I began to write the How to Hear God Speak series because so many bloggy friends had written to me and said, “You seem to hear God speak often.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard Him speak to me.

How do you do that?

How can I hear God speak to me?”  

Thus the How to Hear God Speak Series was born.  

I had mentioned that I would do a Part 5 on Dreams…and finally here it is.

If you have not read Parts 1-4, they can be found on the header under “Faith”.  

And truthfully, part 5 will not make much sense without the foundations of part 1-4.
They are a MUST to hear God speak in dreams.

I can honestly say, that one of my greatest joys in life is hearing God speak.

To fathom that the God of the universe speaks to us in a real and personal way is

 still really a concept that is not easily grasped {at least not by this woman!}.   

But I have had it happen to me, literally thousands and thousands of times.   

What a joy to know that Almighty God cares that much and that He 

wants a personal and active role in each of our lives.  

Such a comfort!

It was probably about 10 years ago that I started thinking about dreams.  Because I had had the Lord speak to me thousands and thousands of times I had learned well to recognize His voice.
 But to my knowledge I had not ever had a prophetic dream.

And so I began to pray nightly, “Lord would you please speak to me in my dreams too?”

  Months passed.  I was so disappointed!  I persisted.  I want all of God and everything He will show me and I did not and do not want to miss out on one aspect of my relationship with Him!
It’s not “either or” for the things God will give us.
He wants us to know Him in every aspect.
So my prayers persisted.
And some days I was down right frustrated!
“Come on Lord, speak to me in my dreams, pllllleeeease!”

I think part of my persistence was also that it sounded like
my sleep would be so much more exciting.
Sleep to me is necessary, but I sometimes wish we just didn’t need to do it at all.
It can seem like such a waste of time {to me anyway}.

Then one night, after months and months of praying the same prayer,  I woke up suddenly about 4:00 am.  I had just had a powerful dream.  The thing I know now, is that for me at least, when I have a prophetic dream, it is very, very, very detailed.  And it is very real.  The dozen times or so that I have had a prophetic dream now, the second I wake up, I know that I know that I know that it was from Him. I am wide awake, it was very real and it has always been very detailed.

That night, in my dream I was walking on a walk way toward a home I had never been to.  There were patches of snow on the ground on each side of me as I walked toward this home.  Suddenly I came upon a body of a woman lying on the path.  She was facing the direction of the home…meaning she was heading to the house as well.  She was lying face down.  She was an elderly lady.  Her hair was thinning.

I quickly bent to help her, so of course, I had to turn her over to see if she was still breathing.  As I flipped her from her stomach to her back, her face went under a bush that was lying over the sidewalk.  I could not see who she was but I knew immediately she was not alive.
The bush was an intentional part of the dream.
I was unable to tell who she was.

And I woke up.

When I woke up I knew that it was my first prophetic dream.

But what in the world did it mean?

As I laid in bed I kept asking the Lord, “What in the world was that all about?”

The details are still vivid today.

It was so real!

Not knowing what to do, I continued praying.  “Lord is there someone I need to be praying for?  But who?”  I started trying to think who it could be in my dream {from her hair, the house} but I could not think of anyone. It was stressing me out.  How would I figure out that meaning?

Kind of funny, I had begged Him to speak to me and He had.
But now what?

Little did I know I was just about to find out!

About an hour later, at 5am our home phone rang.  {Pastor’s phones ring at all hours.}  It was a young woman in our congregation.  They had just found her grandmother dead.

 But listen to the details of her death:

Her family pieced together that apparently she needed her medicine and had forgotten her prescription refill in her car.  So in the night she had gone out to get her pills from the car where she had forgotten the pharmacy bag.  On the way back to her home, she had had a massive heart attack and fallen on her walkway and died.

They found her lying face down.
They found her on the path.
They found her facing the house {as she had already been to the car and was headed back}.
When they found her, she was already gone.
There were, indeed, patches of snow on the ground.

My dream had lined up perfectly, down to the direction that she was facing.

So what was the point of my dream?

Why would the Lord allow me to dream that when there was not a thing I could do about it?

And as I asked Him that question, He immediately spoke to me:  “If you could have done something,
I would have shown me who it was!  But ‘doing something’ was not the point of the dream.  The reason I have spoken to you prophetically in a dream was so that you will understand that I will speak to you in dreams.  And you can trust that it is, indeed, me.”  It confirmed that it was Him, and only Him and I could trust that in the future with prophetic dreams.

So the first thing I can say, is that in talking to other people who have also had prophetic dreams is that one thing is clear to all of us:  The dream is detailed.  Very detailed.

Since that time, I have often kept a paper and pen next to my bed,
so that I could write each detail down.

I should mention that one of the ways I can always tell if my dream is prophetic or not is that in the prophetic dreams I am very aware that I am noticing all the clear details.  Does that make sense?  Like with the woman on the walkway…..in my dream, I knew I was noticing, “Her hair is thin.” In my dream as I was walking to the house,  I was aware that I was noticing, “There are patches of snow.”  Like in that dream I even thought, “She was walking toward the house as well.  Her head is facing the house.”

Like a detective would notice each of the details and
 I am aware that I am noticing those details.

And before long, that dream, with all it’s intricate details,
 was used by God to confirm {even down to the windows on the sanctuary doors}
that we were, indeed, called to pastor what is now
 our former church in Colorado.

Prophetic dreams can be used by God to speak all kinds of things.
Most importantly though, is hearing God speak.
Whether in our day to day, or in dreams…He longs to speak intimately with each of us.

But He will not likely speak when we are cozying up with sin,
harboring unforgiveness, or not spending intimate time with Him.

Again, if you have not read the “How to Hear God Speak” series,
it can be found under “Faith” on the header above.
It is a powerful series that will help each person who longs to hear God speak.

***
{So why does God speak to us in dreams sometimes?
What types of dreams does He give?
What is the purpose of the dreams?
How do we interpret them?
Part 6 will be coming.}