February 7

Genesis 40 In 2007 shortly before I left for Senegal, I had a very brief vision. It was rather cartoonish in nature, but it was clearly the Lord speaking to me on the approach to a significant time of ministry. In the vision, the Lord simply asked me with a smile, “So, you wanna be a door keeper? I have often pondered the meaning of it and whether it was just for that trip or for my life as a whole. To this day I am not completely sure what it meant. It is the pleasure of God to speak to the one who will listen and obey. Two things are clear from Scripture: 1) God speaks to people in dreams and visions. Examples? Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Pharaoh, Moses, Balaam, almost every one of the OT prophets Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Cyrus. In the New Testament there were Zacharias, Mary, Joseph, Simeon, Anna, Peter, John, Phillip the evangelist, the leaders at Antioch, Paul. 2) Those to whom He spoke in dreams and visions seem to be people whom He could trust to be obedient, or who were at a crossroads in history in which He would use them as significant players, whether or not they were obedient to Him. 3) The number of people with who it is recorded that He spoke that way are a significantly small number of people in relation the general population. Joseph’s dad, Grandpa, and Great Grandpa had all been communicated with by the Lord through dreams. When Joseph had his dreams as a teenager and shared them with his family, his father’s argument was not that God does not do such things, but whether Joseph had really interpreted it correctly. Maybe that was why Joseph said, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell them to me, please.” Maybe He was thinking of his father’s response to his early dreams. Maybe he himself was beginning to wonder if those dreams would ever come true. After all at this point, Joseph has been in slavery and/or prison for 11 years. Yet he obviously still believed; otherwise, he would not have insisted that they tell him their dreams. God was with Joseph, and I think Joseph knew and believed it. Do you suppose that Joseph thought that somehow the dream of his fellow prisoners might somehow be related to the interpretation of his own dream which had been rejected by his father and his own experience to this point? Yet he still had the audacity to say, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell them to me, please.” God cannot lie, and Joseph knew it. God gave him the interpretations. Those interpretations led to the fulfillment of his own dreams. Do you suppose that God really wants me to be a doorkeeper? Is there really any sense in which He will use me to unlock or lock doors of spiritual regions for the Gospel of our Lord Jesus? If He does, then it will only be glory for Him. After 57 years of life, I am convinced of one thing: If I accomplish any thing of significance, then it will not be because of me, but solely because of His mighty power. It will be only for His glory and none of mine. Indeed we serve a glorious King. Speak His glory to someone today! --Pastor john