When I was a kid, I believed all the Bible stories. The characters were real people, they heard from God, their world—and eventually, indirectly, mine—was changed, things happened in the spiritual dimension. But that was then; God functions quite differently in the 20th century, according to the King James Bible (Scofield’s notes said so, and they were right up there on a par with the scriptural canon).
So I enjoyed the stories of Moses, Joshua, David, and Daniel. Their exploits fired my young imagination, they moved in the power of some mysterious dimension of which I had no clue. However, the story of their lives had nothing to do with the real world we lived in. Threat of annihilation by the evil Soviet empire; increases in teen pregnancies; divorce rate in the church approaching that of the secular society in which we tried to live our faith without a spiritual clue as to what it was all about.
Don’t look so sanctimonious. You didn’t know what spirituality meant, either. Nobody did. We grew up in an age of reason, where head thinking trumped heart belief. Christians generally (if you’ll pardon the expression) faithfully attended church on Sunday and prayer meetings on Wednesday, but lacked any grounded belief in the reality of the spiritual world. We played church, we sang, we read the Bible, we listened to sermons, but we had no inner spiritual reality. It was all in our heads—it never reached our hearts.
We played church, we sang, we read the Bible, we listened to sermons, but we had no inner spiritual reality.
The church has lost contact with people and doesn’t have much to say to their lives in our society today. No wonder so many people would rather golf or fish on Sunday mornings. We’ve got a mess here, and I think there are two fundamental reasons for these problems.
Experiencing the love of the Father
The first major problem I see is that most Christians have not really experienced the love of God as a reality in their lives. I can attest to the importance of this in my own life. Over the years I struggled with numerous issues that held me back, and kept me from embracing everything my Heavenly Father has for my life. At last, at age 55, tired of fighting with God, I lifted my arms toward heaven and said, “Abba, Father, I belong to You,” and I experienced in a deep, profound way the love of my Father God.
This definitely is the watershed experience of my life—as a result, I began to change dramatically. No longer leaving two resistant heel marks dragging behind me on my life’s pathway, I began to move in God’s direction for my life. I know in a deeply satisfying, inexplicably wonderful way that I am loved unconditionally by my Creator. I am no longer the same man I was before.
Because I believe this is so fundamental, so vital to our lives, I pray that you also would be rooted and established in love—an experiential love of Christ that surpasses knowledge of him (Eph. 3:17-19). Jesus Christ showed us the Father, and we can experience His love deep within our hearts and souls. It changes everything.
Touching the spiritual dimension
In my view, the other chief problem in the Church is this: we do not know how to touch the spiritual dimension in an effective, meaningful way. We’re still behaving as if we lived in a mechanistic world, directed and controlled by our rational behavior. Science is probably ahead of much of the Church in this regard.
We’re still behaving as if we lived in a mechanistic world, directed and controlled by our rational behavior.
For several centuries Newtonian physics was accepted as the proper notion of the universe (that’s what I learned while earning an MSEE at Purdue University). All physical systems, all events, were seen part of a vast mechanistic process. Not so anymore. Physicists have traded their science of determinism and prediction for a more flexible, dynamic view of the universe.
Newton, chaos and dancing
The marvelous cosmos is more chaotic than predictable—even influenced by being observed. Our world is not so much a thing as it is a continuous dance of energy.[i] Today physicists take an almost spiritual approach, holistically including aspects of the unknown and immeasurable. A modern physicist sounds more like a mystic than a mechanic of the universe.
The Church cannot continue to define its structure and run its processes using the machine imagery created in the 17th century by Sir Isaac Newton. I believe it is time to wake-up and be led by the Spirit. As with every spiritual issue, we need to pray like St. Paul for the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, that our spiritual eyes and ears will be opened by the power of God so we can know Him better and begin to function as spiritual men and women (Eph. 1:17-18).
Dreams help us touch the spiritual kingdom
I believe Christians can be awakened to the spiritual dimension through the dream. Basically our lives are pretty hopeless until we are touched deeply by the Holy Spirit. Dreams give us a contact with spiritual reality. We can begin to experience the power of God in the dream! And it transforms us.
My dreams helped open my spiritual senses, making the reality God more alive for me. Dreams enabled me to be more aware that God was working in my life. Dreams helped shape my view of God and change it. I believe my dreams brought the spiritual world closer to me. This is enormously important for us today!
Some of my dreams helped me deal with my inner psychological neurotic problems. When my house foundation was crumbling in my dream, when flood waters edged close to my house, I knew some things had to change! When my soul was in trouble, falling apart, my dreams gave me the inner resources to throw open the doors of my heart and say, ‘OK, God, I’ve got to change!”
My dreams helped me touch the spiritual dimension in such a way that I became increasingly open to the love of God for me, culminating in the Abba, Father experience. Some years later in my dream, Pope John Paul II met me and—it felt as if it were Jesus Himself—gave me the deepest, most meaningful hug I’ve ever experienced.
Gerald Doctor, personal journal entry, June 5, 2008.
Taken from “Dream Treasure: Learning the Language of Heaven,” p. 91.