Understanding Dreams by Pastor Dolapo Lawal: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Human Spirit and the Soul

Dreams are primarily communicated to the human spirit. Man is spirit, he lives in a body, and he has a soul. The soul is your personality, your person. Your spirit is your true life, the life within you. You die when your spirit leaves your body, and the body is only the container. Because we are made by an immortal God, it is only fair that we live forever, and our true life is our spirit.

If the doctrinal premise for this is not understood, dreams and visions can destroy a life. Many people fall into error because of visions and prophetic words handled without discernment. Discernment cannot be sharpened without a doctrinal foundation, because spirits are not discerned by spirits alone. Even the devil comes as an angel of light, and his form has not changed since his fall; an encounter with him will look angelic, not monstrous.

Discernment comes through the proper appropriation of truth. When the devil told Jesus to turn stone to bread, the appeal was that hunger could not be the will of God, yet Deuteronomy 8 shows that God brought Israel to hunger deliberately, to test them and to teach that man does not live by bread alone. Miracles, too, are appropriated differently in different lives. Jesus said, "Your eyes be open," to one man, but for the blind man in the gospels, the appropriate act was to have Jesus spit on the ground, mix his spittle with clay, and wash his face. What worked for one person is not automatically the pattern for another; once the doctrinal premise is understood, truth can be rightly appropriated and customized.

The distinction between the human spirit and the soul is what sharpens this discernment. Six things establish it:

1. The human spirit is the part of man that relates directly with God

   Proverbs 20:27 says the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. God guides, convicts, leads, and communicates through the human spirit. This is where his burdens, his leading, and his conviction are placed, and where the revelation of his word is received. Since dreams are a form of revelation, dreams from God register first in the human spirit.

2. The soul is the seat of the mind, the will, and the emotions

   Psalm 42:5 shows David speaking to his own soul: "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" He was speaking to his emotions. The soul is where a person thinks, feels, and chooses.

3. Hebrews 4:12 divides the soul and the spirit

   Hebrews 4:12 says the word of God is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing of soul and spirit, a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. If soul and spirit were the same thing, there would be no need for such a division. The spirit is the faculty in man that is God-conscious, and the soul is the faculty that is self-conscious.

4. The spirit is what gets born again

   The body did not get born again, and it looks the same as before. The soul did not get born again either, which is why Scripture commands believers to renew their mind. John 3:6 says that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Romans 12:2 calls for transformation through the renewing of the mind. Rebirth happens in the spirit; the spirit is saved, and the soul is being saved, renewed rather than reborn.

5. The human spirit receives revelation

   person

   Pastor Dolapo Lawal

   Enjoying this sermon? Browse more messages by Pastor Dolapo Lawal on Dreams at ReadSermons.

   library_books More Sermons

   1 Corinthians 2:11 speaks of the spirit of man which is in him. The soul receives information and processes thought; the spirit receives light and receives thoughts directly from God. This is why the deception of the enemy operates in the soul realm, not the spirit. Once a person understands where things from God originate and where things from the enemy originate, discernment becomes possible.

6. The spirit is God's word; the soul is earth's word

   In the spirit, a person communes with God; in the soul, a person relates with the world. 1 Corinthians 14:14 says that praying in tongues means the spirit prays while the understanding, the soul, is unfruitful, which is why Paul concludes he will pray with the spirit and also with the understanding, and sing with the spirit and also with the understanding. Dreams come when God communicates with the spirit.

How Miracles and Healing Are Lost

A great many people receive miracles and lose them again, because the healing is received in the spirit but the devil presents symptoms back to the person in the soul, the realm of feeling. In salvation, believers are taught to believe rather than feel, but when it comes to healing, people want to feel, and that gap is where ground is lost.

Kenneth Hagin once noticed that healing evangelists would move from town to town, and roughly sixty percent of those healed at one crusade would lose their healing before the next evangelist arrived. He concluded that the missing ingredient was teaching. What is received by the anointing must be kept by faith. He stopped running three-day crusades and instead ran three-week meetings, teaching on healing and faith for the first two weeks before ever praying for the sick in the third, so that people would know how to keep what they received.

One woman who had been healed of an eye problem was later seen wearing glasses again. When asked why, she admitted she had simply noticed herself wearing them one day while watching a video online, having concluded she could not see well without them. The devil had planted that thought in her soul, and she received it back into her spirit. She was challenged to give up the glasses again, and did not need them again after that.

You may also like

Reversing Infertility In Men & Women

by Apostle Femi Lazarus

arrow_forward

There is a difference between armed robbery and theft. A thief takes what a person does not immediately notice is missing, and that is how the enemy operates in the soul realm, quietly substituting doubt for what was received in faith.

Dreams Come From God

Some go to the extreme of saying dreams no longer come from God at all, that only devils give dreams now. Twenty places in Scripture record dreams being given; most of them to people who were not connected to God at the time, and a smaller number to those already walking with him. None of those twenty recorded dreams came from the devil. This does not mean the enemy never gives dreams, only that Scripture itself only records what matters for its own purpose. Scripture is not an exhaustive historical record; it records only what is relevant to its subject, God and his Christ.

Job 33:14-18 says that God may speak in one way, or another, yet man does not perceive it, in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men slumbering on their beds. Then he opens the ears of men and seals their instruction, to turn man from his deed and hide pride from him, to keep back his soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the sword. Scripture itself calls a dream a vision of the night. Discarding what comes through the dream life can cause real trouble.

Dreams Can Also Come From the Soul

Even though a dream may originate in the spirit, the mind and the emotions can color it. God gives an impression, but a person's own theology and background can affect how that impression is voiced. Jeremiah, prophesying from inside a prison in a terrible situation, spoke almost entirely in terms of judgment. Daniel, a politician, saw visions in terms of empires and kingdoms. When God spoke to Joseph, he used stars and sheaves of corn, the imagery of Joseph's own world.

This is why dream symbols cannot be read from a fixed dictionary. Seeing a dog in a dream does not automatically mean one thing; a serpent does not automatically mean Satan, since Jesus himself is compared to the brazen serpent Moses lifted up in the wilderness. A monkey does not automatically mean degradation. Every dream requires seeking God directly rather than applying a formula, because the intelligence of a spiritual man is the leading of his own spirit, not a memorized interpretation key.

Ecclesiastes 5:3 says a dream comes through much activity, meaning the state of the mind and the pressures of life can shape what is dreamed. This is also why some dreams reflect what a person wants rather than what God is saying. Someone who has already decided who they want to marry will begin to dream of that person in a wedding setting, simply because the heart has been dwelling there.

Discernment Over Borrowed Prophecy

Major decisions, especially marriage, are too often handed over to other people's prophetic words rather than a person's own conviction from the Spirit. Conviction from God is usually quiet and steady rather than dramatic. There was no audible voice from heaven naming a spouse; there was a deep, settled peace and conviction from the very first meeting, even when that conviction was initially set aside. God rarely proves himself with a sign the way he did once for Gideon, and Gideon's single exception should not be treated as the rule for everyone.

Trusting a family's reputed prophet over one's own discernment has led people into real harm. One young woman gave the name of a man she wanted to marry to her mother, who took it to a prophet with an accurate track record; the man named as her husband turned out to already be married with four children the family did not know about. Even prophets with strong track records are not infallible; Scripture records a recognized seer who missed seven times in a single sitting.

This same pattern has driven people into marriages built on someone else's hype rather than their own walk with God, and it has led some into deep disappointment when the reality did not match the promise, because they had married for the prophecy rather than for the person. A double mind, always asking "is this God, is this not God," rather than a settled conviction from one's own spirit, makes a person unable to stand when the relationship is tested.

False Claims and the Word of Warning

Some circulate claims of having visited hell and seen specific believers there, or of having toured heaven and described its architecture. Jesus' account of the rich man and Lazarus makes clear that a great gulf is fixed between the two realms so that none can cross from one to the other; only Jesus himself is said to have gone to both. Any account that contradicts this pattern does not correspond with Scripture. Jude 1:4 speaks of certain men who crept in unnoticed, ungodly men who turned the grace of God into a license for wrongdoing. Jude 1:8 speaks of dreamers who defile the flesh in the same breath as those who despise authority and speak evil of what they do not understand.

Against all of this, believers are called to build themselves up. Jude 1:20-21 says, "But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God." Praying in the spirit sharpens discernment; a person who prays steadily will sense when a word does not sit right, even if it comes wrapped in confidence. Christians often assume a positive prophecy will fail if not believed, but somehow assume a negative one will still come to pass whether believed or not. That imbalance is itself a sign of a mind that has not been renewed; a renewed mind receives both promise and warning by the same standard of faith.