Stephanie Ike: How to Determine if Your Dream is From God | FULL EPISODE | Better Together on TBN

do you have vivid dreams for thousands of years god has spoken to his people through dreams and visions so how do we know if god is trying to talk to us and what our dreams mean christine kane havilah cunnington jada edwards and stephanie ek are joining us today come on let's talk about it [Music] you know at the age of nine years old i started walking with the lord and it was a moment where i saw an angel in my mother's bedroom and as crazy as that moment was it activated something in me with my spiritual side with dreams and visions from that moment i began to realize that dreams was one of the consistent ways that the lord began to speak to me you know i remember things from being a child that really protected me there were times that i would have dreams about not getting into a certain car because of an accident that could occur and not only would i pray about that but i will not get into that car and i remember one particular day the the what the lord showed me rather um there was a the car hit the car on the passenger side and that's where i would have been sitting and i remember them mentioning that if anyone was sitting there that person would have died you know and then i fast forward even to where i'm at right now currently i'm the executive pastor at the palace house los angeles and what's so fascinating is in a dream before that ever happened in a dream i was prayed for and anointed and told that you're being anointed to be the executive pastor and then weeks after that the conversation was had in the natural when i think of the times that we're in right now um one of the things that the lord had shown me concerning those times it was in the dream and there was the earth was flooded but in the waters were dolphins and he began to speak to me that what is happening is going to bring a purge and a cleansing that would that would make way for his will to be established on the earth but to understand that it's not to bring harm because the dolphins they were playful they were having fun he says what is happening is not to bring harm but in the end it will speak of my goodness and so i've had many encounters through dreams that the lord has given me direction that the lord has brought impartation and i've recognized that dreams are such a powerful vehicle for revelation and it just speaks of the goodness of god that whatever way and however that he can get to us that he wants to speak to us and that he has a word for us and so um you know i'm curious javila you know what kind of dreams have you been having in this season and what do you believe about dreams when it comes to your relationship with the lord well you know steph i love how you said they're powerful vehicles i was just doing a little bit of studying on this idea you know we spend a third of our lives sleeping a third of our lives and statistically that's about six years of our lives we're dreaming six years of our entire lifespan is asleep in our bed so the idea that god would just kind of ignore that whole third of our lives and kind of leave it out uh i think we just haven't challenged that idea i know a lot of listeners today are like i don't even think about my dreams being used by god why would that be important well the bible's really clear in fact in the book of acts and joel he says in the new testament and the old testament just to kind of get us both connected to it he says in the last days i'll pour out my spirit your young men your daughters your sons and others will prophesy your old men your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams why does the young man have a vision because i think it happens more like quickly but dreaming dreams take sometimes a lifetime so your old men's have dreams that kind of takes them a while so the way that i see it in my own life i'm not much of a dreamer i have a lot of pizza dreams but usually dreams that stick with me i just ask the holy spirit holy spirit if this is a throwaway dream throw it away i don't need it but if there's something in the stream that i need to know just reveal it to me my sister is a total prophetic dreamer in fact uh before jesus culture church in sacramento region ever was planted she had a dream where there was an airplane in the parking lot of our church bethel and there was the stairs of the airplane was a rainbow and she saw unique individuals of our church climb up on those steps and get into the airplane did you know that every person she wrote down she didn't tell anybody she wrote it down every person she saw go up those stairs ended up going with the church plant so dreams are confirmation i think all prophetic should be confirmation we should never just take a dream and live a life we should go okay god all prophetic is confirmation to the word of god the word of god is our foundation it grounds us and the prophetic around us whether it's dreams visions hearing something seeing something feeling something are all avenues to confirming what the word has already said about us and to us so i love dreams i'm i'm here to say god give me more dreams i'm ready uh but most importantly i just i want to take him seriously and and part of taking that seriously is journaling it writing it down i have friends that every morning they wake up they journal a few thoughts of what's on what they've had that night before so don't you guys think and maybe laura you could speak to this but dreaming it with god prophetic it's all about stewarding and taking seriously what god is saying to us sometimes you just need to say a bunch more because we didn't even act in the last thing he said to us last week we're like god give me a word he's like i gave you a dream i gave you a prophet i gave you a spouse i gave you a pastor i everyone's saying this and you're wanting a dream to kind of get you out of this and he's saying you got to show up like a spiritual grown-up so lori i don't know how you feel about that but that's been true in my life well i'm like you i i don't dream a lot i've had a few visions that have kind of changed my life but my husband is a big dreamer and if he wakes up and says he's had a dream he's had you know four five six major dreams that have actually steered uh our direction in our whole life and and so when he wakes up and says i had a dream last night i am all ears and i want to sit there and take notes and remember because i feel like we'll be sharing this we'll be talking about this dream for years to come and one time back in 1994 he woke up bawling so we had been married since 85 i had never seen my husband cry like that and i was we were getting ready to go to church and i was in the bathroom he was still asleep in bed and all of a sudden i hear him calling for me and he i could tell something was wrong and i go flying in there and to to make a long story short i sat beside the bed he wept in his hands and he said i have had a dream that feels like i've been there all night i've been sitting with my grandfather who was papa bethany who had passed back in 1970s and he said he basically told me who i had a couple pieces of paper with names on them and they were names of people that you'll work with for the rest of your life and this is what you'll do and you'll go here and you'll go there and this will happen and and and at the time we were wondering we were looking in orange county for a home maybe a place to build a home and uh kim clement had said put your feet in hollywood that's all he told us didn't tell us where just put your feet there god doesn't care what house you get put your feet there and um matt so that was something that was heavy on matt's heart and he said but papa he said where are we going to move and he said the table that we were sitting at turned to sand and papa said you're going to move across from and he took his finger and he wrote the hannah barbera and if you've ever seen a hanna-barbera cartoon you've seen the way it's it's written real pretty and cursive and he wrote that in the table and um he said i woke up and i'm going hannah barbara where is that you know he goes well when we he and i had shot this real video show there uh before and so we knew where it was we uh we're just in a truck driving with the crew up there so not paying any attention he goes well it's up in l.a i was going l.a you know in here i had a little two and five-year-old son i'm going ellie i'm not i don't i'm good i'm looking in orange county for a home and and um i'll never forget we put our kid our kids and my parents in the car and we drove up and we pulled off the freeway and we just sat there in the middle of the hollywood hills and he said well there's the hanna-barbera building right there on the freeway and we just started looking up in the hills long story short we miraculously got a home that overlooked the hanna-barbera building a few years later matt's going down the street and he sees at the hanna-barbera building they're moving out and and we were in the hanna-barbera building we bought that building uh we were partners in it and we steward generation entertainment out of the hanna-barbera building for years before we came back to tbn that kind of stuff so i'm all yours about that chris uh i don't know what it's like for you uh i just know that i don't have a whole lot of dreams and i wish i'm i'm asking for more dreams too havilah well totally it's not historically uh been a major thing for me as as well i get more sort of impressions than dreams but when there are a couple that i have had you know when we look at age 21 i remember one night and i mean you know i'm 53 and a half years old so this is i can on one hand maybe tell you this this amount of things that happened but i uh had gone to bed and i woke up and this was coming into that i just come back from greece there was someone that was rescued and i was still vacillating about what are we going to do like you know are we really going to do this am i going to do something with this with my life and i'm in bed and then i vividly saw a group of girls in a container and screaming like the container was sealed just totally sealed and they were screaming for help and all i remember was getting up i mean i was wet soaked through nick could tell you this this has only happened once in our married life i was soaked through in the bed and i was yelling we're coming to get you we're coming to get you i hear you i mean i could cry just say it i hear you we're coming to get you and it was like so you know any time in my life when i think the work we're doing with 821 is just too hard or you know what i remember that dream it's like i i remember like god spoke to me i heard their cries i can't not uh do that it was like huge and there was one other time um before i was ever preaching or teaching i was in australia and i'd gone to a sporting event in one of our very big arenas and it was like i don't know how long this lasted um but for me i don't remember the sporting event because it was like something surreal happened to me and like i was i know i was sitting in my seat the whole time i know that the game was happening the whole time but for me my only memory of this and so this is before i was a preacher before i knew any of this would happen it was like the whole thing had stopped i had moved from my seat to a platform and that whole arena was listening and i was proclaiming the gospel and literally i was seeing an article this before i'd ever gone to a billy graham thing this is the internet and social media didn't even exist so i didn't even know and i just saw streams of people coming forward uh to say yes to jesus it was so surreal but it's so real and it's kind of um i often think of that you know i mean nowadays except for during covert 19 but pre-covert 19 that was then my life like every week that you know i'd be in some arena and giving some kind of altar call and i would i would just before i would step up on the platform i'd say still to this day i'd do this you know holy spirit you showed me this you sure i mean i would still say that like you showed me this so um you know it's not major but i have had a couple of uh things like that and i want more too it's you know and i've asked god i have other friends that are so and i don't have part of that maybe um something to do with a giftmix but i have some really creative friends like in terms of artist creators like uh painting drawing singing music writing really artistic they um i have to stop them sometimes ago i think that was just pizza but they are like having dreams that chris god spoke to me god spoke to me like all the time through their dreams i certainly i don't know jada if you got those kind of friends or if you're like that i am i i'm a i'm a bit of a creative myself but there's a i'm kind of center brained some kind of strange i'm like this i see very creative but highly analytical so i'm the person that might have a random dream about colors and swirls and visions and the other half of myself goes jada just relax you you drink you you drink soda and you have indigestion it's okay but so i can talk myself down off the ledge but i i have only had a handful of really memorable dreams because that's not my thing either but maybe today this is for people who have had dreams and they're not sure what to do with them god can do something with that but i'll tell you the most recent dream i had i had a very dear friend of mine and uh and her mother who was like a spiritual mentor for me most of my life and just a mother figure in my life uh was ill and we were just praying with everything we had that there would be healing and that god would turn that thing around and he would do what we know he can do and um i remember one night um about somewhere near very near the end of her life it had been about three weeks before um she actually passed but about three weeks before i had a very vivid dream i saw her face i knew what she was wearing and i knew that she was in heaven and she opened her arms and she just gave me this big hug and i was weeping she was weeping and trying not to weep now and she just said it's okay i'm fine i'm happy it's okay and i remember calling my friend and sharing this dream with her and i knew in that moment that the lord had given me that because we needed the encouragement that even though he wasn't going to answer the way we wanted he was still in it and um sorry so so for me i think that sometimes excuse me just a minute i think for me that you know god can use dreams to speak to us in our most vulnerable and yielded place because sometimes in our waking hours we're praying so hard for a thing or we already have our minds geared toward a thing and when we're sleeping and we're vulnerable god can speak really what he wants to say sometimes and you know sometimes it's a big vision of something that's coming sometimes it's just comfort and he says i know what your heart wants but i'm showing you have a different plan but it's still good and so i think for me that's been my experience that he's spoken words of comfort or words that speak to something i've been wrestling with or praying with and very often it's been for a friend or something like that so i know he speaks i know he does and i want to encourage you not to be afraid of that sometimes it's in the vulnerability of our rest that god needs to speak to us things that we might resist in our waking hours i think he still does it how about you stephanie now i love what you shared so much jada because oftentimes i look at dreams as god starting a conversation a continuing one and when we talk about you know hearing the voice of god there's always this uncertainty because many people believe that maybe they don't dream that much or they have a lot of pizza dreams but and you have this question like how do you know what's from god how do you know what's a pizza dream how do you know what's the enemy and the truth is that you don't initially and it's it's in the presence of god that you begin to decipher you know one of my favorite scriptures is in proverbs and it says that it is the glory of god to conceal a thing and it's the glory of kings to search it out so there is something about our spiritual dna that requires us to put information together that god does not always give us this you know clear sharp elaborate understanding through dreams because when we look at jesus you know jesus would speak in parables sometimes and then he would take his inner circle and because of their unique hunger explain to them what the parable meant but the people that heard the parable and were not following jesus because they wanted that intimacy with him it seemed that it was unfruitful and that is where and that is where a lot of people find this place of like what does that dream even mean but i've learned that when you bring every single thing in the presence of god that sometimes the most random just like this must have been bad food dream has a message encoded in it and what happens with that too you know when we you know just honoring um that space honoring that place of being yielded is that when god sees that you know i i see you being very faithful you know every night you put a journal by your bed every night you you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is to tap into what did that what did i dream about one of the things that fights against us because the funny thing is that many of us actually do dream but we forget the dream and we forget the dream because that dream was planted in a spiritual place but when we wake up the first thing we do in the morning we go on social media we go to the kitchen we make coffee so now the flesh is so activated that your spirit is asleep and so that's why a lot of times for many people when they're praying or worshiping they're like oh my gosh i had a dream you know but when we wake up it's about honoring that space look at your you know just what we said you know about sleeping it's a you that space look at that moment as god this is holy ground you know when i'm going to bed i want to just even in those moments of sleeping i want to have you in mind i want you to speak to me and that when you wake up don't touch your phone the first thing you should honor god with the start of your day go and worship go in prayer because what was planted in you was spiritual and it would be awakened through you engaging your spirit and so there are times that god would say you know what what i need to tell you is so critical that i'm just gonna bother you with it but the truth is when we look at how god speaks when we look at how jesus engaged with people there were moments that jesus would say it like it is and there were moments that jesus was speaking parables and so it's up to us going back to that scripture that it is the glory of kings to search out a matter god what does this mean what is this and in that consistency in that submission in that childlike space of not being too quick to conclude this did not mean anything in that space all of a sudden god knows this is for the ground this is a further place that i can speak to you this is something this is a vehicle i can use for you and so just for many people who feel like god just speak to me speak to me you can begin to see your dreams to see when you go to bed as a holy ground go to bed and worship and with the expectation have a journal open it up and say god you love me you want to speak to me you i'm going to bed right now and i just believe that you would just open up your words to me and no matter what that dream is no matter how random it is sometimes a dream that seems random and crazy is just god's invitation of saying i want to start a conversation with you would you continue would you pick up that conversation with me you know and so havilla i wonder have you ever had those dreams that you felt like um this didn't make any sense in the beginning but then it unfolded over time and you're like oh my gosh god you're speaking to me i think absolutely i think there are things that don't make any sense and like you said you just go okay god you started the conversation you know i don't know about you but i think sometimes we don't take authority over our sleep we kind of let you know bad dreams kind of happen and demonic things going on and we're watching things and then in our sleep you know i remember one time and i don't know if you guys have ever had this but waking up and having a demonic presence not on me but around me where i had fear immediate fear and i remember talking to my dad about it i said what do i do and he said if you could say the name of jesus all things that are coming at you have to bow down in the name of jesus and i remember when i would wake up in fear anxiety or a bad dream i would start to utilize jesus jesus and get that authority and i i think some of the viewers that are watching today you might be struggling with night terrors you might be struggling with you know going to bed is scary for you it doesn't feel like a comfortable thing you've got maybe memories or trauma that it's triggered when your vulnerabilities are down and what we want to believe with you at better together is that we want to believe that god is going to come and break all the things all the fear and all the anxiety that's wrapped around your sleep and we want we want to believe that god's going to give you a fresh deep restorative sleep like you've never had before and so one thing that we do when our kids are struggling is we just loop worship music i know you know it's like really but we just throw it on on a you know ipod or whatever and just loop that worship music so when you're in that kind of sleep state you're getting that music around you and some of the things um we do is we just pray over our boys before they go to sleep i pray before i get back lord i just ask that you bless my sleep give me a deep sleep protect me uh encourage me and i think it's really important that we take authority over our sleep and then you know also i would say and this is just like just to kind of make sure we say it you need to not take everything so serious i think sometimes and we can be so weird in the way that we get a dream and we're like i know that's my husband or i know it's just to go over to this nation or i know and god's like no that was pizza calm down i think sometimes we as christians we want to kind of over oh if god wants to give it to you he'll confirm it so sometimes i just want to say let's all relax a little bit let's be fervent in our call and our purpose but if god wants to say it he has no problem confirming it multiple ways and it's not like you're going to miss this one moment so i think about mary she said you know when the spirit of god spoke to her it says she hid it in her heart that is i think some of the call that's on our lives just to take that thing hide it in our heart like you said stephanie and let god continue that conversation so i just want to pray for all of you viewers i felt impressed in my heart that some of you the idea of dreams feels scary and traumatic and you're like i don't know what to do this has always been a place of vulnerability and fear um and i've never thought of it that i can actually take authority and we just ask holy spirit that you would go into every atmosphere of the place that each of each of us that are watching that you would go into that atmosphere and you would take authority right now by the power of the holy spirit you would take authority over every demonic fearful anxious worry that wants to come and choke the life out of our dreams and i ask for restorative sleep i ask for prophetic dreams dreams that last a lifetime i asked for visions in our sleep that we would see miracles we would be healed there would even be restoration the person that we have not been able to forgive i ask that in the dream we'd be able to have an encounter with that person and forgive them in our sleep i pray god that you would continue to be god of our whole lives even the third of it we're sound asleep and we love you jesus in jesus name amen at tbn our mission is to use every available means to reach as many individuals and families as possible with the life-changing gospel of jesus christ thank you for helping make the gospel of grace go around the world without you we couldn't do it god bless you

Channel: TBN

Views: 32,066

Rating: 4.9454546 out of 5

Keywords: stephanie ike, stephanie ike 2020, revival, dream interpretation, dreams, dreams from god, stephanie ike dreams, stephanie ike sermons, stephanie ike husband, women's ministry, women's bible study, jada edwards, havilah cunnington, full teaching, full episode, tbn, trinity broadcasting network, trinity broadcasting network live, tbn live, matt crouch, t8b2n6, 8t2b6n, tbn826, 826tbn, faith, women pastor, prayer, dreaming, sleeping, what does my dream mean, god's voice, the voice of god

Id: lE8LPctCI_8

Length: 24min 55sec (1495 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021