Stephanie Ike - How to Determine if Your Dream is From God

Do you have vivid dreams? For thousands of years, God has spoken to his people through dreams and visions. So how do we know if God is trying to talk to us and what our dreams mean. Christine kan Haavela Cunnington, Jada Edwards, and Stephanie E. K are joining us today. Come on, let's talk about it. You know, at the age of nine years old, I started walking with the Lord and it was a moment where I saw an angel in my mother's bedroom. And as crazy as that moment was, it activated something in me with my spiritual side, with dreams and visions. From that moment, I began to realize that dreams was one of the consistent ways that the Lord began to speak to me. You know, I remember things from being a child that really protected me. There were times that I would have dreams about not getting into a sudden car because of an accident that could occur, and not only would I pray about that, but I will not get into that car. And I remember one particular day the the what the Lord showed me rather there was the car hit the car on the passenger side, and that's where I would have been sitting and I remember them mentioning that if anyone was sitting there, that that person would have died, you know. And then I fast forward even to where I'm at right now currently the executive pastor at the Pata of South Los Angeles. And what's so fascinating is in a dream, before that ever happened, in a dream, I was prayed for and anointed and told that you're being anointed to be the executive pastor. And then weeks after that, the conversation was had in the natural. When I think of the times that we're in right now, one of the things that the Lord had shown me concerning these times, it was in a dream and there was the earth was flooded, but in the waters were dolphins, and he began to speak to me that what is happening is going to bring a purge and a cleansing that would make way for His will to be established on the earth. But to understand that it's not to bring harm. Because the dolphins, they were playful, they were having fun. He says, what is happening is not to bring harm. In the end, it will speak of my goodness. And so I've had many encounters through dreams that the Lord has given me direction, that the Lord has brought impartation, and I've recognized that dreams are such a powerful vehicle for revelation. And it just speaks of the goodness of God that whatever way and however, that He can get to us, that he wants to speak to us, and that he has a word for us. And so, you know, I'm curious, have a love you know, what kind of dreams have you been having in this season and what do you believe about dreams when it comes to your relationship with the Lord. Well, you know, step I love how you said they're powerful vehicles. I was just doing a little bit of studying on this idea. You know, we spend a third of our lives sleeping, a third of our lives, and. Statistically that's about six years of our lives. We're dreaming. Six years of our entire lifespan is asleep in our bed. So the idea that God. Would just kind of ignore that whole third of our lives and kind of leave it out, I think we just haven't challenge that idea. I know a lot of listeners today are like, I don't even think about my dreams being used by God. Why would that be important. Well, the Bible's really clear. In fact, in the Book of Acts and Joel, he says in the New Testament and the Old Testament. Just to kind of get us both connected to it, he says, in the last days, I'll part my spirit. Your young men, your daughters, your sons, oders will prophesy your old men. Your young men will have visions, and your old men will dream dreams. Why does the young men have a vision, Because I think it happens more like quickly. But dreaming dreams take sometimes a lifetime, So your old men's have dreams that kind of takes them a while. So the way that I see it. In my own life, I'm not much of a dreamer. I have a lot of. Pizza dreams, but usually dreams that stick with me. I just ask the Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, if this is a throwaway dream, throw it away. I don't need it. But if there's something in this dream that I need to know, just reveal it to me. My sister is a total prophetic dreamer. In fact, before Jesus Culture Church in Sacramento Region ever was planned, did she had a dream where there was an airplane in the parking lot of our church Bethel, and there was the stairs of the airplane was a rainbow, and she saw unique individuals of our church climb up on those steps and get into the airplane. Did you know that every person she wrote down, she didn't tell anybody. She wrote it down. Every person she saw go up those stairs ended up going with the church plant. So dreams are confirmation. I think all prophetic should be confirmation. We should never just take a dream and live a life. We should go okay God. All prophetic is confirmation to the Word of God. The Word of God is our foundation. It grounds us and the prophetic around us. Whether it's dreams, visions, hearing something, seeing something, feeling something, are all avenues to confirming what the Word has already said about us and to us. So I love dreams. I'm here to say, God, give me more dreams. I'm ready. But most importantly, I just want to take them seriously. And part of taking that seriously is journaling it, writing it down. I have friends that every morning they wake up, they journal a few thoughts of what's on what they had that night before. So don't you guys think And maybe Laurie you could speak to this, But dreaming with God prophetic, it's all about stewarding and taking seriously what God is saying to us. Sometimes you just need to say a bunch more. Because we didn't even act in the last thing he said to us last week. We're like, God, give me a word. He's like, I gave you a dream, I gave you a prophet, I gave you a spouse, I gave you a pastor. Everyone's saying this, and you're one a dream to kind of get you out of this, and he's saying, you got to show up like a spiritual grown up. So, Laurie, I don't know how you feel about that, but that's been true in my life. Well, I'm like you, I don't dream a lot. I've had a few visions that have kind of changed my life. But my husband is a big dreamer. And if he wakes up and says he's had a dream, he's had, you know, four or five six major dream that have actually steered our direction in our whole life. And so when he wakes up and says I had a dream last night, I am all ears and I want to sit there and take notes and remember, because I feel like we'll be sharing this we'll be talking about this dream for years to come. And one time back in nineteen ninety four, he woke up bawling. So we had been married since eighty five. I had never seen my husband cry like that. And we were getting ready to go to church and I was in the bathroom. He was still asleep in bed, and all of a sudden I hear him calling for me, and I could tell something was wrong, and I go flying in there. And to make a long story short, I sat beside the bed. He wept in his hands and he said, I have had a dream that feels like I've been there all night. I've been sitting with my grandfather, who was Papa be knew who had passed back in nineteen seventies, And he said, he basically told me who. I had a couple pieces of paper with names on them, and they were names of people that you'll work with for the rest of your life. And this is what you'll do, and you'll go here and you'll go there, and this will happen. And at the time we were wondering, we were looking in Orange County for a home, maybe a place to build a home, and Kim Clement had said, put your feet in Hollywood. That's all he TOLDU. Didn't tell us where. Just put your feet there. God doesn't care what how you get. Put your feet there. And Matt so that was something that was heavy on Matt's heart. And he said, but Papa, he said, where are we going to move? And he said the table that we were sitting at turned to sand, and Papa said, you're going to move across from and he took his finger and he wrote the Hannah barbera And if you've ever seen a Hannah Barbara cartoon, you've seen the way it's written, real, pretty incursive. And he wrote that in the table and he said, I woke up and I'm going Hannah barbar Where is that? You know? He goes, well, he and I had shot this real video show there before, and so we knew where it was. We were just in a truck driving with the crew up there, so not paying any attention because well, it's up in La. I was going to La, you know, And here I had a little two and five year old son. I'm going to La. I'm not. I don't I'm good. I'm looking in Orange County for a home and I'll never forget. We put our kids, our kids and my parents in the car and we drove up and we pulled off the freeway and we just sat there in the middle of the Hollywood Hills and he said, well, there's the Hanna Barbarra building right there on the freeway, and we just started looking up in the hills. Long story short, we miraculously got a home that overlooked the Hannibar Barra building. A few years later, Matt's going down the street and he sees it, the Hannah Barbara building. They're moving out, and we were in the Hanna bar Bearer Building. We bought that building. We were partners in it, and we steward Generation Entertainment out of the Hanna Barbarer Building for years before we came back to TVN that kind of stuff. So I'm all years about that, Chris. I don't know what it's like for you. I just know that I don't have a whole lot of dreams, and I wish I'm asking for more dreams too. Hala, Well, totally, it's not historically been a major thing for me as well. I get more sort of impressions than dreams. But when there are a couple that I have had, you know, when we look at A twenty one. I remember one night, and I mean, you know, I'm fifty three and a half years old, so this is I can, on one hand maybe tell you this amount of things that happened. But I had gone to bed and I woke up and this was coming into that I'd just come back from Greece. There was someone that was rescued, and I was still vacillating about what are we going to do, like, you know, are we really going to do this? Am I going to do something with this with my life? And I'm in bed and then I vividly saw a group of girls in a container and screaming like the container was sealed, just totally sealed, and they were screaming for help. And all I remember was getting up. I mean I was wet, soaked through. Nick could tell you this has only happened once in our married life. I was soaked through in the bed and I was yelling, We're coming to get you, We're coming to get you. I hear you. I mean I could cry just saying I hear you, We're coming to get you. And it was like, so, you know, any time in my life when I think the work we're doing with A twenty one is just too hard, or you know what. I remember that dream. It's like I I remember like God spoke to me. I heard their cries. I can't not do that. It was like huge. And there was one other time, before I was ever preaching or teaching. I was in Australia and I'd gone to a sporting event in one of our very big arenas, and it was like I don't know how long this lasted, but for me, I don't remember the sporting event because it was like something surreal happened to me, and like I was. I know, I was sitting in my seat the whole time. I know that the game was happening the whole time. But for me, my only memory of this. And so this is before I was a preacher, before I knew any of this would happen. It was like the whole thing had stopped. I had moved from my seat to a platform, and that whole arena was listening, and I was proclaiming the gospel and literally I was seeing an old school this before I'd ever gone to a Billy Graham thing. This is the internet and social media didn't even exist, so I didn't even know, and I just saw streams of people coming forward to say yes to Jesus. It was so surreal but so real, and it's kind of I often think of that, you know, I mean nowadays except for during COVID nineteen, but pre COVID nineteen, that was then my life. Like every week that, you know, I'd be in sum arena and giving some kind of altar cores and I would I would just before I would step up on the platform, i'd say, still to this day, I do this, you know, Holy Spirit, you showed me this, you show I mean, I would still say that, like you showed me this, So you know, it's not major, but I have had a couple of things like that, and I want more too. It's you know, and I've asked God. I have other friends that are so and I don't have part of that, maybe something to do with a giftfix. But I have some really creative friends, like in terms of artists, creators like paint, drawing, singing, music, writing, really artistic. They I have to stop them sometimes. Ago I think that was just pizza, But they are like having dreams that Chris Gon spoke to me. Gon spoke to me like all the time through their dreams. I certainly. I don't know, Jada, if you got those kind of friends or if you'll. Like that I am. I'm a bit of a creative myself, but there's a I'm kind of center brains. I'm kind of strange. I'm like this icye, very creative but highly analytical. So I'm the person that might have a random dream about colors and soils and visions, and the other half of myself goes Jada, just relax, you drink, you drink soda, and you have indigestion. It's okay. But so I can talk myself down off the ledge. But I have only had a handful of really memorable dreams because that's not my thing either. But maybe today this is for people who have had dreams and they're not sure what to do with them. God can do something with that. But I'll tell you the most recent dream I had. I had a very dear friend of mine and UH and her mother, who was like a spiritual mentor for me most of my life and just a mother figure in my life, was ill and we were just praying with everything we had that there would be healing and that God would turn that thing around, and he would do what we know he can do. And I remember one night about somewhere near, very near the end of her life. It had been about three weeks before she actually passed, but about three weeks before, I had a very vivid dream. I saw her face, I knew what she was wearing, and I knew that she was in heaven. And she opened her arms and she just gave me this big hug, and I was weeping. She was weeping and trying not to weep now, and she just said, it's okay, I'm fine, I'm happy, it's okay. And I remember calling my friend and sharing this dream with her, and I knew in that moment that the Lord had given me that because we needed the encouragement that even though he wasn't gonna answer the way we wanted, he was still in it and sorry, So for me, I think that sometimes, excuse me just a minute, I think for me that you know, God can use dreams to speak to us in our most vulnerable and yielded place, because sometimes in our waking hours, we're praying so hard for a thing, or we already have our minds geared toward a thing, and when we're sleeping and we're vulnerable, God can speak really what he wants to say sometimes, and you know, sometimes it's a big vision of something that's coming. Sometimes it's just comfort and he says, I know what your heart wants, but I'm showing you have a different play but it's still good. And so I think for me, that's been my experience that he's spoken words of comfort or words that speak to something I've been wrestling with or praying with. And very often it's been for a friend or something like that. So I know he speaks. I know he does. I want to encourage you not to be afraid of that. Sometimes it's in the vulnerability of our wrist that God needs to speak to us things that we might resist in our waking hours. I think he still does it. By about you, Stephanie, now, I love. What you share so much, Jada, because oftentimes I look at dreams as God's starting a conversation or continuing one. And when we talk about, you know, hearing the voice of God, there's always this uncertainty because many people believe that maybe they don't dream that much, or they have a lot of pizza dreams, but and you have this question like, how do you know what's from God? How do you know what's a pizza dream? How do you know what's the enemy. And the truth is that you don't initially, and it's in the presence of God that you begin to decipher. You know, one of my favorite scriptures is in Proverbs, and it says that it is the glory of God to conceal a thing, and it is the glory of kings to search it out. So there is something about our spiritual DNA that requires us to put information together that God does not always give us this, you know, clear, sharp, elaborate understanding through dreams. Because when we look at Jesus, you know, Jesus would speak in parables sometimes and then he will take his inner circle and because of their unique hunger, explain to them what the parable meant. But the people that heard the parable and were not following Jesus because they wanted that intimacy with him, it seemed that it was unfruitful. And that is where and that is where a lot of people find this place of like what does that dream even mean? But I've learned that when you bring every single thing in the presence of God, that sometimes the most random just like this must have been bad food, dream has a message and coded in it. And what happens with that too, you know, when we you know, just honoring that space, honoring that place of being yielded. Is that when God sees that, you know, I see you being very faithful. You know, every night you put a journal by your bed. Every night, you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is to tap into what did I dream about? One of the things that fights against us, because the funny thing is that many of us actually do dream, but we forget the dream, and we forget the dream because that dream was planted in a spiritual place. But when we wake up, the first thing we do in the morning, we go on social media, we go to the kitchen, we make coffee. So now the flesh is so activated that your spirit is asleep. And so that's why a lot of times for many people, when they're praying or worshiping, they're like, oh my gosh, I had a dream, you know, But when we wake up, it's about honoring that space. Look at your you know, just what we said, you know about sleeping, it's a you that space. Look at that moment as God, this is holy ground. You know, when I'm going to bed, I want to just even in those moments of sleeping, I want to have you in mind. I want you to speak to me, and that when you wake up, don't touch your phone. The first thing you should honor God with the start of your day, go and worship, Go in prayer, because what was planted in you was spiritual and it would be awakened through you engaging your spirit. And so there are times that God would say, you know what I need to tell you. It's so critical that I'm just gonna bother you with it. But the truth is, when we look at how God speaks, when we look at how Jesus engaged with people, there were moments that Jesus would say it like it is, and there were moments that Jesus would speak in parables. And so it's up to us, going back to that scripture that it is the glory of kings to search out a matter God, what does this mean? What is this? And in that consistency, in that submission, in that childlike space of not being too quick to conclude this did not mean anything. In that space, all of a sudden, God knows this is fertile ground. This is a fertile place that I can speak to you. This is something, this is a vehicle I can use for you. And so just for many people who feel like God, just speak to me, speak to me, you can begin to see your dreams, to see when you go to bed as a holy ground, go to bed and worship and with the expectation have a journal, open it up and say, God, you love me, you want to speak to me. I'm going to bed right now, and I just believe that you would just open up your words to me. And no matter what that dream is, no matter how random it is, sometimes a dream that seems random and crazy is just God's invitation of saying I want to start a conversation with you. Would you continue? Would you pick up that conversation with me? You know? And so havla. I wonder have you ever had those dreams that you felt like this didn't make any sense in the beginning, but then it unfolded over time and you're like, oh my gosh, God, you're speaking to me. I think absolutely, I think there are things that don't make any sense. And like you said, you just go okay, God, you started the conversation. You know, I don't know about you, but I think sometimes we. Don't take authority over our sleep. We kind of let you know, bad dreams kind of happen and demonic things going on, and we're watching things and then in our sleep. You know, I remember one. Time, and I don't know if you guys have ever had this, but waking up and having a demonic presence not on me but around me where I had fear, immediate fear. And I remember talking to my dad about it. I said, what do I do? And he said, if you could say the name of Jesus, all things that are coming at you have to bow down and the name of Jesus. And I remember when I would wake up in fear, anxiety or a bad dream, I would start to utilize Jesus Jesus and get that authority. And I think some of the viewers that are watching to day you might be struggling with night terrors. You might be struggling with you know, going to bed is scary for you. It doesn't feel like a comfortable thing. You've got maybe memories or trauma that it's triggered when your vulnerabilities are down, and what we want to believe with you at better together, is that we want to believe that God is going to come and break all the things, all the fear and all the anxiety that's wrapped around your sleep, and we want we want to believe that God it's going to give you a fresh, deep, restorative sleep like you've never had before. And so one thing that we do when our kids are struggling is. We just loop worship music. I know, you know, it's like really, but we just throw it on a you know, iPod or whatever and just loop that worship music. So when you're in that kind of sleep state, you're getting that music around you. And some of the things we do is we just pray over our boys before they go to sleep. I pray, if we're gonna Lord, I just asked that you would bless my sleep, give me a deep sleep, protect me, encourage me. And I think it's really important that we take authority. Over our sleep. And then you know, also, I would say, and this is just like just to kind of make sure we say it, you need to not take everything so serious. I think sometimes we can be so weird in the way that we get a dream and we're like I. Know that's my husband, or I know it's just to go over to this nation, or I know, and God's like, no, that was kitha calm down. I think sometimes we as Christians, we want to kind of over Oh, if God wants to give it to you, he'll confirm it. So sometimes I just want to say, let's all relax a little bit, let's be fervent in our call and our purpose. But if God wants to say it, he has no problem confirming it multiple ways, and it's not like you're going to miss this one moment. So I think about Mary. She said, you know, when the spirit of God spoke to her, it says she hid it in her heart. That is I think some of the call that's on our lives just to take that thing, hide it in our heart, like you said, Stephanie, and let God continue that conversation. So I just want to pray for all of you viewers. I felt impressed in my heart that some of you the idea of dreams feel scary and traumatic and you're like, I don't know what to do. This has always been a place of vulnerability and fear, and I've never thought of it that I can actually take authority. And we just ask Holy Spirit that you would go into every atmosphere of the place, that each of each of us that are watching, that you would go into the atmosphere and you would take authority right now by the power of the Holy Spirit. You would take authority over every demonic, fearful, anxious worry that wants to come and choke the life out of our dreams. And I ask for restorative sleep. I ask for prophetic dreams, dreams that last a lifetime. I ask for visions and our sleep that we would see miracles, we would be healed, there would even be restoration. The person that we have not been able to forgive. I ask that in the dream we'd be able to have an encounter with that person and forgive them. In our sleep, I pray God that you would continue to be God of our whole lives, even the third of it. We're sound asleep and we love you Jesus in Jesus name. At TBN, our mission is to use every available means to reach as many individuals and families as possible with the life changing gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank you for helping make the Gospel of Grace go around the world. Without you, we couldn't do it. God bless you.