Dr. Rodney Plunket

The July 2003 issue of FastCompany magazine contains an extended section entitled “All the Right Moves.”  This section is comprised of answers to questions that perplexed business executives are asking in the current business climate.  I was especially intrigued to answers provided by a FastCompany senior editor named Polly LaBarre.  Polly LaBarre’s piece addresses the question, “Is it time to downsize my dreams?”  Here is a portion of her answer:

One day, you’re the CEO of Me Inc.; the next, you’re out on the street with a sandwich board proclaiming, “Have PhD.  Will Work for Food.”  One moment, you’re a pioneering CEO wearing khakis to work in Silicon Alley; the next, you’re explaining the differences between relaxed-fit and cargo-style khakis to your customers at the Gap.

The ruling narrative of our careers has done an abrupt 180.  We’ve gone from no limits to no options, from boundless growth to brutal rationalization.  It seems as if no one is exempt from the compromises, humiliations, and outright rejections that accompany the worst hiring slump in 20 years.  All of a sudden, we can’t help but think what would have been unthinkable a few short years ago:  Must I temper my ambitions?  Do I have to settle for less––and am I lucky to get even that?  In other words, is it time to downsize my dreams?

The answer to that question, it turns out, is another question.  The shift coloring our collective work psyche is from a clear imperative to make more––best expressed in that classic Silicon Valley bumper sticker, “Stop for Lunch and You Are Lunch”––to a searching question that encourages us to make the answer up for ourselves.  That question, of course, is the eternal but freshly relevant one recently unleashed into popular conversation by Po Bronson with his book What Should I Do With My Life? (Random House, 2002).

Since its publication last December, the book has topped the best-seller lists, been featured on Oprah and Today, and sparked a grassroots sensation.  It has also generated some push back.  “One reaction is, How dare you encourage people to pursue their dreams in this brutal environment,” says Bronson.  “It’s a real disconnect to assume that the way to a better life is something that happens only in good times.  Actually, the opposite is true.  In my conversations with more than 1,300 people who have either found a sustainable solution to the question or are in the midst of wrestling with it, it’s when your best-laid plans go awry that you make the first, best steps toward the life that you want to lead––and the work that lights you up.”

Discounting your dreams in the face of external pressures is dangerous.  When you hunker down in survival mode to wait out or protect yourself from a tough environment, chances are, you will get stuck there.

It’s equally unwise to spin elaborate escape fantasies.  When your job, your status, or your relationships aren’t secure and satisfying, says Bronson, “what happens is that people pursue the general goal of ‘happiness.’  People say, ‘I could be happy doing this, I could be happy doing that.’  But it doesn’t help them make any kind of a determined decision about who they are and what they want.”

Further along in this piece, the author quotes Marshall Goldsmith, who is described as “one of the world’s most celebrated behavioral coaches.”  Goldsmith says, “The 1990s was a frenzy of people thinking that happiness comes from the outside:  ‘If I had more money, more prestige, more something, I’d be happy.’ . . . The positive spin on the bust is that people began to see the illusory nature of that kind of happiness.  It all disappeared.  And it always can disappear.”[1]  As is easily seen, this article tells readers not to give up on their dreams when times are bad.  If anything, you should pursue them even more when times are bad.  The result of pursuing your dreams, this piece declares, will be a better career and a better life, a life built upon your dreams.

The very idea of living a dream is exciting.  Does anyone want to live a humdrum life that merely takes a person from birth to death with no real sense of purpose or meaning?  I don’t think so.  We want to live a life that is much more than just existing, much more than just surviving into old age.

I am here this morning to say that I believe God has a dream for you––a stirring, stimulating, thrilling dream for your life.  That dream is awakened and actualized by faith in the living God, a faith that is itself awakened by the Good News about Jesus the Christ.  Why do I think that God has a dream for the lives of everyone whom God calls through the gospel?  Let’s go to Scripture to answer that, and let’s begin in the Old Testament because God has been dreaming dreams for people for a very long time.

Please turn to Isaiah 60:1-3.  This passage actually conveys God’s dream for Jerusalem, the holy city of God; but this vision also serves as a concise statement of God’s dream for Israel as a people and a nation because God’s dream for Jerusalem and God’s dream for the nation are closely tied to one another; they are pretty much inseparable.  Isaiah 60:1-3:

          Arise, shine; for your light has come,

                    and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

          For darkness shall cover the earth,

                    and thick darkness the peoples;

          but the Lord will arise upon you,

                    and his glory will appear over you.

          Nations shall come to your light,

                    and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

This is a great and stirring vision.  The Israelites were to be filled with light because of their embrace of the Lord’s radiant presence.  They were to stand out in the world because of the radiance of God’s glory shining upon them and out from them.  They were to shine with the holy light of God, but that rarely occurred.

God had a dream, and God was fully capable of making that dream a reality for the people.  But they turned away from God’s dream over and again.

Now look with me at Psalm 78:1-22, a psalm which powerfully conveys the failure of the people of Israel to live out God’s dream.

Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;

                    incline your ears to the words of my mouth.

          I will open my mouth in a parable;

                    I will utter dark sayings from of old,

          things that we have heard and known,

                    that our ancestors have told us.

          We will not hide them from their children;

                    we will tell to the coming generation

          the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might,

                    and the wonders that he has done.

          He established a decree in Jacob,

                    and appointed a law in Israel,

          which he commanded our ancestors

                    to teach to their children;

          that the next generation might know them,

                    the children yet unborn,

          and rise up and tell them to their children,

                    so that they should set their hope in God,

          and not forget the works of God,

                    but keep his commandments;

          and that they should not be like their ancestors,

                    a stubborn and rebellious generation,

          a generation whose heart was not steadfast,

                    whose spirit was not faithful to God.

          The Ephraimites, armed with the bow,

                    turned back on the day of battle.

          They did not keep God’s covenant,

                    but refused to walk according to his law.

          They forgot what he had done,

                    and the miracles that he had shown them.

          In the sight of their ancestors he worked marvels

                    in the land of Egypt, in the fields of Zoan.

          He divided the sea and let them pass through it,

                    and made the waters stand like a heap.

          In the daytime he led them with a cloud,

                    and all night long with a fiery light.

          He split rocks open in the wilderness,

                    and gave them drink abundantly as from the deep.

          He made streams come out of the rock,

                    and caused waters to flow down like rivers.

          Yet they sinned still more against him,

                    rebelling against the Most High in the desert.

          They tested God in their heart

                    by demanding the food they craved.

          They spoke against God, saying,

                    “Can God spread a table in the wilderness?

          Even though he struck the rock so that water gushed out

                    and torrents overflowed,

          can he also give bread,

                    or provide meat for his people?”

          Therefore, when the Lord heard, he was full of rage;

                    a fire was kindled against Jacob,

                    his anger mounted against Israel,

          because they had no faith in God,

                    and did not trust his saving power.

A summary statement of God’s dream for the people is found in verse 7; it is that “they should set their hope in God.”  But the psalm’s seventy-two verses give more and more examples of Israel’s rejection of God’s dream.

Now let’s move to the New Testament (NT) to see that Jesus did not give up on God’s dream for the people of Israel.  We can begin by noting that all four Gospels indicate that Jesus spent the vast majority of His time among the Jews; and even some of the time that Jesus did spend away from the Jews was spent with the Samaritans––who, although a mixed race, could also trace their lineage back to Abraham.

But we must look also at some explicit statements in which Jesus seeks to call the people to God’s dream.  Please turn with me to Matthew 23:23-24, a passage in which Jesus clearly calls two influential groups of Jewish people back to God’s dream.  There Jesus says,

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law:  justice and mercy and faith.  It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.  You blind guides!  You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!

God’s dream was that the Jewish people would live lives characterized by “justice and mercy and faith,” but some who revered the Jewish religion the most had turned that religion into an obsession with matters no more consequential than gnats.  They made sure they got those lightweight items right, but they ignored weighty matters the size of a two-humped camel.  They failed to embrace the reality of God’s dream.  They missed out on the wonder of living the life that God most wanted them to experience.

A poignant example of Jesus’ pain at the refusal of the Jewish nation to receive God’s dream is found in Matthew 23:37-39.  Please turn to that passage and follow along as I read:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!  See, your house is left to you, desolate.  For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

Not only do we hear Jesus’ pain at the people’s refusal; we also hear the consequences of that refusal.  Jesus says, “See, your house is left to you, desolate.”

But God not only has dreams for the lives of nations.  God also has dreams for the lives of individuals; in fact, God’s dreams for nations will not be realized if the individuals who make up those nations do not embrace God’s dream.

God had a dream for the life of a man named Saul, but it took extraordi­nary effort on God’s part to get Saul to embrace that dream.  Jesus appeared to Saul in a blinding light on the Road to Damascus to get him to embrace the dream that Saul was rejecting.  Saul tells the story of that experience in Acts 26.  Listen to what he says in Acts 26:13b-14:

I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions.  When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?  It hurts you to kick against the goads.’

Goads were what a person used in that day to motivate and direct oxen.  Jesus was telling Saul that he was not going the way God wanted him to go.  God was directing; God was using the goads, but Saul was refusing God’s dream for his life.  But finally Saul did embrace the dream.  And O, what a dream it was.  Saul became Paul and later wrote that all of his Jewish religiosity was nothing but rubbish in comparison to “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8).

My call today is for all who trust in God to embrace God’s dream for our lives.  Let’s not kick against the goads.  Let’s not refuse to come under the wings of Jesus.  Let’s not focus upon gnat-sized matters.  May the matters that matter most to God matter most to us.

But what is God’s dream for your life.  The NT declares in several passages that God’s Holy Spirit has gifted each one of us to serve and to minister in the Name of God and to the glory of God’s Son, Jesus the Christ.  So we begin the experience of living out God’s dream for our lives by taking note of the gifts that God has given us.

But I believe that there is more to it than that.  Last week we emphasized the pursuit of God’s presence through Bible study, fellowship, and prayer.  It is my strong conviction and experience that the more I am into the Book, the more I am being supported and invigorated in my faith by fellow believers, and the more I am seeking God through prayer the more I am aware of God’s dream for my life and the more I am embracing and living out that dream.

Sisters and brothers, let’s seek God’s dream for our lives.  Let’s seek it through Bible study, prayer, and through our fellowship with one another.  And every part of that dream that we discover, let’s embrace it and live it out.  May the dream of God be the transforming power within our lives.

Top | Sermons | Home