Seeing the Voice of God: What God Is Telling You through Dreams and Visions (27 page)

You have seen the shows where psychics speak to the dead and tell people with great accuracy what their grandmother is saying to them from the “other side.” What they do not do is clarify which “other side” they are on. These psychics are not communicating with the actual dead, but with very old demonic spirits who, through observation, can relay information about anyone from the past, godly or ungodly. But do not be fooled. When a psychic dies, there will be thousands of spirits fighting over his or her soul, to drag that person into a very dark eternity, whereas when a prophet dies, there will be one Spirit—the Holy Spirit—ushering him or her into eternity with God.

Charles, a former psychic who is now a Christian filled with the Holy Spirit, believes that the enemy recognized his prophetic gift before he did and sought to pervert it early on. While Charles was still in high school, two friends (both witches) gave him a book on casting spells, but what started out as love spells and life spells for wealth and happiness quickly turned from white magic to dark magic. He found himself in the dark world of blood rituals, witchcraft, channeling, Ouija boards, crystal balls, levitation and tarot card reading. But he discovered he did not need the tarot cards to read people’s pasts and futures because
somehow he just “knew” information about people. It was the enemy “borrowing” the prophetic gift Charles had and using it for evil. It would be another seventeen years before Charles figured that out. Years that instigated drug abuse, homosexuality, attempted suicide and separation from God.

When I asked Charles to give me an example of a successful spell he once cast, he paused and then looked away. When he looked back at me, his eyes were full of tears. “Maim and kill,” he whispered. He described driving down the interstate one day and feeling rage over a co-worker’s actions, so he called upon every evil power to “maim and kill.” Days later, the co-worker had a massive heart attack. She did not die, but her dog did at the same time. In retrospect, the co-worker probably had someone praying for her and those prayers sustained her, but the spirit of death that he released would not stop until it had killed something, which in this case was her dog.

Another time he became angry at a man, allowed the hate to take over and cast a similar vengeance spell. Within days the man had a bad car wreck. Charles said that these successful spells were seducing because there was so much power, but that you were left feeling very empty afterward. He said sometimes he got scared because there was so much darkness, especially with the channeling, during which he said he would invite spirits in and just take a backseat and let them drive. He would remember nothing afterward. One time, he came to and had a friend up against a wall, trying to break his arm.

But just as Charles did not need tarot cards to read people’s pasts and futures, he also quit relying on the spell books and just spoke what he was inspired to declare in the moment. He would speak out and put faith behind his words, not even necessarily knowing it was the devil. When he told me this, he quickly added, “But it doesn’t matter if you even know; it’s going out into the spiritual realm anyway.”

Charles hopes this will be powerful revelation even for Christians, that their words are powerful in changing their own situations. Proverbs 18:21 says the power of life and death is in the
tongue. “It’s easier to speak death than life if you’re broken and wounded because you believe it about yourself,” Charles says, adding, “The energy behind it is easier to tap into.” As for speaking death and curses over people, Charles did it for years, but now he speaks life. Describing the way God uses him to give others accurate prophetic words about their past and future brings tears to his eyes again as we speak. “It’s always life changing for them and for me,” he says. “I’m sure it’s not perfect because we’re not perfect, but God still uses it, and it gets all around the junk and muddiness in our brain and is still perfect for that person.”

I then asked him to describe the difference between what it feels like to prophesy versus casting spells. He answered, “In both you feel a stirring and a moving, but the prophetic is way better.” He described to me how fulfilling it is to speak to someone’s heart and see it changed by God’s love. He added, “Foreknowledge is sweet.”

Charles shared about his eventual salvation in Florida and about a deliverance session that started at the church altar one night while he was merely worshiping and ended with it taking six men to hold him down during expulsion prayer. “Witchcraft is a very strong spirit, not stronger than the Holy Spirit, but very strong. It’s control and rebellion. And pride. If it weren’t for Jesus and the call on my life—and obviously somebody was praying for me before—and if God didn’t rescue me, I’m sure I would be dead. You cannot stay in that much darkness and live.”

Charles says he used to hate the Body of Christ, probably because of the intense rejection he faced from them, but now he loves them intensely. It is that love that fuels his prophetic ministry. Charles got to see his son come to the Lord two summers ago. At the time of our interview, he was on day eight of a forty-day fast. When I asked what God was doing in him
during this fast, he said, “I love the beautiful Bride of Jesus even more now.”

Just as Charles’s witchcraft experiences began with friends giving him a book, he and I both hope you will recommend this book containing his testimony about the power of God to your friends and influence them to accept no counterfeits.

Lucid Dreaming: An Interview

Lucid dreaming—a dream in which you are aware you are dreaming—promotes the idea of controlling your own dreams, which I personally find a tediously boring concept in comparison to what I have experienced with God’s dreams. Controlling my dreams means that my one limited mind holds the sum total of the plots available for a dream. With prophetic dreams, the Creator of my soul (not to mention of the universe) pulls from His creative playbook of endless images meant to prosper and protect my real life and then visits me with them. Afterward, I get to wake up and live them, not wake up and realize they are fake and fleeting. So once again, lucid dreaming is a counterfeit of prophetic dreams.

Michael is a young man whose story is similar to that of Charles’ in that a friend influenced him to try lucid dreaming and gave him material to get him started. In lucid dreaming, you lie down and relax, using stereo headphones to listen to audio tracks that emit a series of pulses, tones and voices. Anywhere up to 90 minutes later, you will have successfully entered a dream state in which you “wake up” in a dream and have total control over what you dream. A narrator walks you through a process that quickens all of your senses, and as you engage in lucid dreaming, your body falls asleep, but your brain does not. Michael says, “It’s as if you are completely asleep but 100 percent completely awake. It dumps you immediately into REM dream sleep, and I could feel the transition when I began lucid dreaming. I was physically asleep and trapped inside my own body. I could even hear myself snoring with 100 percent consciousness.”

The downside of lucid dreaming is that it feels as though you are living the dream in real time. Time appears to pass like real life. And like the popular dream movie
Inception
, which depicts layers of dreaming, Michael said that once he was stabbed in a dream, he felt the knife stabbing him and he woke up in another dream that was three years later, only to wake up again and still be in yet another dream, so now he was three dreams deep. He says, “It was like waking up from a concussion or like you got out of prison after twenty years and the world had changed. A night felt like a month. I lived days in these dreams, and many of them weren’t good.”

But one night, Michael started the routine of tones, pulses and narrations and decided midway through that he was too tired, so he took off the headphones and went to sleep naturally. What happened next proved to him that he was playing with fire. He entered into a dream so hideous that in it, he was trying to kill himself to be freed from it. Finally, the “set” of the dream began to crumble in front of him (again, like
Inception
), and he fell into a black hole, waking up in his bed. But he was not alone. Standing at the foot of his bed was a dark silhouette. I asked him what he felt, and he said, “Terror. Utter, absolute horror as though you’d come face-to-face with a demon.” He was done with lucid dreaming for good.

Michael described the draw of lucid dreaming. There was no end to what he could dream, he said, stating, “The concept was that I could do whatever I wanted.” Unfortunately, a ten-year struggle with pornography had turned his dreams into a breeding ground for addiction. Interestingly enough, the Lord used a dream to deliver him of the pornography—a prophetic dream, not a lucid dream. He described having no control over it and not wanting to because it was so powerful. It involved a small girl (probably an angel) giving him some cleansing water to drink to rid his mouth of waste. He woke up gagging and spewing something tarlike and sticky from his mouth. Since that dream, he has not struggled with pornography again. “The urge
has been gone entirely. The uncontrollable urge is gone. And the stain is still on my carpet to remind me.”

We are highly impressionable while we sleep. This is because God created sleep so that we can be still and vulnerable toward Him. You will remember that we discussed brain waves in chapter 4. We learned that beta and alpha waves occur while awake, beta waves appearing during your normal daily stimuli (talking, listening, processing information), and alpha waves being present during times of relaxation and peacefulness, such as when in prayer.

But we also learned that in stage 1 (N1) sleep, the brain enters theta waves, which is a state called hypnogagia. If that word looks like hypnosis to you, it is because of its close relation. Lucid dream narrations basically hypnotize you and put you in a trancelike state. Theta waves are the state of consciousness that enhances creativity. People often recount seeing the color blue when in this transitional state, which is where the phrase “it came to me out of the blue” originates. Hypnotists prey upon this vulnerable state, and it is no wonder. The enemy craves our creativity, for we are never more like our Creator than when we are being creative.

Michael’s deliverance dream came after he took two very important steps. First, he began attending a Spirit-filled church that taught on healing and deliverance, and second, he asked God for Holy Spirit baptism. Seeing as how those are both key elements for victorious living—not to mention for life as a discerning seer—I would like to devote the closing pages of this book to their importance.

The Holy Spirit Baptism

Doesn’t every believer have the Holy Spirit? Before I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, I would get so offended at the notion that I
did not have all of the Holy Spirit I needed. Even when writing this book, each time I used the terms
Spirit
-
filled
or
Holy
Spirit
baptism
, I could hear the skeptics in my head. You need not worry that I think I have a monopoly on the Holy Spirit over you or anyone, but I would like to walk you through the Scriptures that convinced me there was more of Him to be had. Why wouldn’t that be good news?

First, who is the Holy Spirit? He is eternal (Hebrews 9:14), omnipresent (Psalm 139:7) and omniscient (John 14:26). Second, what does He do? He enkindled the writing of Scripture (2 Peter 1:21), helped create the world (Genesis 1:2), convicts of sin (John 16:8), makes us new (John 3:5–6), seals all believers (Ephesians 1:13–14) and makes His home in our hearts (1 Corinthians 3:16–17).

Third (and most important),
how
does He come? If we study the three Greek words Scripture uses to describe His activity, we can see three ways that the Holy Spirit manifests. These three little words changed my life. The first word is
para
, which means “with” and describes the Spirit drawing a person. John 14:17 (
NIV
, emphasis added) says, “But you know Him, for He lives
with
you and will be in you.” The second word is
en
, which means “in” and shows that the Spirit lives inside a believer. John 14:20 (
NIV
, emphasis added) says, “On that day you will realize that I am
in
my Father, and you are
in
me, and I am
in
you.” But the third word,
epi
, means “upon” and signifies the Spirit “coming upon” the believer with power. Acts 1:8 (
NLT
, emphasis added) says, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes
upon
you.”

For 10 years I lived with the Holy Spirit
para
(with) me, drawing me until I was saved at the age of 10. Then for 17 years I lived with Him
en
me (still do, and so do you if you are saved). But at 27, I first experienced the
epi
, which was when the Holy Spirit came upon me and I spoke in a heavenly language. The
epi
is not a one-time experience. It certainly was not one time for Peter and John (as shown in the book of Acts), and it was not one time for me, either.

Other spirits—evil spirits—can try to
epi
, or come upon you, too. Just look at this word you have seen dozens of times:
epi-lepsy
. Make more sense now? You have heard of Christians falling under the power of the Holy Spirit, and perhaps you have been skeptical, but I have both fallen down with an evil spirit’s
epi
and with the Holy Spirit’s
epi
, and I tell you, they are both real. As I said in chapter 9, I do not believe a Christian can be possessed of a demon because a demon cannot dwell in someone the Holy Spirit already occupies. But the
epi
factor explains why a person can be a Christian and still be “under” attack. Remember,
epi
means “to come upon.”

But what really convinced me that there was more of the Holy Spirit to be had were Jesus’ own words to His disciples. In John 20:22 (
NIV
), after His resurrection, we hear, “And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” So they had the Holy Spirit, right? But then, He later tells them there is more Holy Spirit coming. In Luke 24:49 (
NIV
), as He is leaving the earth, He says, “I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” He added in Acts 1:8, “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come
upon
you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (emphasis added). If the disciples did not resist receiving more of the Holy Spirit, then neither should we.