One of the best barometers of spiritual maturity is the size of your dreams! I can accurately estimate the size of your faith by the size of your dream. You can’t be filled with the Spirit and not be filled with God-given dreams! Acts 2:17 says, “I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions and your old men with dream dreams.” Seeing visions and dreaming dreams is a byproduct of being filled with God’s spirit. The more the Spirit the bigger the dreams!

We don’t often think of him in these terms, but Jesus was the quintessential dreamer. No one dreamed bigger dreams than Jesus! He said, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” To appreciate the scope of that dream you have to understand that at that juncture in history, the average person never traveled outside a thirty-five mile radius of their home! And Jesus told twelve relatively poor and uneducated disciples who lived in the middle of nowhere to take the gospel to the ends of the earth! The Great Commission is the biggest dream ever dreamed. I think the size of the dream can only be explained by the fact that Jesus “had the Spirit without limit.” The only limit to how big your dreams are is how full of the Holy Spirit you are. If you’re filled with the Spirit you’ll dream God-sized dreams!

 In his book, the vision and the vow, Pete Greig says, “When a vision comes to us not as human aspiration, but as divine revelation – then the whole equation changes.” Human aspirations eventually asphyxiate. There is no spirit to sustain them so they run out of ruach or breath. Greig says, “When a vision is born in the pride of a prayer-less imagination, it is nothing more than a projection of the self.” I don’t put much stock in dreams that are born out of prayerlock, but never underestimate a dream conceived by the Holy Spirit in prayer!