the consciousness that even when my body is resting, my spirit is still alert. This is where the power of dreams kick in. Because the Lord can always have communion with your spirit at any time. And that's why in dreams, he can encounter you. So it's about communion.
It's about conversations. Dreams could be God starting a conversation or continuing a conversation. And so what I encourage people to do is that even when you're going to bed, Take some time to meditate on the Lord. You know, biblical meditation is different from, you know... meditation in the world or in culture.
In culture, meditation is about emptying the mind. You know, for believers, meditation is about filling the mind with the word of God. And so when you're going to bed, take some time to just meditate on the attributes of God. If there are questions you have that are bothering you, ask the Lord in prayer and just, you know, talk to the Lord and say, Lord, if there's something you can show me, I'm here, I'm willing.
Take an act of faith, have a journal by your bed, have a pen by your bed. your bed. Take your phone away from that. You don't even want the temptation to get distracted and recognize that dreams are just another channel where God can continue to commune with you.
You know, even when I think about my dreams, what they look like, how they feel, it varies on the message God is sending. And so there are times that I would have an impartation dream, right? An impartation dream is when you have an encounter with the Lord or an angel or, you know, someone of just the spiritual side.
significance where they're imparting a message from the Lord, right? And so for me, I'm a pastor. Oftentimes before I preach a message, I would have dreams where an angel will come to me and tell me what the Lord has assigned me to teach.
And so they will come and say, hey, literally, they will tell me even a Bible verse, or they'll tell me this is what, this is. Your assignment in this location, I travel a lot to preach and in different regions they need different things. And so for me, every time it's an assignment, so that's an impartation dream. Those dreams come with clarity. You know, I'm not questioning, it's not about the symbols, it's literally about the person in front of me telling me what to do.
Now they're dreams that could be warning dreams. These dreams can have, they take on a form of many symbols where it's an activity of what's taking place, right? You might be wearing a shoe and you lose a shoe.
And it could seem random, like, why did I lose a shoe? But the shoe is a symbol for something that the Lord is saying. And so depending on the message, warning dreams are not colorful. Warning dreams have like a dull, you know, black and white tone.
And even if they have color, it doesn't stand out to you because the dream is bringing a message that is warning you. It's not to excite you, it's not to make you feel encouraged. Encouragement dreams, you might notice, you know, sometimes they might feel, you know, more colorful or things like that, but it all depends because color in itself is a symbol. Now, you know, dream interpretation, when you think about when you have a dream and people say, how do I interpret this dream? What you're interpreting are the symbols, and part of those symbols are colors.
Right? And so not every dream, the color might not stand out to you, and there are other symbols that are key in interpreting that dream. But I will give you an example. An amazing friend of mine, he was dating this awesome lady, and he was praying to God. And he was like, man, God, show me if this is my wife.
How would I know if this is my wife? And he has a dream. In the dream, the dream is literally black and white.
Right? And so the color stood out to him. You're not always going to have a dream where the color stands out to you. But the color stands out to him and it's black and white and this is his life without this lady. It was very dull.
It was very boring. It just felt it was lacking life. And then the dream shifts and he's with her and there's this vibrancy of color in the dream like he could the color stood out so much to him. And so when he woke up the Lord you know confirmed to him he says this woman you know I'm approving of her you know.
her being your wife basically and that her your life with her is going to be very vibrant it's gonna be colorful it's gonna be rich she's gonna be full and so colors could stand out in your dream but not always you see everyone dreams the truth is everyone does not remember their dreams and so how do you get to the place of now dream recall right and it has to do with how you prepare before you go to bed and when you wake up right And it goes even beyond that. It becomes a lifestyle. But let's start with before going to bed and waking up. If you're saying that, Lord, I want to continue to commune with you. First of all, think about it like prayer.
When you want to pray, when you want to be in a place of prayer, maybe there's something that you're desperate, you're desperately calling out to God. Do you first say, okay, I'm going to go take some time to pray and just commune with the Lord and believe he's going to speak to me. Right before you do that, do you watch a horror movie?
I'd say, you know what, let me just watch this horror movie and then go pray. Why? Because your soul is going to be so cluttered with the emotions from the film. Your soul is going to be so loud with everything that you have just exposed yourself to that in the place of prayer, in the beginning place, you start feeling as though, okay, Lord. And you get into a place of maybe worship to kind of prepare you into his presence, right?
The tabernacle in the Old Testament is a perfect picture of communion. There's the outer court, there's the inner court, there's the Holy of Holies. Many of us are in the outer court asking for a Holy of Holies experience, right?
You can't be in the outer court and saying, God, just speak to me. No, that happens in the Holy of Holies. And it's such a beautiful picture of who you are. There is the body, there is the soul, and there is the spirit.
And so before going to bed, bed, feed your spirit, feed your spirit, break the layer of your flesh, break the layer of your soul and feed your spirit. Take time in worship. Take time to meditate on the Lord.
No matter what is like the routine in your home, maybe you're married, you have children. I feel you, right? But there's always going to be a moment where you can just quiet your soul. You can be laying in bed and worshiping in your heart.
You can be laying in bed right before you shut your eyes and just meditate on God. Think about a scripture and speak to the Lord while you're in bed, right? Because that is how you prepare yourself for communion, right?
There's many things I talk about in the book, but these are some of the basic things, how you prepare your body. and your soul. Your body, don't stuff yourself up with, you know, junk or alcohol. The Bible talks about do not be filled with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Don't take things that will cause you to not have clarity with the Lord when going to bed or will make you just feel like you have the itis. Because when you have the itis, you just knock out, right? And so be a good steward of your body, what you're eating, all of that.
Now, when you wake up, One of the things I talk about in the book is the first 90 seconds. The first 90 seconds matters so much. What you do within the first 90 seconds could be the difference between remembering your dream and forgetting it. Because the dream is planted in a spiritual place.
If you wake up and immediately you get into activity and busyness, that is why you will have moments where you're like, you woke up in the middle of the night, you knew you had a dream, you went back to bed. You woke up again, you got on your phone, you got, you started checking emails, you started having conversations and you're like, oh my gosh, I can't remember this dream, I forgot. In the mercy of God, sometimes there's something that will trigger our memory because we see something that we saw in the dream, but then there are many times that that dream is gone.
And here is the crazy part, not even just crazy, scary. Forgotten dreams don't lose their significance. And so in prayer, you can even seek the Holy Spirit, Lord, bring that dream back to me.
Because when the Lord speaks, it's treasure. It is treasure. It is hidden treasure and you want to search it out.
For anyone who's out there and you're feeling far from God, you're feeling distant from God, here's the thing. God is crazy about you. You have to know this.
Jesus loves you. You know, one of the things that always blows my mind is when Judas betrayed Christ. And why am I saying that? Because the Bible tells us that Satan entered Judas, right, to betray Christ. But this is the same Satan that did not want Jesus to go to the cross, right?
Because you see in dialogues, there was a moment where Peter was telling Jesus and he was like, Lord, you will not do no such thing. And Jesus says, get behind me, Satan. So then you're wondering, like, why is Satan confused?
On one hand, you don't want him to go to the cross. On another hand, you... you enter Judas to betray him so that he goes to the cross? No. Could it be that when Satan entered Judas to betray Christ, he was trying to prove a case to Jesus?
Okay, maybe you don't understand that these people are not worthy of you, but let me show you that even the disciples that walk with you, even the ones that have been with you for three years, they've seen you doing incredible miracles. They've seen all of this. They would still betray you.
Are you sure you still want to die for them? Could it be that the betrayal of Judas was not about Jesus going to the cross, but more so for him to stop himself and say, look, these people are not worth it. But regardless of all of that, regardless of the people that betrayed him from far and from near, he still went on that cross because he loves you. Because he knew that nothing will separate you from his love.
Nothing. No mistake you have made. No, nothing.
Nothing will separate you from his love. The part we have to play is faith. Now, here is the difference.
Jesus loves you, but to receive from him requires faith. The Bible says it is impossible to please God without faith. And here's the thing you have to know. You have faith.
It's just that you have faith in the right thing or in the wrong thing. And so shift that perspective. Have faith in a God that loves you and wants to have an intimate relationship with you. I always say this, Jesus did not die for you to not speak to you.
There is more to you than you know. If you open up your heart to him, he will show you. And so I'm excited for you and I'm believing that you would get out of the way and trust what God wants to do with your life. You are not here on accident, you are not a mistake, you are a child of God and you are called of God.