Resurrection Ripples - 5 - Dreams and Visions

Scripture: Acts 16:9-15

Acts 16:9–15 NIV

9 During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10 After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. 11 From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, and the next day we went on to Neapolis. 12 From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days. 13 On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. 14 One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. 15 When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.

5/25/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Standard

Opening Prayer:

Gracious God,

through a vision you sent forth Paul to preach the gospel

and called the women to the place of prayer on the Sabbath.

Grant that we may be like Paul

and be found like Lydia,

our hearts responsive to your word

and open to go where you lead us. Amen.

Dreams and Visions

Vision part 2

Thank you all for your prayers last week. I also want to thank Kerri and those who stepped up to fill in for me at the last minute. My day didn't go as planned, but from everything I've heard, God worked through all of you. There were two beautiful services. As your pastor, it’s a great relief to know I can trust that God will take care of you, and, in His strength, you will take care of each other during those moments when Bekah and I cannot be with you.

We've uploaded a video of the message I hoped to share with you about the power of Jesus, which calls us beyond our understanding. I encourage you to watch that video if you have the time, especially if you have felt God tugging at your heart and are trying to discern your next steps.

In last week's scripture on the video, Peter learned that God speaks to us inwardly through His Spirit—through our dreams, visions, and the guidance of our conscience. We must listen to Him. He also presents that call on our lives externally or outwardly. He always goes ahead of us, and the calling we feel inside will be met with opportunities to show obedience in the world around us. Most importantly, we need to verify that call on our lives through scripture, specifically in the teachings of Jesus, because He interprets all of scripture for us. And don't try to discern God's call on your life alone. He brings us together into His family as the body of Christ so that we can nurture, encourage, correct, and guide one another to follow Him faithfully.

As we've seen throughout the past few weeks, those small acts of obedience add up and create powerful changes, transforming the lives of people we may never even meet. We may not be responsible for saving and redeeming the world, but through those resurrection ripples that flow through us and empower us, everything we do matters, whether we know it or not.

Jesus wants us to partner with him in his work. He has given us the goal of bringing everyone into a growing relationship with him. While we may not be able to see or comprehend all the details of that work, Jesus gives us the specific vision to help us fulfill that general mission of His Kingdom.

What we see

Our look at the power of the resurrection of Jesus has taken us from Mary and the witnessing women at the empty tomb, to Paul’s conversion, to the resurrection of Tabitha, to Peter and his world changing dinner party, and today we’re back with Paul as more ripples of the Resurrection continue to wash over him. I hope you’ve been able to see the way. God worked through the lives of all of these people, intersecting their stories together as they all became part of the story of Jesus. One wave of redemption was not enough for them, and it’s not enough for us. Jesus has more in store for us all.

I also hope you’ve noticed Jesus working back-and-forth between men and women, Jews and Gentiles, those who were always near God, and those who came from far away. His vision for us is bigger than we can grasp on our own.

However, we often get tunnel vision. The verses right before the scripture we read today tell us that Paul wanted to take the gospel message to the province of Asia, an area between Asia and Europe, around Turkey and its neighboring countries.

But God gave him a vision, sending him west instead of east. Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit prevented him from going to the province of Asia, as he had been hoping and praying to do. We can have internal desires and sometimes tell ourselves that they are from God. But sometimes, those desires are misplaced. It's not that they're bad; it's that they're pointed in the wrong direction.

So God took Paul's misplaced desire to take the gospel to one place and pointed him in another direction. And Paul was faithful. I'm sure he was sad it didn't work out as he hoped, but he didn't throw a tantrum or try to bargain with God to devise a compromise. He went where God sent him. He got on a ship and traveled to the port of the Macedonia region, then to Philippi, the capital city in that area.

This journey didn't follow his typical strategies of taking the gospel to the Gentile world and planting churches. In cities where there were enough Jewish immigrants to gather together, they would work to build themselves a synagogue, kind of like a small local church for them to worship in together. Paul usually went to these local synagogues first and shared about Jesus with them before expanding to the Gentiles in town. After all, Jesus came to the Jews first. At the beginning of his ministry, he often went to the synagogues to preach and teach to the faithful people there before going out to the countryside and interacting with Jews and even Gentiles who were more on the fringe of the faith.

In my work with new ministries, we often refer to that as going after the low-hanging fruit or those closer to us before putting forth more effort and energy to reach those further away.

I am confident there were many Jews who had been displaced from Israel and maybe even some Christians who had been persecuted and chased out of their homes, who found their way to the province of Asia and to whom Paul wanted to go and connect to as some of that low-hanging fruit. He may have even had personal friends and family in the area. But that's not how his story went. There was no synagogue in Philippi because Macedonia had fewer Jewish immigrants.

As Paul looked for some of his Jewish brothers and sisters to share Jesus with and establish a church in that area, he was led to a small prayer meeting conducted by some women who prayed while doing their laundry at the river outside town. This tells us not only that there were not enough Jews to form a synagogue in this town, but also that there were very few faithful Jewish men to participate in any of their religious practices.

This wasn't low-hanging fruit. This was Paul going out on a limb at quite a distance and personal cost, and not seeing much fruit at the end of that limb. But he did it because God gave him a vision for it, even if he didn't fully understand it.

What God Intends

Paul had a plan. He had an inward desire and opportunities to share Jesus. He based his plan on what he had seen the other disciples do and what he learned about Jesus, as well as the Scripture from the Old Testament that he knew probably better than most of us.

Jesus sent Paul a vision of a man from Macedonia that interrupted and redirected his plans, sending him in a different direction. None of that planning was bad or wrong. It was Paul being faithful to the best of his ability. But like us, Paul didn't know what he didn't know, and he couldn't see what he couldn't see.

Jesus truly sees the big picture. Beyond the strategies and programs we implement for good publicity, Jesus knows the names and hearts of every single person who has ever lived or will live.

Jesus saw the heart of a struggling Jewish woman named Lydia, who had packed up her bags and her business and moved almost 300 miles away from home to expand her business in an area with less competition. In Philippi, she was an outsider, probably not the best person to start a new church to reach the people of that area. However, she was open to the gospel message and received everything that Paul had to share with her.

In fact, she got so excited that she invited Paul and those with him to come and stay at her house, perhaps knowing that, being neither Jew nor Gentile with this faith in Jesus, Paul had nowhere to go. Perhaps Lydia had been in a similar situation at one point and had worked her way up to purchasing a household and acquiring servants to help her at home and with her business, making purple dye for clothing. She got on fire for Jesus, and the rippling waves of Jesus took root in her heart and her home, eventually growing across the entire region of Macedonia.

Planning with Jesus

We struggle to understand our dreams and visions. Not everything we see or feel is from Jesus. It's not easy to discern what comes from God, what has been imposed on us by others, what is influenced by evil spiritual forces, and what may be simply caused by things like a slight fever or indigestion.

When it comes to dreams and visions, we need to take everything with a grain of salt and a good sense of humor because we're not always going to get it right. And the good news is, that's okay. Jesus calls us to follow him faithfully, and that means our immediate responsibility is taking our next step toward him. Jesus is in charge, leading us as our Good Shepherd, who will do everything in his power to get us to where we need to be.

We are his sheep, but Jesus doesn't treat us like livestock. He calls us his friends and tells us that he reveals everything to us that the Father has revealed to him. He doesn't want us to be ignorant but desires us to see as much of the landscape of his kingdom as our eyes can take in.

When we think about vision in our church and how it connects to the mission that Jesus gives us, we may feel tempted to get right into the planning and doing as quickly as possible. That's exactly what Paul had done. He had a message, a method, and a map. He was planning a road trip, reaching out further and further from Israel deep into the Roman Empire. Jesus took that plan and said, "Paul, I think we can do more. I think together we can reach further and go places that no one else could go, and do things together that no one else could do."

Jesus did not hand over the responsibility of the kingdom to Paul, giving him more than he could possibly bear. According to that vision, all Paul had to do was go to a place and tell someone about Jesus. Jesus took responsibility for the rest of the details.

The whole idea of following dreams and visions from Jesus falls apart if you only hear from God once in a great while. We can catch that overwhelming vision of things that are far beyond us, and obsess over it, knowing we'll never fully understand it, but continuing to focus on it to the neglect of everything else.

Jesus is not one of those pagan oracles that only speak to us in dreams and riddles, and expect us to figure out what we're supposed to do from there. Yes, he wants to show us that bigger picture every once in a while, out of love, and because he wants to invite us to truly be part of his mission of salvation and redemption in the world. He wants us to understand not just what he is doing, but why he is doing it. And for that to really work, he wants to communicate with us every single day.

For every one conversation we have with him about that big picture of where we're going, he wants to have a hundred or a thousand small conversations with us about what we're doing today, where we're going today, who we are becoming today. Just like Peter, Tabitha, Mary, and the women at the empty tomb, we will never see that vision come to pass if we are unwilling to surrender daily and be faithful in the next step right in front of us.

Perhaps you've heard the saying, "Man plans and God laughs." Maybe you can relate to that. I know I've often tried to put together elaborate strategies, and at the end of the day felt like a child making a sandcastle on the shore, waiting for the tide to come in and ruin everything.

But I don't think God is up there in heaven wanting to smash our best efforts when we put our minds and our abilities to use, especially when we do that together. I think, if anything, there are times when we plan, and Jesus weeps because we don't include him. Or we throw him in at the last moment, asking him to bless whatever mess that we've put together. I think he weeps because he knows there's so much more he could do with us if we are willing to put down our pride, surrender our need for control, and let him do the leading.

Vision is important. It's a mark of vitality to the church, like a heartbeat to the human body. Perhaps you've heard the scripture from Proverbs 29:18 that starts off, "Without vision the people perish." Eugene Peterson's version of that, in The Message paraphrase, says, "If people can't see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves. But when they attend to what he reveals, they are most blessed." I think that's an elegant and accurate way to describe the way Jesus wants to lead us with dreams and visions.

When we receive those visions in faith, knowing full well that we're missing a lot of details, a lot of puzzle pieces that show us how to get from where we are today to becoming that picture of perfection that Christ sees in us, we find ourselves in the right place, in the right posture, to be empowered to follow him faithfully. That means surrendering ourselves, our wills, and our desires, and laying it all on the line, saying, "Jesus, take us where you will." And he led the way for us in that, as he struggled to follow his heavenly father faithfully.

We remember that night in the garden when he had the vision. He knew the mission that he was to go to the cross and die for the sins of the whole world. And he struggled with it. And he asked if there was any other way. And then he said, "Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done." That's the posture we take when we follow the vision we get from Jesus.

You want to know how good God is? I told you earlier that he had a desire to take the gospel to the province of Asia, and that he may have had friends and family in those cities he wanted to reach. The Holy Spirit kept him out of some of those places. But that woman he met in Philippi, Lydia, came from the province of Asia in a city called Thyatira. And she was a woman of faith. And we know the gospel made it back to those people, maybe not through Paul, but maybe through Lydia. And we know that because it was one of the seven cities that were given a specific message from Jesus in the Revelation. God honored that desire that was in Paul's heart because it was an honorable desire, even if it didn't work out the way Paul had hoped or expected.

At the end of the day, Jesus will always know better than us, which means we don't have to understand everything. We can be focused on being faithful to the next steps in front of us. And at the end of the day, we can trust that Jesus loves even more than us. Those noble desires that he puts in our hearts... he desires them even more. And he is already working ahead of us, taking responsibility far beyond anything we will ever be able to do and see on our own.

Where do you see Jesus working in your life?

What is he calling you to do to partner with Him in that work?

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus, we want to see more of who you are and what you're doing in and around us. When we look at one another, we want to see with your eyes and recognize the incredible potential hidden in each of us. When we look at the community around us, we don't want to see nameless, faceless people. We want to know each other by name, understand our stories, and know our hearts. Most importantly, we want to see what you are doing in us. We pray for this today, fully aware that we are asking for more than we can currently see or comprehend. Our request is not driven by pride or a desire to control the mission you've set before us. Today, we ask for your vision to be given to us so that we can see what you love and learn to love more like you. In your holy name, Jesus, we pray. Amen.

We are going to close our service today with the same song of revival we began it with. As we invite Jesus into our lives and the life of our community, nation, and world, offering ourselves in His service, I invite you too try to sing along with us this time.