Dreaming Great Dreams

DREAMING GREAT DREAMS

(Healthy Habits by Luis Palau, June 2001)

 

When I was about seventeen years old and beginning to take the

Word of God seriously, one verse bothered me. I just couldn’t

believe that it meant what it said. I checked other translations

to see if I could find a better rendering. But the verse says

essentially the same thing in each translation.

 

Jesus Christ declares in that verse, “I tell you the truth,

anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.”

(John 14:12)

 

That is a fantastic, almost incredible promise, but there it is.

It came from the lips of the Lord Jesus and has been proven

many times. Have you proven it true in your own life?

 

As a teenager growing up in Argentina, I felt frustrated about

evangelizing the unsaved. “Lord, there are millions of people

in this country alone,” I realized. “Yet here we sit, Sunday

after Sunday, the same people doing the same thing. We have

to reach out.”

 

So several of us began to pray together, “Lord, get us out of

here. Do something. Use us.” Slowly, in my heart and in the

hearts of the others, a vision began to grow -- a vision of

reaching millions of people.

 

Some of my dreams were so wild that I didn’t tell anyone except

my mother about them, and I didn’t even tell her all of them.

She encouraged us, saying, “Come on. You don’t need a special

message from the Lord. He gave the order centuries ago to preach

the good news to everyone. So go. Don’t keep waiting for more

instructions.”

 

So we began to evangelize -- slowly, in a small way. Now I am

constantly amazed how the Lord has fulfilled so many of our

great dreams the past thirty years. “Praise the Lord!” we’ve said

again and again. “It’s happening!”

 

While Jesus Christ was here among us, He deliberately limited

Himself to three years of ministry in Palestine -- to a small area

for a short time -- before dying and rising from the dead to save us.

 

Today Christ is calling you and me, His ambassadors, to dream

great dreams because anyone who believes in Him can do the

great works He did. How is that possible? The key to this promise

is twofold.

 

First, because Christ was going to the Father, He would send

the Holy Spirit to indwell us. Now that the Spirit indwells us

as believers, Christ does His works through us!

 

Second, Christ adds a condition to His promise: “Anyone who has

faith in me will do what I have been doing.” The Lord challenges

us to have faith -- not necessarily to have more faith, but faith

in Him. It is an ongoing faith. Another translation puts it this

way: “He who continues to believe in me will also do the works

that I do.”

 

Have you stopped seeing great things happen in your life? Perhaps

you have stopped believing that God can work in a mighty way

even in our generation.

 

What limits the work of God here on earth? Is God somehow

incapable of reviving the churches? Of turning the hearts of

multiplied thousands to Himself? Of causing the fires of revival

to spread throughout this country and beyond? Of course not!

 

In a sense, though, God has chosen to limit His works to those

things we trust Him to do through us.