Open your Bibles to Acts chapter 2 and meet me at verse 17. Acts chapter 2 and verse 17. And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your young men shall see visions. Your own men shall dream dreams. Now notice in the last days, how many of you know that we are in the last days?
It's been over 2,000 years since Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection, and every prophecy in scripture that needs to be fulfilled before the second coming of Jesus has already been fulfilled. We are literally in the last days. And we notice here that in the last days that God says he's going to pour out of his spirit on all flesh. So he's not going to discriminate. Sons and daughters, both genders, is going to receive the spirit. And both generations, young and old, will receive the Spirit.
And watch what the outcome will be. There shall be prophecy, visions, and dreams. Say this after me. Prophecy, visions, and dreams. So in the last days, we can expect to see prophecy, that's encouraging words, vision, divine guidance and direction. And dreams, which is an anticipation for a future outcome. Now, in this teaching today, I want to use these three words interchangeably. I want to use the word hope, dream, and vision interchangeably, okay?
We've been talking about hope. Last week, Jeannie did a great job talking about look up, keep your expectations up. And the Lord told me that this would be a year of hopes fulfilled. And so when you hear the word dream, I want you to think hope, and I also want you to think vision in this message today. In Proverbs 29, 18, Proverbs 29, 18, it says, where there is no vision, where there's no dream, where there is no hope, the people perish.
So the people perish without hope, without vision, and without a dream. A life is a terrible thing to waste. How many of you heard that before? A life is a terrible thing to waste. The same is true for a person without a dream, without hope, and without vision. Life loses its purpose and potential. A dream is a desire or an aspiration that inspires you, something you hope to achieve or experience in the future. A passionate dream inspires hope. A passionate dream inspires hope.
Without a passionate dream, your life becomes empty and fruitless. So it's important that we have hope. It's important that we have vision. It's important that we have a dream or our life will become empty and fruitless. A dream motivates you to get out of bed every day. If you're not motivated to get out of bed, it could possibly be because you don't have a vision. You don't have a dream and you are hopeless. A dream will motivate you to get out of bed every day.
A dream drives your plans and orders your steps. A dream will drive your plans and order your steps. Dreams give you purpose and help you discover why God created you. Dreams will give you purpose and will help you discover why God created you. I like this. A dream inspires discipline and influences your choice of friends and colleagues. Now, this is important. A dream inspires discipline and influences your choice of friends and colleagues.
Some of you need to cut certain friends off because they don't fit your dream. They're holding you back. I've had to do that before. Certain people I no longer talk to because they don't fit the dream God has for my life. They no longer have the ability to help me fulfill the dream God's called me to. They want to hold me back and tell me stories back when I was in the seventh grade and tell me stories back when I was in the 10th grade and all of that.
I am going forward and the dream is going to inspire discipline and influence your choice of friends. For example, I have a dream to play with my grandkids, to be healthy enough to tussle and roll around with them, tackle them and play with them. They jump on my back and my back's not hurting. Well, then if that is a dream, then the discipline is I have to work out. I have to walk. I have to get on the treadmill. I have to lift some weights. I have to maybe not eat like I usually eat.
A dream is going to inspire discipline and it's going to influence your choice of friends. A dream decides whether you need college or no school at all. Whether you need college or no school at all. It has been said that the poorest person is never the one without wealth, but the person without a dream. The poorest person is never the one without wealth, but the person without a vision or without hope. If you're going to live a life filled with purpose, it must include a dream, a hope, vision.
Dr. Martin Luther King, we celebrated him on Monday, said, I have a dream. And we still are impacted by that dream today. A dream is a picture of the life that God has designed specifically for you. It's a picture, an image. The vision is an image of the life God has designed specifically for you. There are traces, watch this, of your destiny found in your history. There are traces of your destiny found in your history. What does that mean?
If you can look back at your past and you can see some things that have occurred in your past, there are traces of some things that have occurred in your past that can determine what your future would be. I think about when I was a kid, there are pictures of me being three and four years old with a microphone. I mean, my mom has shown me tons of pictures. I always had a microphone in my hand. Traces of your destiny found in your history.
When I was in the third grade, my third grade teacher told me that he was getting a divorce. It was a male and he was getting a divorce. And I literally talked to him about everything's going to be all right. This is when I was in the third grade. Now, my mom then weren't happy that the teacher told me that, But I remember that. I remember him telling me that. I remember telling him it was everything was going to be all right. I was eight years old, nine years old, somewhere around there.
Everything's going to be all right. Why? There are traces of your destiny found in your history. Some clues about your calling can be found in your past experiences. Some clues about your calling can be found in your past experiences. Your challenges, victories, passions, and even setbacks contain valuable lessons that point toward what you are meant to do. Let me say it again. Your challenges, think about them.
Your victories, your passions, and even your setbacks contain valuable lessons that point toward what you are meant to do. It's important to have a dream. It's important to have a vision. It's important to have hope, which is an intense, earnest expectation of something good happening in the future. Dreams begin with God. Dreams begin with God. Every time God personally encounters people in Scripture, he immediately begins to reveal his dream for their lives.
Remember Abraham? A dream to be a father of many nations. Noah gave a dream to build an ark, and it had never rained before. Nobody had ever seen rain before, but God gave Noah a dream to build an ark. Moses, a dream to lead people. Joshua, a dream to finish the legacy of Moses. He gave Matthew a dream to marry Mary and raise Jesus. These are dreams that God gave that told and foretold the future and the destiny for the individual. What is the dream God has given you?
What have you put aside? What have you put down? What have you forgotten about? What have you felt like you're too old to do now or even you're too young to accomplish? What is the dream that God has given you? This year I want you to pick this dream Back up Pick it back up Because God wants to do a new thing in your life Somebody say amen Dreams will stretch you. If a dream captures your imagination and inspires you every day of your life, then it's probably from God.
Did you hear that? If it captures your imagination and inspires you every day of your life, then it's probably from God. If a dream seems impossible and you are unable to fulfill it on your own, then it's probably from God. If a dream seems as though it will never come to pass, yet deep down on the inside you're unwilling to give up on it, then it's probably from God.
Amen. If you've experienced resistance, difficulty, setbacks, and sometimes frustration over the dream, then it's probably from God. If the dream seems to consume your thinking, getting bigger and bigger on the inside of you, then it's probably from God. If the dream seems to define and shape your life, then it's probably from God. Because dreams require faith, courage, and resilience.
Genesis 37 verse 5 in the New Living says it this way, One night, Joseph had a dream, and when he told his brothers about it, they hated him even more than ever. Sharing your dream with the wrong people can lead to opposition or even the destruction of your dream. I was in the 10th grade, and I'd always enjoyed flying. I still enjoy flying airplanes. I enjoy the travel.
I enjoy going up in the air. I enjoy, my wife would tell you, every time the plane takes off and she's next to me, I turn to her and say, this law works every time. The law of lift works every single time. And she laughs. And she always laughs because I love the lift. I love the land. I love the fly. I enjoy. We took the kids a few summers ago during COVID actually to the airport and just watch the planes just take off. We spent half the day there just watching planes take off and land.
We just love, I love flying. And now I think they love flying too because I love flying. And so flying was always something that was embedded in me. When I was a little boy, I would fly by myself. We used to fly United Airlines and I would fly alone as a little kid. And at the time they would have a flight attendant. They were known as stewards, right? Now they're flight attendants. A stewardess, stewardess, that's what it was. A stewardess would travel with you.
And then once you get off, and I was young, they would walk you to the person. Remember, the people used to be able to come right up to the gate. And so I would fly a lot, enjoyed flying, and I wanted, inevitably, to be a pilot. I just wanted to fly for United Airlines. That was a goal of mine, to fly. And so in the 10th grade, a pilot from the military base that was local came in and started talking about the occupation and the profession of flying.
And he began to share what it took to be a pilot. And I was tuned in. I was just, listen, I just, man, this is so good. And then he said, you have to have 20-20 vision in order to fly. Well, at the time, I had just got glasses. And I remember asking him, wait a minute, wait a minute, you have to have 20-20 vision. You can say, yeah, you can't fly unless you have 20-20 vision. And I said, so I just got glasses, and I wasn't wearing them at the time. You know, I was too cool to wear glasses.
But nevertheless, I had them. And I couldn't see, but I was too cool. You know what I'm talking about. And so I said, so you can't fly without glasses? And he said, no, you have to have 20-20 vision. Well, that just crushed me. It crushed me. I no longer wanted to be a pilot because I didn't have 20-20 vision. I remember going home and telling my dad, I said, hey, you know, I don't want to be a pilot anymore. And I told him the story.
He was living. He was looking for this guy. He went to the school. I mean, he was living because my dream was crushed. It was crushed. And I did a little research and I couldn't tell. Half the time they said you had to have 20 and the other half the time you didn't. I didn't know what was true. And so I really just kind of gave up on that. Well, a couple of years ago, Stacy knew that about me. And for my birthday, she gave me a private flying lesson with someone in a little old prop plane.
And I went up there and it was a 25-year-old young woman. And I was nervous. I'm like, do you know what you're doing? She's like, I know what I'm doing. And we took off and we flew over our house and my kids were waving. Don't tell them, but they saw me, but I didn't see them. OK. But they were they said they were waving. I never really saw. But nevertheless, we flew and then she gave me the control.
And I flew the plane, and she said, you know, we were, I was, I think it was 74 was running, and we were on top of 74, and she's like, stay on 74. You got the controls, and she told me what to do, and I'm flying the plane. Stay on 74, and she's talking to me, and I'm talking. Next thing you know, I'm over here. 74 is over here now. She's still talking. I finally said, Amber, I'm not on 74 anymore. She was like, that's what happens is the wind.
The wind will push, and if you're just one degree off, you're going to be completely off. But I learned a lot in that two-hour flying lesson. Something kind of got back on the inside of me, right? Man, flying came back. That's a dream that I always had. But be careful who you tell your dream to because they will stomp it and crush it. And a lot of times, it's people that are the closest to you that will crush your dream.
Parents, spouses, good friends will crush your dream and you have to just be careful who you tell it to. The right thing at the wrong time could be the wrong thing. It's the right time to tell a dream to somebody. If I'm half sleeping in bed and I'm in and out of sleep and Stacy comes to tell me, I want to start a business, I'm going to tell a girl, I don't want to hear that, I'm trying to go to bed. That's not the right time, right?
The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing. What is the right time to tell the dream? God gives you a dream by showing you. I know this is about God. He gives you a dream by showing you how it ends. He shows you how it ends. Thinking about the dream of Joseph, where he had multiple dreams of his brothers and his father bowing down to him. He showed him the end of the dream, but he never showed him the beginning or the middle.
A lot of times when God gives us visions and dreams, it's always the end of the thing. And we have to be patient and have some courage and some resilience to step out and start. He doesn't reveal the beginning and middle parts because that's where he shapes you and cultivates you. In the middle is where you're going to get shaped. And if he were to tell you how you would be shaped in the dream, you would decline.
I don't want no part of that. I've always wanted to, the Lord has always been a call in my life to pastor that ever since I was a kid, I knew that that call was the pastor. If the Lord ever told me how it was going to happen. And how I would lose some friendships and how people would leave and people would badmouth me or talk bad about me or stab me. I would have never agreed to do any of this. But he didn't show me all that. He cultivated me and shaped me and he molded me and he made me.
And now I'm strong in the Lord and in the power of his mind. I had to be developed. I had to be worked on. And because when he began to work on me now, I know that I can, having done all to stand, stand. I know that he who is with me is with me. Where the people come and go, he is with me. And I began to recognize that and learn some things like, you know what? I used to get really upset when I was misunderstood. Oh, you guys misunderstood. Let me get up and explain this to you.
I need to explain. And I had to learn, you just want to be misunderstood. I'm not going to get up and explain and explain and explain and explain, right? Unless you just really have a question, I'm not going to do it just to do it. I had to learn some things about being a leader that if the Lord would have showed me at the beginning, I would have never went down this road. I would have stayed working for my Fortune 500 company. Or it wasn't my company, somebody else's Fortune 500 company.
Come on, somebody say amen. Dreams require a departure from your comfort zone. Dreams require a vision. Hope requires a departure from your comfort zone. God's dream for you will always challenge you to face your fears and trust him completely. His dream will always challenge you to face your fears and to trust him completely. When he gives you a vision, it's going to challenge you to overcome the fears, the fear of running out, the fear of failure, the fear of success.
What, you know, there's a fear of success. What if this actually works? People have a fear of success. It might work, and I don't even know what to do if it does work. And so they won't even start because they don't know what to do. You're always going to have to confront your fears when you step out in God's vision and his dream. God normally gives you a dream that is too big to accomplish on your own.
The dream he gives you is always too big to accomplish alone, so he's going to always require that you work with a team. There's always going to be a team that you work with to accomplish this dream. God calls a man to start a project or a woman to start a project, but he calls a team to finish it. Never alone because the vision is too big for yourself.
Romans 15, 13 says this. Paul tells us now, may the God of hope, the God of hope, the source of hope, fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. So God is the source, the originator of hope. Hope is an intense, earnest expectation of something good.
God is going to fill you with joy and peace as you believe him And then he wants you to abound and overflow and have an abundance of hope by the power of the Holy Spirit It's important that we have hope in this day and age That we are not people that are hopeless We're people without no vision or people that don't have a dream We're people that are full of hope and expected in that God is going to do something miraculous in our lives. Do you believe that? I say, do you believe that?
God's going to do something big in your life. Proverbs 10, 24 in the New Living Translation says it this way, the fears of the wicked will be fulfilled. The hopes of the godly will be granted. Glory to God. the hopes of the godly. What are you expecting? What do you desire? What has God placed in your heart? What has he said to you? What have you been meditating on? What can you not give up on?
I believe in this year that if you hold on to your hopes, that you will experience manifestation and your hopes will be granted in this season. Say amen if you believe that. It's important that we maintain our hope. Everything and anything is after us to get rid of, to sway us, to get us confused, to get us distracted from this hope that we have in him. I mean, from news media to your cell phone to Pookie and Ray Ray talking about
negativity to we don't know what's true. We don't know what's false. We don't even know what news we should receive or not. All of that is to get us distracted and get us off of the hope that we have in him. At the end of the day, we win. I got three amens on that. At the end of the day, we win. We win at the end of the day. We win. And so our hopes will be granted. Get your hopes back up.
Get your dreams back up, whether it be a healing in your body, whether it be a dream to minister to your coworkers and your friends, whether it be a dream to feed the homeless, whether be a dream to be debt-free. Get the hopes back up and let God grant these hopes this year. Say amen to that. Jeremiah 29 11 in the New Living Translation, Jeremiah 29 11 in the New Living says, for I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord.
There are plans for good and not for disaster to give you a future and a hope. In the Passion Translation, it says, here's what Yahweh says to you, I know all about the marvelous destiny I have in store for you. A future planned out in detail. Glory to God. My intention is not to harm you, but to surround you with peace and prosperity and to give you a beautiful future glistening with hope. Come on, somebody say amen it at.
God's plan is to fulfill a beautiful future for you that will glisten with hope, that will be inspired with hope, that you can help the hopeless. That you will encourage the hopeless, that the ones that feel forgotten, you will inspire the forgotten. The people that feel invisible, you'll go ahead and inspire them. The people that feel like no one's paying attention to them, you will inspire them like the insignificant. Your hope can inspire somebody else.
Your hope can make someone else hope for a brighter day, for a brighter future. Hope to be maybe the profession you're in. Hope to accomplish what you accomplish. I don't know if you know this, but people are watching you. People are studying you. People have their eyes on you. They're seeing does serving God really matter? Because if we are people who serve God and have no hope, why should people that don't serve God want to come over and serve God? We got to have hope.
We got to be inspirational. We got to be encouraging. We got to be enlightening. We got to activate and invoke and inspire and start to have hope that will tell people and turn people to look towards God and say, if God can do it for me, he can do it for you. Come on, say amen to that. That was the weakest amen I've ever heard. I said, say amen to that. Amen. Glory to God. We are people that are filled with hope. God has a dream that he's given you.
You can help me, Kurt. And he has a plan that he's given you. And he has a purpose that he's given you. And he has a future that's already designed just for you. And it always involves, listen to me, it always involves helping other people. This vision, this dream, this hope is going to involve impacting other people in a positive way this is how you experience true life.