When Did You Stop Dreaming?

Our dreams are actually seeds - seed of promise and the Kingdom, which were planted in our heart by the King Himself. We sometimes don't realise the value of the dreams that we carry. We think of them as just 'our dreams' - yet they are actually HIS dreams, which He Divinely and strategically planted inside of us before the foundation of the world.

As He formed us in our mother's womb, he wove these dream seeds into the fabric of our hearts, and wrote the scroll of our lives, in which He saw us treasure and live these dreams. He knew that as we lived them, we'd be living in the fullness of our true identity as sons, and would be bringing the Kingdom of God into reality before the watching world. He was so excited as He saw this and placed these dreams in our being. They were intended to bring us into our wide-open, spacious life, and to bring others into theirs, so the whole world would come into the knowledge of the glory of God.

Think of them like strategic sign posts deliberately placed by God on an adventurous life journey, so we would know that if we just fulfilled one dream after the next, after the next, we would find ourselves in the fullness of the Kingdom. That as we fulfilled the dreams of our heart, we would know we were in the middle of God's will for our lives.

The reality is, our dreams aren't just for us - they are God's hidden strategy for catapaulting us into our wide-open, spacious life!

Yet somewhere along the line, most of us stopped dreaming, at least in part. We either didn't know we carried dreams in our heart in the first place, or we didn't value them, thinking that they were either somewhat selfish or unimportant, and as such we didn't fight for them. We became busy with things that took us away from continuing to pursue our dreams, and before we knew it, we were trapped exactly where satan wanted us, in survival mode.

We didn't realise that we were actually carrying around the very dreams of God in our heart and that by giving up on our dreams, we were actually giving up on GOD's dreams.

Jesus fought a great fight to protect the dreams of His Father's heart. He died so that we could carry the dream of His Father, and live a royal life as King's kids in the fullness of the Kingdom of God. He wants us to know today that our dreams aren't just extensions to the life we're called to live, but they are actually the fabric of it. They are important, strategic and pivotal and He wants us to step into them, because they will carry us into our wide-open, spacious life. We not only have permission to live this life, but we are commanded to live it. Why? Because...

Living our wide-open, spacious life means fulfilling the dreams of our Father's heart.

Jesus is asking us to fight for our Father's heart today, and value the dreams that He has placed within us.

The Enemy's #1 Strategy

This painful reality that I had let go of some of the dreams of my Father's heart was placed before me when I was recently reading a book called The Dream Manager, by Matthew Kelly. In this book one man asked another a most pivotal question.

"When did you stop dreaming?"

Talk about a question to make you stop and take stock! It sure hit me between the eyes, because I knew I was an extraordinarily big dreamer as a child. Some people have looked at my life over the years and commented that I've achieved so much, and sure I have accomplished a number of things that were in my heart to do. Yet in comparison to what I knew was in there in the first place, I've hardly even scratched the surface!

Sadly, I can pinpoint the time in my life when I stopped dreaming, and what that led to... settling and then coming into survival mode, which is the total opposite to wide-open, spacious living!

And therein lies one of the most strategic things satan has ever accomplished. How did he get us from royal sons of the Most High God who have a full inheritance, to orphans who live in lack and survival mode?

Satan has always had one main strategy in his attack on the Kingdom of God on this earth, and that is to attack identity. If he can take away our sense of true identity, he can deceive us into thinking that we don't have anything and we can't do anything and that we'll easily be overrun by our enemies.

Here satan was, faced with the reality of King's kids with a full inheritance, sons of the Most High God carrying dream-seeds of promise which had been planted in our hearts by God and would have an inevitable harvest if we simply stayed aligned in our hearts with the Kingdom. So what did he do? He knew we wouldn't just hand over our dreams in one hit if we realised they were gifts, seeds planted there by God to bring a harvest of the Kingdom in our lives and in the world around us. He didn't start by trying to get us to stop dreaming. He started by putting pressure on our lives and undermining our sense of our identity and inheritance.

He pressured us with poverty and lack mentalities and the experiences of others, which told us that we were the ones who had to make everything happen in our lives, and that our source was our own toil. He told us that our dreams were selfish and carnal. He diluted teachings about the Kingdom until it became nothing more than an abstract concept, instead of the promised land in which all of our dreams could be fulfilled. In this condition, we became pressed with bills and overwhelming to do lists... and gave up our true identity.

It was a gradual attack, and he sucked us into settling, because he knew that as soon as we started settling for less than the Kingdom of God, it wouldn't be long before we found ourselves in full blown survival mode, where getting through the day and the to do list and paying the bills became the main order of the day, rather than our lives being advanced simply by being raptured by our relationship with Him, getting our blueprints from heaven, and taking anointed actions as directed by His Spirit.

Here's how satan worked his strategy in my life. At 17 years, my dreams were so valuable to me that I had turned my two wardrobe doors into a great, big vision board covered with pictures of places I wanted to see, things I wanted to do, things I thought I would own, and contributions I wanted to make to the world. It was inspiring to me and my life felt like a wide-open, spacious life, like the world was my oyster.

When I was about 20 years old, I fell in love with the wonderful man who would become my husband, and packed up my vision board to move back to my parent's home in the neighbouring town, leading up to our wedding. At the time that I took it down, there was no thinking, ‘I’m settling here.’ I honestly thought it would go back up again after I got home to my parents or after I got married... but it never did.

I've heard this story in different variations so many times. We tend to get married (which is a wonderful blessing from God and the fulfilment of a special dream), have children (also a wonderful blessing from God and the fulfilment of a special dream), get bogged down into the routine of work, lack of joint vision and the difficulties of life and providing, and what happens? We find ourselves in this place where each day the focus is actually not so much on advancing and walking in the fullness of dreams and of seeing promises manifest, (because we aren’t sure by then that they will manifest for us) and it ends up that the focus of the day is how to get through it! How to feed the family, how to upgrade our car, how to provide or get the house clean or to get through the to do list. These are all good things, but we often try to get them outside of the Kingdom of God. This is a picture of how my husband and I were living and why what had once felt like a limitless life, had become one that felt very small.

There was a point where I thought perhaps I should put the photos from my vision board in a display book instead, which I did, and I flicked through it from time to time. Yet as the busyness of our household increased and our bank account balances decreased, the gap between what I believed I could live and what we were experiencing became some large, it actually became painful to look at those pictures. So I stopped doing it. Somehow, in a technology upgrade, I also lost the file which contained my 'bucket list' - the things I wanted to do during my lifetime... there had been about 500 items on that list, some of which I'd already achieved. Once I lost it, I didn't try to re-write it.

Don't we justify as we go along? I remember telling myself that I wasn't able to do these things then, but I would do them in the future, so I would think about my dreams then. I literally just put my dreams off to some future fulfilment date. As long as we keep putting things off into the future, we comfort our hearts that we're not giving up on them, but in reality we don't actually intend to fulfil them because we're taking no steps towards them. And we're not taking steps towards them because we feel stuck, limited, or have believed the lie that this is all there is in life, and we actually don't think the promises could be true for us anyway.

Underlying all of these lies is the biggest lie of all - that our dreams are just about us, they're selfish or unimportant and we're not even sure we have permission from God to live them.

If we only knew how important our dreams were to us walking in our true identity, the expanding of the Kingdom of God on the earth, and how much God longs for us to fulfil them, we would never have let them go. I hear the Lord's voice to us saying, 'Remember your dreams. They're from me. They're precious. They're a gift. Capture them. Remember them. Live them.'

The Life We Are Invited to Live

How does God actually intend for us to live? John made that very clear in John 10:10.

This is an overflowing, abundant, limitless, enjoyable life, paid for by the blood of Jesus and desired for us by our Father. How many believers do you know who actually feel they have permission to live a life like this?

It's not God who is telling us to live small. He's invited us into open and expansive living! If we're living small it's because in our hearts we feel small and we've chosen to live small. Yet at any moment - even right now - we can choose to live big!

How do we take up God's invitation for wide-open, spacious living? We refuse to settle any longer for less than the Kingdom of God in any area of our lives, and we decide to live in a distinctly different way, by choosing to see what HE is seeing.

When there’s no clear vision… where there’s no dream, people settle, people go into survival model, they wander into somewhere in another place than where they were meant to be. We only ever wandered away from our dreams because we stopped looking at them. But if we'll start to look at them again, we will get back on track with God's prophetic vision for our life! Our dreams are the signposts - we need to start looking at them!

We need to realise that when we stop dreaming and come into survival mode, we are actually aligning with our old man and shutting down our true identity. Survival mode living is old man thinking, it's old man living and the Kingdom of God simply cannot be advanced from this place. It's no wonder that God says that when our dreams remain unfulfilled, our heart actually becomes sick.

Yet when are dreams are fulfilled, is it a tree of life to us and the world around us. Why? Because we are actually actually aligning with our new man, which is our true identity, and we are partnering with Holy Spirit in advancing His Kingdom on the earth. There's flourishing and life and growth. It's a place of hope and delight and everyone can see it.

He is asking us to live in the Kingdom of God, which is the Kingdom of fullness, abundance, overflow, and where the resources of heaven are at our disposal for whatever we and those who come to us need. It's a Kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy. But in order to live there, we're going to have to start dreaming again.

Start Dreaming Again

I remember the day when the Lord told me in no uncertain terms to start dreaming again. He wanted me to believe for the renovation of my house and told me to buy magazines and put the pictures of homes I loved into a folder and meditate on them until I could believe for my own house to be beautiful.

Trust me, if you looked around and could see what I saw in my home and in my bank account at that point, you would have understood my angst at doing that. After hiding from the pain of thinking about my unfulfilled dreams for so long, I was actually not very happy with God for asking me to put my dreams in front of me again. Didn't He know I didn't have any money and that it was impossible for me to get my house renovated? Didn't He know it was going to hurt my heart? Did He want to get my hopes up, only to be disappointed? Yet He paid no attention to my excuses and was insistent. Why? Because He knew that the only way I could ever come out of the place of survival and protection of my heart that I had chosen to live in, was to dare to dream again.

To do that I had to trust Him. To do that I had to believe that indeed His Kingdom was real and carried what I needed. But He knew that as I reconnected with my dreams, I would in turn reconnect with my true identity and inheritance, and I would learn how to function in His Kingdom, where all things are possible. And He knows the same is true for you too.

If you want to be in the will of God for your life, start dreaming again!

You may think, 'I've left it too late, I've missed my opportunities'. I know a man who is in his 80s and yet has a 15year plan for his life! Wherever you are on your life's journey, don't give satan another moment of your life by thinking about what could have been. We've all missed it at different points. Dust yourself off, pick yourself up and start dreaming again today! You've probably heard the saying that the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The next best time is now!

You might also think, 'I don't even know what my dreams are.' Well isn't it going to be exciting to journey with Holy Spirit and find out! You can be sure that the dreams God placed in your heart are still there, and Holy Spirit knows what they are. He will bring them remembrance for you if you will ask Him to and then make space in your life to spend with Him so He can show them to you.

If you want help re-connecting with the dreams that have laid dormant in your heart, book in a roadmap session as my gift to you, and we'll navigate this together.

As your dreams start to return to you, you may find yourself wondering which dreams are from God and which are your own idea? Like as though the ministry-type dreams are from God and the fun dreams (ie places to see and things to do) are just our idea. That's not the case at all!

The dreams God placed in your heart are not just that you may DO something. He said that He came so we can ENJOY our lives! Do you realise that when you enjoy your life you are displaying the Kingdom of God? Someone who is running around overwhelmed and serious can never display who God is. Yet someone who is lighthearted and at peace and rest, enjoying the fullness of all Christ died to give us, displays the King and His Kingdom.

We are to enjoy our lives, that His Kingdom may be seen! When you know you have permission to enjoy your life and actually Jesus died so that you could, because that demonstrates His Kingdom, then that opens up your dreams back to your hearts.

I bless you to dream the dreams that God has been dreaming about you before the foundation of the world. Enjoy every one, capture them, pray into them, see yourself achieving them, seek the blueprint for their fulfilment and walk in them. You will soon neither recognise yourself or your life, because your dreams will have brought you to the place God always wanted you to live in: The fullness of His Kingdom!

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