Dove Awards: Reverent WonderSample

Living with Reverence and Revelation

By: Gloria Gaither

The Bible is full of dreams and dreamers. According to this reliable source, dreams may turn out to be the roadmap for our lives, the warnings that keep us from tragic blunders, or an aspiration so lofty that we spend the rest or our lives trying to live up to it. 

Dreams may usher us into heaven or leave us with a limp that will always remind us that it’s worth wrestling with angels to find our true identity in God. 

One thing is sure: As the wise man said, “Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint.” (Prov. 29:18). The Hebrew word for revelation speaks of revelatory vision, a word from God. Without God’s revelation of the law in our lives, we will flounder and be aimless. 

I love the idea that God has a dream for us. We are a promise He has made to Himself and to the world. Author Brian McLaren has suggested that we might even paraphrase the line from the prayer Jesus taught us to pray that says, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,” this way: “May all your dreams for your creation come true.” If we pray this, of course it means that we must “trust God and God’s dreams enough to realign our dreams with God’s, to dream our little dreams within God’s big dream.”

As we live this year out with reverence for God and seeking revelation of His law may we dare to dream.  And may those dreams be lived inside the eternal dream of God—a dream so big that “we will never see the end of it or fully understand it” until we are at last “filled up with God himself.” (Eph. 3:19 TLB).

Response: What dreams are idling in your heart? Is that dream aligned with God’s word?

Scriptures: Proverbs 29:18, Ephesians 3:19