Each one of us has some big dream for our lives – woven into our DNA by God.  But how do we know if we’re actually living the dream?  I mean, how do we know when we’ve arrived?

How are you doing? Great to be with you again today. This week and last week we’re talking about living out the big dream that we have for our lives. I have one and you have one, even if it’s hidden down deep inside somewhere, maybe long forgotten. And if that dream is a part of God’s plan for your life, (all dreams aren’t of course), then somehow, somewhere it’s going to fit into God’s bigger plan touching the people in this world with His love.

It may not be immediately obvious. Often He only shows us one piece at a time, but eventually, as we find ourselves living out our dream for our lives, whatever that is, it’s going to involve just that, touching other people with God’s love.

But how do we know when we’ve arrived? I mean, how do we know when we’ve actually started living that dream? It’s a good question.

Over these last couple of weeks we’ve been having a bit of a look at a book called, "The Dream Giver" by Bruce Wilkinson and David Kopp. It’s a book that I would really encourage you to buy. If you go to our website, and we’ll give you that address at the end of this program, you can go to a link where you can buy that book.

It’s a book about a man called Ordinary. He’s a nobody from the land of Familiar. And this book traces his journey where he embraces his big dream, where he leaves his comfort zone, where he deals with the bullies along the way and ends up in a wasteland and spends time with God in a sanctuary and travels through the Valley of Giants and finally he arrives in the land of promise, the land where he believes his dream lies.

But it kind of doesn’t look very much like his dream. So what does it look like? How do we know when we’ve actually started to live our dream? How do we know when it’s gone from being a dream to being an actuality? It wasn’t what Ordinary expected and sometimes, when we get to a point where we’re living our dream, it doesn’t look like what we expected.

Let’s have a listen to this little excerpt from the book:

In the days that followed Ordinary walked through every street and every lane and every path of this dismal city of Anybody’s. He talked to young anybodies and old anybodies. And what he saw and heard filled him with sadness. The needs of the anybodies were great and their hopes were few. Ordinary’s heart began to ache in a way it never ached before.

One day Ordinary took a stroll near the city gates. As he walked he talked with the friendly anybody children who followed him. And then he heard the Dreamgiver say, ‘What do you see?’ Ordinary stopped. He looked down into the children’s faces. ‘I see beautiful anybodies in great need,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ the Dreamgiver said. ‘What else to you see?’

Ordinary looked up. He could hardly believe his eyes. Carved on the inside of the gate was the name of his dream. ‘Your big dream lies here,’ said the Dreamgiver. Could it be true? Instantly he knew it was true. He’d arrived.

Then Ordinary understood why he hadn’t recognized his big dream when it was right in front of him. The lovely city he’d imagined all along wasn’t his dream but a picture of what his dream would accomplish. The big needs of these anybodies matched perfectly to the big dream in his heart and it was time to do his dream.

Ordinary was so excited that he let out a whoop of joy much to the delight of the anybody children.

Isn’t that the way? We say to God, “I’ve got a dream. I want to be a nurse or I want to be a teacher or I want to be a preacher or I want to be a Mom or I want to be a husband. I have this dream to help other people. God use me to help other people. Use me Lord.”

But somehow we imagine that God will take us to a beautiful place full of nice, well-adjusted, wonderful, lovely people. And we imagine that when we get there, those that will work with us on our dream, will share every aspect of our dream. They’ll see the world completely our way. Come on, we know life’s not like that. But we have these idealized, unrealistic pictures in our heads of what the land of our dreams will look like.

Listen, if we have a God-shaped dream in our hearts, then that God-shaped dream is going to match a God-shaped need out there somewhere. And people who are in need generally aren’t beautiful people by the world’s standards. People in need are hurting. And hurting people often hurt others.

When God called Moses out of the desert to go and lead Israel out of Egypt where they were in slavery into the Promised Land, what he found was several hundred thousand grumbling Israelites that he spent forty years with in the desert.

When God called the apostle Paul to go and minister to churches in Corinth and in Ephesus and a lot of the books of the New Testament are letters from Paul to those churches. We can see from those letters that Paul dealt with a whole bunch of maladjusted, irritable people who didn’t appreciate what he was doing for them.

The picture that we often have in our mind, that idealized picture, is of the end game. It’s what the world will look like when we’ve lived the dream that God has called us to live. When we get there we expect it to be easy and it’s not. The journey to our dream can be so hard as we have opposition and giants and people who criticize us. So this unrealistic picture in our heads means we can often miss the fact that we’ve reached our dream, like Ordinary.

You might have heard the term, “Bloom Where God Has Planted You”.

I spoke last week about a woman who dreamed about having a coffee ministry. I asked her “Who do you know today, neighbors, acquaintances, friends, people at your church, who do you know here and now who could just use someone to talk to over a cup of coffee?” She listed several and I said, “Why don’t you start there?” And so her dream was born.

We sometimes think that our dream lies miles away. We sometimes think, Well, if only I could get in a good relationship, if only my marriage was better, if only we could move somewhere else, then I could live God’s dream.

But most times that’s not the case. Sure, sometimes, to live God’s dream, we have to move to another city or another country. But most often God wants us to bloom where God has planted us.

And most often, when we look at the dream in our hearts, that God-shaped dream, and then we look out at the people around us, what we will discover is that there is a God-shaped need out there which matches perfectly with the dream that we have in our hearts. If a dream is from God, ultimately it will always end up meeting a God-shaped need because God’s plan is to express His great love to people in need on this earth.