Specialization in the Kingdom

In the past 20+ years, I have been part of the charismatic movement and beyond, I have learned a decent bit about dream interpretation, and have practiced it enough on my dreams and those of others that I consider myself to be decent at dream interpretation. I have friends who I definitely would consider experts, but most of the time I think there is value in trying to work out a dream on your own with the Holy Spirit. If nothing else, as we work out and practice interpretation of our own dreams, I believe it can help give us clearer insight into some of the ways that God communicates with us on a day-to-day basis outside of the dream realm. However, I want to take some time explaining how I manage dreams and dream interpretation to look at something a bit more expansive—how we specialize in skills and abilities in the Kingdom of God.

As I said above, I’m decent at dream interpretation. However, when I have a dream that truly stumps me, I will reach out to one of my expert friends. But then, because I’m pretty sure they get inundated with dream requests from other people, I try to not just pick and choose when I ask them, but I also like to vary who I ask so I am not always putting it out to the same person.

Well, I had a confusing dream the other day. The basic concept of the dream wasn’t all that complex, but how the symbology fit with my life, and the significance of a few of the key symbols in the dream were still somewhat confusing to me. So I reached out to a friend. And like I said, I took a minute to decide who to ask first before I just randomly asked someone, and it just felt like this particular friend was the best person to ask. So I did. And she agreed to take a look at it and get back to me.

A day or so later, she wrote me and asked me a question related to my ancestral background and inner healing and deliverance. I was intrigued, because I had no idea how she derived that from the dream. It turns out that in-between the time I sent her the dream and a day or so later when she read it, she and her husband had watched a documentary. In that documentary it included some of the same symbols that were in my dream—except this was a documentary about Irish folklore, not dream interpretation. What it appears happened is that when I was stumped on the dream and was pondering who to consult, the Holy Spirit nudged me toward the one person that He knew he was about to give an interpretation to. Now this is an interesting story, but what does this have anything to do with you, the reader, and what does this have to do with Kingdom specialization?

This makes me think of the book of Daniel, where we see that Daniel was given skill in the interpreting of dreams by the Lord. But he was surrounded by people who also interpreted dreams. Daniel’s skill wasn’t made irrelevant as a result of other people also possessing similar skills, but he definitely had more skill and a level of divine gifting that set him apart. However, Daniel was also not everywhere all at once, so I imagine that the interpretive abilities of everyone else also had their relevance. I think these details are important because there are a few things we can derive from this on a broad level for spiritual life.

The first thing is that being surrounded by others with similar specialization or experience does not make you or your abilities irrelevant, nor does it put you in competition with one another. As a nurse, I literally work with a dozen other nurses on a daily basis. My nursing knowledge and skills are not made invalid as a result of other nurses being present, nor does it mean we are competing to see who can “do it better,” but rather we can pull on each other’s areas of more narrow focus or ability as needs arise. I’m not terrible at placing IVs, but I’m also not the expert on our unit. However, if you need wound care done and aren’t sure what to do, calling me for help might be a good idea. Even with my example of dream interpretation, whether mine or Daniel the prophet, having others in your specialty area isn’t a bad thing, nor does it mean the area is oversaturated. We aren’t in competition with one another in the Kingdom—we lift each other up.

Second, Daniel wasn’t the expert at everything. He still needed other people to do whatever it was they did, and he still needed to primarily hit his areas of expertise. In other words, Daniel’s specializations were just that—areas of focus. It didn’t mean he was never permitted to venture outside of that lane, but Daniel knew where his lane was and for the most part he remained in it. One of the things I think that Kingdom maturity looks like is people staying in their own lane to a certain situational degree.

I have a minister friend who is more than happy to speak to his areas of specialty, but when someone asks him for advice or his opinions on things he is not considered an authority on, he has no qualms about telling them he either doesn’t have an answer or doesn’t consider himself qualified enough to give a good answer to that matter, and moves on. This is actually a very reasonable response, and is a mature approach to something we see with specialization, which is what is known as situational authority. If we are at a Body Shop dealing with car problems, no one cares about my knowledge or input. Why? Because I know little about vehicles and next to nothing about how to fix them. If someone suddenly starts having medical problems in that Body Shop they’ll want my help, but otherwise the best thing I can do is sit silently in a chair and let the experts do their job. Maturity knows when to step in and when to sit down.

Whether talking about Daniel being gifted with dream interpretation who sounds like he became exceedingly good at a rapid pace due to his giftings, or me who may have some measure of gifting but also who learned through experience over time, I think there is additional wisdom we can glean from all of this. In your average dream-interpretation situation neither Daniel or I would need to rely on someone else for the answer. While I don’t consider myself to be on Daniel’s level, when things get high-level though (such as needing to tell someone both the contents of the dream they had and its interpretation), even Daniel needed to take extra time to seek the Lord for help. I think there is an element of this type of maturity that we need to expect ourselves to walk in in the body of Christ—where we know when we can dive in and resolve something as Sons in the Kingdom and when to get outside help.

On a general level, wherever I go there should be a solution because I am present. If someone needs healing, I’m there so you get healed. If somebody needs inner healing and deliverance, I’m there so you get set free. Whether it’s raising the dead, dream interpretation, or anything else, I believe that we as individual believers should be well rounded enough that we are generally able to handle circumstances as they come across our path, whether they are our problem or the problems of those around us. And if for some reason, you are not walking at that level yet, that’s okay. We all have areas in room for growth, this is not condemnation to anyone who doesn’t feel like they have arrived yet. We are all on a journey, technically there is no point of arrival. But there is gradually increasing in maturity, and that needs to be a focus of ours. The term “jack of all trades master of none” is something that should apply to most believers, with the exception that I think it should say “master of few”. There is an element of general ability across the board that I believe each of us should possess, and to the extent that we don’t, we should be intentional about learning and growing in those areas. And yet, there is another side of things—what I mentioned before about staying in one’s lane. We should possess general ability, but also be able to recognize specialization.

Ephesians 4 is clear that Jesus gave SOME to the apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers. In Romans 12, we see another list where it lays out workers of miracles. It doesn’t mean that only a special few are permitted to perform miracles, but that there is a specialization where some people are more capable at it than others. This means that not everyone specializes in each of those things—nor should they. If we want to function as a healthy Body of Christ, then we need to understand both generalization and specialization, and operate to a healthy capacity in both. For me, I made a decision many years ago that I need to walk in enough Kingdom power and authority that regardless of the problem and whether anyone else is present who can manifest the Kingdom in an instant, that if I am present that it will be enough. I have by no means fully apprehended that place, but it is something that does drive me to grow in all things Kingdom. This doesn’t negate the need for specialization, as I definitely specialize in areas of healing, whether body or soul, and things prophetic, whether revelatory or interpretive. I still have much room to grow in all of those areas, but it means that I know where I specialize which means I also can be aware of when I need to step up because my skills are best put to use versus when I should step aside and let someone else do their thing.

The good news is that whether in generalization or specialization, Kingdom advancement is Kingdom advancement. My encouragement to anyone who is moving forward is to keep doing so. If someone isn’t sure how to advance, areas of weakness you can shore up, or how to best learn and grow, I encourage you to take some time and ask the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, counsel and guidance, to show you a path forward. If you want to learn and grow in specific areas, then find those who are already blazing a path forward in those areas and read their books, listen to their teachings and podcasts, etc. This site is a great resource for inner healing, deliverance, physical healing, and engaging in the spirit, with hundreds of free articles that also cover things such as faith, miracles, and engaging angels. You can also check out my books on Amazon that cover a range of miracles, raising the dead, theology for life, traveling in the spirit, inner healing, impartation, and more. Be well, be blessed, and advance the Kingdom!

Grace Over Formula

I had a dream on January 18^th of this year that I want to share with you, as well as the interpretation and the message it carries for all of us. The dream itself was pretty short. I was at my old property and standing at the fence talking to the neighbor. In real life this neighbor doesn’t exist, but in the dream she was a woman who had a very young child and she needed food for the kid. For some reason I was in possession of a container of Similac baby formula that I had sitting on my pantry shelf, and I could see it on my shelf while I was talking to her (don’t ask me how, dreams can be weird). I offered to give her the baby formula, and she politely declined. Instead of letting me give her the food, she gave me a $5 bill. That was the end of the dream. Upon waking, it didn’t take long to identify the message of the dream, because the dream symbols were fairly clear and it was a play on words—grace instead of formula.

Sometimes we can get so busy trying to do things the way we have always done it before or the way everyone else is telling us that something works that we forget we have the Spirit of the Living God inside us and at our disposal 24/7. This reminds me of something a friend said to me in a conversation just the other day, which was that sometimes people think using the prophetic for daily life things is cheating. Its not.

When I was in college, I had one class where the professor gave us four essays that we could prepare for prior to each exam, as we would each get one of them on the test. He was only ever going to give each of us one of them, but it was random as to which essay question each of us would get, so if someone wanted to perform well they had to research to prepare to answer all of them. The morning of each test, I would ask the Holy Spirit to help me get the essay question I wanted—the one of the four I felt I was the most prepared to answer well. Once on the ride to class (Penn State has a campus bus system because it’s a large campus) the Holy Spirit said “move one seat to the left”. That might not mean much to anyone else, but it was a very straightforward answer to me because, as most students do after a few weeks in any class, we all sat in the same seats out of habit (and I got a dirty look from the girl who normally sat in the seat I took that day, as it was one to the left of my normal seat). On the day of the final exam, because finals were often held in different rooms and at different times than normal, I had never been in the classroom so the Holy Spirit showed me a vision of an aerial layout of the seats in the classroom, highlighting the one I should sit in with the color blue. When I arrived I got distracted and completely forgot to look for my special seat, and by the time I realized it, most of the seats were filled. I looked around the room and then realized I was already sitting in it! God had guided me to the right seat anyway.

The Holy Spirit is our ultimate cheat code for life. He is the Spirit of Wisdom, Revelation, Knowledge, and Counsel, so it seems only prudent that if we need any of those things that we start by asking Him for them. But in order to take advantage of that, we have to be willing to set aside our well-planned formulas for things and learn to flow in grace. That doesn’t mean we should never make plans of any kind, but especially when it comes to our spiritual life, when we operate from a position of grace we will be able to set aside our rote formulas for accessing God, getting things done in prayer, and all of the other “ways” we have learned over the years to get God to do things. Why? Because often those things are based on running a formula. For example, there is a chapter in my book “The Power of Impartation” that explains multiple spiritual laws in depth. That information is both useful and helpful, but there are times when we are so busy trying to work spiritual laws to our benefit that we miss out on an even higher good that God has prepared for us.

When we are able to live from grace, God’s divine empowerment in our lives, we can transcend all formulas and patterns and be led by His Spirit in all we say and do. And I’m not there by any means, but I do feel this is a valuable reminder for all of us.

As we close, I want to leave you with a resource that might be helpful. I haven’t read this book yet myself, but it came to mind as I was writing this article, and I suspect it is because the Holy Spirit is nudging me to share it with you all—so that’s what I’m going to do! The book is called “Grace Over Grind: How Grace Will Take Your Business Where Grinding Can’t” by Shae Bynes. In her own words, she is the “Founder and Chief Fire Igniter of Kingdom Driven Entrepreneur,” and this book is actually an expanded version celebrating the 5^th anniversary of the book. While it is geared toward business, I suspect the principles in it can translate to other areas of life as well, and if you’re a kingdom-minded business owner then Shae is someone you’ll want to get in touch with. And if you like what she says, she also has a podcast you can listen to as well. Be well, be blessed, and may you go forth with grace!

Warning Dreams Are Good Dreams

The night before last I had a strange dream in which I was talking to a woman who was showing me her garden. In this garden there was a lot of poison ivy growing, as well as some other plants—one of which she said sometimes is poison ivy in disguise. I don’t recall more details of the dream, but it struck me as strange that poison ivy would disguise itself as some other kind of plant that looks nothing like it. On waking, I had to go bury a dead goat before church as one of my stepdaughter’s goats died from a copper deficiency and they were unable to get more of the supplement in time to save it. We had prayed for its resurrection the two days prior and with no results, we decided it was time to bury it, which became my job.

I loaded the goat up in a wagon and pulled it toward the back of our property which is forested and we don’t currently use for anything (other than burying goats), and was getting ready to turn into this one clearing-area when I stopped—because I realized I was about to walk through a patch of poison ivy. Now, poison ivy by itself is really annoying because the oils on the plant create an immune cascade in the body that causes an inflammatory response (the rash and itching) long after you have already washed the oils off your skin. In my case though, the inflammatory response likes to compete inside my body for the title of “Longest Ongoing Ivy Inflammatory Response” so even a week after I was exposed my body will still be creating new rashes—even after it has covered a large portion of my body already. In other words, I get poison ivy really badly and learned decades ago to rapidly identify and avoid it. I just haven’t lived right by woods for a number of years and got out of the habit.

Well, this is where the dream comes in. While I am sure there is more to the dream message than I currently understand (such as paying attention to what we cultivate in the garden of our heart), if I hadn’t had that dream about poison ivy I don’t think I would have been quite as mentally keen on noticing the plant in real life, and probably would have identified it while standing in the middle of it (For those who don’t know, all dreams have messages—you have to learn to interpret them to gain the understanding and subsequent benefit of the dream). If I had to classify this dream, it would fall into the category of warning dreams—ones that have a message warning you about something, whether a current internal/emotional condition, an unsafe personal relationship, or some other potential calamity. Warning dreams don’t sound like good dreams at first glance, but that is a perspective issue. In truth, warning dreams are very good dreams because they make you aware of something so you can fix it. I recently had a warning dream where I was on a battlefield and my gun kept jamming. The warning in that dream was that if I don’t fix what is causing the gun to jam, I won’t be able to stop enemy attacks because my weapons will be ineffective. Again, the dream doesn’t sound good, but the message it carried is very good because it helped me identify something in my life that I need to change in order to prevent the outcome the dream tells me is possible.

Dreams can be messages from God, messages from our subconscious, or messages from the enemy. We can travel in the spirit at night and upon waking we think we had a dream but in actuality our spirit was somewhere else in the night (I talk more about this in my book The Beginner’s Guide to Traveling in the Spirit), and often God will give people spiritual encounters with angels, Jesus, and other saints while they are asleep. Ultimately, all dreams can be considered good dreams with the right internal perspective, but warning dreams in particular are extremely useful to help us make course corrections and keep us moving steadily forward on our life journey. And in this case, my warning dream helped me avoid weeks of health problems as well. And I thank God for that!!

The Two Basic Steps to Understanding Our Dreams

[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” text_font_size=”16″ use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]

Dreams are one of those things that “everybody” has. Now, some of you reading this might say “I don’t dream”. Scientifically speaking, everyone enters REM sleep and dreams, but many people don’t remember their dreams. Regardless of whether one remembers or not, God speaks to all of us in our dreams. They are usually about us and our lives, and can be warnings, instruction, informative or revelatory, reflection, and more, and not all dreams come from God. Certain medications can influence our dreams, as can demonic powers and the prayers of other people, whether blessings curses. Some people dream in color, while others dream in black and white. Many times people have short dreams while others have long and detailed dreams with multiple parts or acts to them. While types of dreams clearly vary, what we are going to look at today is the two basic steps to understanding our dreams.

Dreams accomplish many different things, as shared above, but a key comes out of Job 33:15-18. It says:

“For God does speak—now one way, now another—though no one perceives it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn them from wrongdoing and keep them from pride, to preserve them from the pit, their lives from perishing by the sword.”

While the verse focuses on warnings, the key I want to focus on is that God speaks to us in dreams to guide us. If we understand that God communicates with us regularly when we are asleep, we can glean Heaven’s wisdom for our lives here and now even when we aren’t spending time in prayer and listening to the Lord for instruction. For example, I recently had a dream where a friend was telling me about a project he was working on. In real life he isn’t currently, to the best of my knowledge, actually working on the aspect of this project we discussed in my dream, but it touches on some things he is already doing, and this dream seems to provide him with insight on a direction God wants to take the project in the future. While most dreams are about the dreamer, this dream was about him, not me, (evident by the content of the conversation) and provided divine guidance for the future.

Dreams offer prophetic guidance for us in our daily lives, but we can’t take advantage of that guidance if we don’t do two things: write them down and interpret them. The reason we have to write them down is that for whatever reason, dreams can be easy to forget. Sometimes I will wake up in the morning with a dream that was so vivid I am convinced I will remember it later. . . only to forget the entire dream. The worst part is that I know that if I had written the dream down then (or recorded myself speaking the details), I would have it, but because I waited, it is lost. I had this happen last week. I had two dreams, and both of them seemed significant to me. I was sure that I would remember them, so didn’t write them down. I promptly forgot the one, and then because I’m so awesome, I even waited a week to write down the second dream, losing a number of details on that one as well.

I’ll be honest, it’s actually quite difficult to interpret dreams I have completely forgotten, so my best advice is to make sure to record your dreams in some way very soon after you wake up. Some people use their phone to record, some people keep a journal right at their bedside. I usually use the notepad function on my phone to write down the date and a summary and any relevant notes about the dream and flesh out the details later. It works fairly well for me. Then, I eventually put them all into a single Word document by date. If I ever want to look up keywords, I can just use the find function and search for any keywords from as far back as the journal goes.

Interpreting dreams is the second step to getting useful information from them. What is so difficult is that they are frequently hard to interpret. My dreams are often long and detailed, and while individual items in a dream usually hold meaning, it is possible to get what a friend calls “analysis paralysis”, where I get tied up in the details such that it becomes hard to see the bigger picture. I usually have to write down the dream, then write down a much shorter summary of the dream, cutting out as many minor details as possible. Once I get a general overview of the dream, I can often figure out what it is about. Once I understand the overall subject of the dream, then I can flesh out the details once more. This doesn’t always work for me, but it is one of the two things I do to interpret my dreams. The other thing I do is ask Holy Spirit.

The Bible says in Ephesians 2 that He is the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation. Isaiah 11 says He is the Spirit of Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, and Knowledge. The Holy Spirit knows everything we need to help interpret our dreams, so asking Him for help is a good idea. Sometimes He will give me one or two piece of the puzzle that helps me put things together and figure it out. On rare occasion, He will explain the whole dream to me. Other times I don’t really get any understanding at all, so if I don’t feel that those dreams are poignant or significant, I just don’t worry about it. On occasion, I will ask a friend for help, as sometimes it is easier to interpret other people’s dreams than our own, but I try to keep that to a minimum as we all have dreams and it’s not someone else’s job to interpret mine.

Dreams as a whole are rarely as clear and obvious as the one I had about my friend and his project. They usually have a lot of imagery and symbolism that clouds our understanding, so we have to bust out our best codebreaker abilities and figure it out. Sometimes God will use a play on words to show us something. Once I dreamed about raising the dead on a train. In praying about the meaning, the Holy Spirit showed me that the train represented training—providing a vehicle to learn something. That might not have been apparent at first, but that one hint from Holy Spirit put the whole dream into perspective, and that was all it took for me to work out the rest of the details. In fact, a few months later I had some follow-up dreams to this one that provided further guidance on how to go about that training process.

In the end, learning to interpret dreams can be very helpful, and it is a good way to get revelation from God on an ongoing basis. Some people take a dream interpretation class or training of some kind, and this can be helpful. Well-done Christian dream interpretation training will help provide an overall framework for learning to interpret dreams, but even those classes have limits. Dream interpretation books, in my mind, are the same. They can possibly provide a little help if you are stuck on a particular dream symbol, but you usually need to understand more of the dream before a symbol dictionary can help. In the end, nothing is a substitute for one-on-one communication with Holy Spirit. When we talk to God about our dreams, He will help us.

If you don’t think you dream and want to start remembering them, already dream and want to dream more and remember them better, or dream and remember but want to get better about interpreting them, then pray the following prayer and then start putting your faith into action. Record your dreams and practice praying over them and interpreting them. As you are faithful with what you are given, God will give you more!

Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, I ask that you would speak to me during my sleep. I ask that you would increase my dreams and help me remember them. I ask that you would give me wisdom like you did Solomon, and understanding like you did Daniel. I ask this all in Jesus’ name. Amen.

[/et_pb_text][et_pb_code admin_label=”Code”]<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://app.getresponse.com/view_webform_v2.js?u=B40ZB&webforms_id=6653905″></script>[/et_pb_code][et_pb_comments admin_label=”Comments” show_avatar=”on” show_reply=”on” show_count=”on” background_layout=”light” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid” custom_button=”off” button_letter_spacing=”0″ button_use_icon=”default” button_icon_placement=”right” button_on_hover=”on” button_letter_spacing_hover=”0″]
[/et_pb_comments][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

Specialization in the Kingdom

Grace Over Formula

Warning Dreams Are Good Dreams

The Two Basic Steps to Understanding Our Dreams

Recent Posts