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Learning to Interpret
Why bother to seek an interpretation for your dreams?
God doesn't want someone else to interpret your communications, He wants
you to understand Him.
How close of a relationship could you have with your earthly father if you
spoke different languages and relied on an interpreter to communicate? The
Lord's desire for us is to come to know and understand Him personally.
I was praying to the Lord for His direction regarding what He wanted me to
publish in the How-to's of dream interpretation.
This was God's response, from the Heart of God........
The Number One Principle in Dream Interpretation:
THUS SAITH THE LORD, SEEK ME FOR THE ANSWER.
To confirm that it was Him putting it on my heart and that He meant it, and
that He really wanted it clearly stated, the very next day before I began to
work on the teachings on dream interpretation He sent word through a very
anointed prophetess close to me. She wrote to me and said that the Lord was
putting it on her heart that we need to seek HIM to interpret our dreams.
Dreams are from Him to us and He wants and desires our fellowship. He said
that many people totally skip over Him in dream interpretation. They don't
stop to ask Him. They don't approach Him for the answer. They just quickly
seek an interpreter or the advice of others for the answer but never stop to
meditate on the dream and to seek His face.
There is nothing wrong with sharing your dreams with others, looking up
symbols, and seeking an interpretation but please do these things after
seeking God first. If you seek Him first, He will always be faithful. Whoever
seeks, finds. Whoever knocks, it shall be opened.
Mark 4:22 Things are hidden temporarily only as a means to revelation. For
there is nothing hidden except to be revealed, nor is anything [temporarily] kept
secret except in order that it may be made known.
Many times people get anxious or frustrated, and even angry, because they
do not understand a dream or because they cannot or do not get help from a
dream interpreter but they should not! The above verse from Mark tells us
that whatever God has temporarily concealed will be revealed in due course.
Sometimes God gives us a dream now that we will simply not get at this
present moment and not a soul on earth will be able to give us the
interpretation to it until the moment that God intends for it to be revealed.
I had a dream one day that my grandmother and I were in her home and I
was cooking for her.
At the time of the dream it made no sense because I lived in Texas and my
grandmother lived in New York. But several months later, when my
grandmother was in the hospital after having a stroke and being found
comatose the meaning became very clear. My grandmother was refusing
treatment, was determined to die, and established a DO NOT RESUSCITATE
order. She also refused an operation essential to living. My family fell to
pieces. They were told by the doctor that without the operation she would live
maybe two weeks.
God immediately brought my dream to my memory with the revelation....she
is not going to die. You will see her again and you will cook for her. I hadn't
cooked for my grandmother in ten years. Especially since I no longer lived in
New York.... I really had no place to cook for her there...but it did make sense
if I was doing the cooking in her home! I totally received the revelation that
she was not going to die and shared it with everyone that I spoke to.
Exactly as God revealed, she changed her mind, had the operation and lived
two more years.
This is dream is a testimony for not worrying about the interpretation of every
dream and just letting them happen. A person who looks for a symbolic
message in everything would have completely lost sight of the literal
interpretation of this dream. Many, many, many dreams are little clips of
your future. In my dream life, more dreams are literal clips of the future than
are not. That means, they don't have a "message" or an interpretation. They
are exactly what they appear to be.
Rest in God, trust God. Take comfort in His ability to get the understanding
of every dream to you rather than being in fear over your inability to
understand Him. If you've prayed, meditated, sought Him and anointed
interpretation through prophetic dream interpreters, just REST! Either the
dream has no meaning or it is for the future. Have faith in Him.
I once heard of faith as described like this:
A man was teaching a tribe in Africa, or trying to teach, about what faith was
but they had no word in Africa for faith so it was difficult. Until one day, he
passed by a man reclining on a hammock and he said, That's it! That's faith!
Faith is reclining on Jesus! We get all wound up when we don't understand
because we worry about our inability to understand the dream instead of
trusting His ability to get the message through. Recline on Jesus. Trust
Him! If you are absolutely putting God first in every are of your life, RELAX!
Take comfort in His goodness! He will take care of you!
As a testimony to God's excellent ability to get interpretations to us I share
this situation. He is so faithful to make sure that we understand Him! When
we are faithfully seeking God for everything in our lives He is so faithful to
us! There will be times in our lives, when we are faithfully seeking Him, when
we will receive a dream from Him and believe that we have the interpretation
for it. Then because we are faithfully seeking Him He will reveal parts of the
dream interpretation that we have overlooked or have misinterpreted
Example: I was on a very fast moving, scary river in a boat that seemed like a
canoe. The water was moving very fast and the next thing I knew the canoe
was about to go over some waterfalls. Not only was it about to go over some
waterfalls but it was about to go over in the worst possible place it could go
over. After I went over the falls, the next thing I knew I was dangling from the
edge of a rocky outcrop, which appeared out of nowhere. I was dangling from
the edge of this rock by my fingertips. And then, a huge person helped me
down. After I was helped down I saw huge spiders. These spiders were so big
they looked like king crabs. I shuddered to even think about how ghastly these
spiders were.
That Tuesday, I went to intercessory prayer and asked my pastor to pray for
me because I knew I had some "rough waters" ahead. (Whenever I get a
dream like this, the first thing I do is to get prayer from every prayer
partner that I have.) Then, after the prayer meeting, Jose, a member of the
church showed up and we all started talking. After some conversation, we
discussed some other things that I wanted prayer for and as a result he and
another intercessor began to pray for me.
Jose was not there when I told my pastor about my situation so he had no
natural knowledge of my dream and He did not know that I knew I had some
rough waters coming. Additionally, I never told my pastor that I knew that I
was going to land on the rock. I told her that I knew in the end I was going to
be okay but that I wanted prayer because I believed prayer in advance was
what was going to get me through. Jose knew nothing about my dream when
he began to pray.
As Jose prayed about my prayer request which was unrelated to the dream
that I had had, he went from praying about my prayer request to praying in
the spirit, and then he goes into the following, "You have rough waters ahead
but you will land on The Rock. Jesus is The Rock."
At the time of the dream, I didn't recognize that the rocky outcrop in the
dream, the one that just happened to save me, was a symbol for The Rock
(Jesus). But God is so good, when a dream is from Him and when you are
acknowledging Him in all your ways, He will get you the interpretation that
was meant for your benefit. My dream was interpreted without the
interpreter even knowing he was interpreting it. As they were praying I knew
instantly that this was confirming my dream and confirming and encouraging
me that all would end well. It really isn't so bad to go through a rough patch
when the Lord is telling you that He is going to catch you.
Because I sought God regarding what He was showing me, because I believed
Him, and because I was faithfully seeking His face for myself and others He is
faithful right back.
He says, He who honors Me I will honor, and of those who seek Me I will be
found!
GLORY TO GOD!
The following portion of the dream is an excellent example of not worrying
about understanding every single symbol or element of a dream. When we
have a dream and don't understand every single symbol sometimes we feel
like, Well, if I don't have the interpretation to every symbol or every element,
maybe I don't have any of this interpretation correct, but this is not true. You
can have a perfectly accurate interpretation without having an interpretation
for everything. God seals up some parts of a dream, prophecy, or a vision for
a purpose. Because God does seal up some things for a perfect time and
purpose it especially behooves us NOT to get into works of the flesh, namely
frustration, when we are unable to interpret every dream or every symbol in a
dream.
In the dream above, after the brother prayed for me, the sum of what I knew
about the dreams was this: I had an interpretation to the rough waters, God
had spoken to me through the brother that the rock represented Jesus saving
me, but I still had no revelation about the spiders in the dream. This was
important to me because very often spiders represent physical attack and
they have never meant anything positive so I just wasn't exactly thrilled to see
spiders in my dream and I really wanted to know what they meant.
After I had gone through some rough waters, I wondered, was this it? Are the
rough waters over or is there more to come? Because what I had just gone
through certainly was rough but it could have been worse (The exaggerated
feelings in the dream represent another point: Dreams are often exaggerated
and often what happens in real life won't be nearly as bad as it felt in the
dream.) and up until this point I did not see anything in the situation that
had come to pass that was related to a spider. The spiders were at the very
end of my dream so I knew they would be at the end of the rough patch.
The next day, my husband and I were looking at houses and I just happened
to see some of the biggest spiders I have ever seen in my life. When I saw
them, I was strangely happy because I "knew" in my knower that God had
given me the spider symbols in the dream because I was not going to be sure
when the rough waters were over. The hugest spiders that I've ever seen were
His answer! He knew when I saw those spiders that they would be
remarkable. He knew they would be something that really stood out to me!
Hallelujah! It's over! He knew I was going to wonder if the ordeal was over so
He put the spiders in the dream to reassure me when it was over that it was
indeed over. He is SO GOOD! God shows us these things in advance so that:
- nothing takes us unaware
- so that we can be prepared and prayed up in advance
- to encourage us even before the storm that we will be taken care of
Of course there will be times that are appropriate to receive counsel from an
interpreter (mainly for confirmation) or the Lord would have done away with
the prophetic gift (which, by the way, He hasn't) but His divine plan is for you
to come to Him. God gave us the body of Christ as a blessing to us. Sharing
and communicating the things of God, including dreams, is one of those
blessings. Sometimes it just helps to share and get help and support in
understanding our dreams better. Sometimes just sharing them with others
who understand that God speaks through dreams, lifts a heavy weight or
burden because someone else understands and opens our thinking to receive
better from Him. Sharing can be a blessing in many, many ways as long as it
is not replacing seeking God first and foremost because if we diligently seek
Him with our whole heart He will speak to us intimately, without the need for
someone else to tell us what He is saying.
Copyright 2008 Mia Sherwood Ministries
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