Has God placed a dream in your heart that has not yet come to pass?
Perhaps your dream is so big that its fulfillment seems impossible. If so, you’re not alone. All of us have dreams and desires, yet oftentimes the things we desire from God are beyond our natural ability to gain or accomplish.

When it seems as if they are never going to happen, we are prone to bow to the pressure of time and at that point start trying to make things happen. Failure or compromise is usually the result. Sure, we might do some things, but they might not be what God really wanted and we can fall short of the mark.

In this presentation, I would like to share some pertinent information with you that could be of assistance that applies to everyone of us, whether we are “in ministry” or not. The principles are consistent. We shall start with Abraham who was one such man who had a dream or a vision. It was an impossible dream.

When he was advanced in age and his wife was barren, God spoke to him. And יהוה said to Aḇram, “Go yourself out of your land, from your relatives and from your father’s house, to a land which I show you.  “And I shall make you a great nation, and bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing!  “And I shall bless those who bless you, and curse him who curses you. And in you all the clans of the earth shall be blessed.”  So Aḇram left, as יהוה had commanded him, and Lot went with him. And Aḇram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Ḥaran.  And Aḇram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son, and all their possessions that they had gathered, and the beings whom they had acquired in Ḥaran, and they set out for the land of Kena‘an. And they came to the land of Kena‘an. Genesis 12:1-5.

As I have said many times before, Abraham did not really obey God in the way we often hear at first. He took Lot and his father with him, but God had told him to leave all friends and relatives behind. His journey started when he was 70 years of age and I am convinced that Abraham did not know where God was sending him. All that he had was a word from God telling him to pack his belongings and start moving, saying that He would tell Abraham he had arrived when he got there. That really took a major step of faith, based solely on a promise from God. He did not have a bible and did not have the leading of the Holy Spirit as we do, so at this point he started the journey that would make him the father of our faith, despite some hiccups along the way. I’ve made a journey of my own but knew where I was going and that was traumatic in many ways, so what he did really took some intestinal fortitude to say the least.

When He told Abraham to leave his country, God didn’t tell him where he was going or how to get there. All He said was that He would tell him that he had arrived when he got there.

God does not always lay out all the details of a dream before us. He gives us one piece of the puzzle at a time. It’s up to us to connect each of the pieces by faith in His Word.

Each step toward a dream must be taken in faith and there might be times when each step is challenging, sometimes painful. The promises are real and the Promised Land is real—but there are giants in the land and we have to overcome them.

I believe that every promise from God has to be appropriated by taking action, sometimes violent action to take the promises. Jesus said in Matthew eleven that the Kingdom of God suffereth violence and that the violent ones take it by force. As we know, this kingdom is not heaven. There is no violence or need for such drastic action in heaven. He was referring to the rotten here and now, pressing in forcefully if necessary to take what is rightfully ours.

He was relating to John the Baptist here and up to then, everything was in a different dispensation. Both John and Jesus ministered under “Old Testament” conditions”, so the promises had yet to be “ratified” by Jesus’ ministry, but there were some folk who still pressed in to obtain the promises. The woman with the issue of blood was one. 

What God has for us is there, as I often say, but they do not simply fall out of the sky and land in our lap so to speak; we have to take possession of our inheritance. Doing this usually takes place in different stages.

Let us jump ahead in time from Abraham to the nation of Israel and the Exodus. God sent those plagues, opened the Red Sea for them and provided for all their Needs. He led them by the pillar of fire and the cloud and gave water from a rock, manna and quails, so they knew about and experienced the supernatural of God. What He told them was that taking possession of the Promised Land would not happen overnight, but little by little. We see this in Exodus chapter twenty-three and I recommend you go through it carefully, but here are the key points.

He said that His angel would go before them and that this angel would bring them into the place He had prepared. This means that there is a place for us. It also means that there is a time process involved. In Habakkuk chapter two we see that the vision or our dream has an appointed time for its fulfillment. I shall come back to this later, but bear in mind that when God gives you a dream/vision, a time factor is involved.
  We can be assured that God has something prepared for us and that we will not be alone.

• He told them to obey this angel and not to provoke him, because His Name was in this angel.
  Who was He? I believe that this was the Lord Jesus before His incarnation. Think about this for a moment.
• He said that this angel would not bring them into a place without having any problems to overcome.
• He said that  but the enemy would be right there in the middle of their Promised Land and that their enemies would be His enemies. He promised to give them their inheritance, but they had to do their part and rid the land of idols and not worship false gods.
• God said that it would take time. Our dreams do not always happen overnight. The reason is simple. If God gave us everything at once, we might not be able to handle it and we could lose what we desire because of our unpreparedness. Liken this to Jesus’ teaching of putting new wine into new wine skins and not into old wine skins. This time factor will, as I said above, be discussed more later.

I once asked a few people in my church before I closed it in preparation for our move, “If I gave you 1 million dollars, what would you do with it?” I had been teaching them the principles of faith, the laws of the harvest, tithing and more and I waited for an answer. Let me ask you this same question right now. “If you were given $1,000,000, what would you do with it?”
After a pregnant silent pause, one person said, “I’d tithe.” Another then agreed and said, “Yes, I’d tithe too”. My reply was, “That’s good, but what next?” After much stuttering and stammering, a range of answers came out, all of which were selfishly oriented. One said, “A car” and I again asked, “OK. What next?” The answers had to be dragged out of them... A house. New Clothes and all kinds of things like that, all of which are acceptable of course, but the exercise revealed what I suspected. They were totally unprepared for anything, despite my teaching.

Let me show you something more by looking at the time Jesus fed the multitude as seen in John chapter six.
He had been teaching and miracles of healing had occurred, so they all witnessed the supernatural of God
 Jesus asked Philip, “Where can we buy bread so that they can eat?” He was testing Philip.
The immediate reply should have been along the lines of, “What are you planning to do?” or “What do you want me to do?” He could at least have said, “From the supermarket back in town”.
Philip however replied by natural reasoning, despite all Jesus had done, “Even if we had a full years’ wages, it would not be enough.”
The Lord did not mention any amount of money! He asked where they could buy food.
Andrew came along and said that there was a boy there who had offered his 2-piece fish lunch and immediately said, “That will not go far anyhow”.

They, like us at times, did not see into the realms of possibility and reverted to natural reasoning and this is the realm of the enemy.