“DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM”
To dream is to look ahead and have hopes and ambitions and plans, to see the impossible become possible and reach for it. In Christ we have found that hope we were looking for, the forgiveness of sins, release from bondage, and the promise of real life. With freedom in Christ we are able to dream.
To dream the impossible dream. This phrase comes from a musical entitled “Man of La Mancha” which is based on the story of Don Quixote by Cervantes. Don Quixote was delusional; he thought he was a knight protecting his realm. When he was fighting dragons he was actually fighting windmills. This is where we get the expression “chasing windmills,” a euphemism for wasting our time.
But the title song had a few phrases that caught my attention in regards to dreams. Don Quixote sings: “To dream the impossible dream; to fight the unbeatable foe; to bear with unbearable sorrow; to run where the brave dare not go.” And later he sings a profound verse: “To fight for the right without question or pause; to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause.”
Hope is such an energizing feeling that it drives us to reach for higher heights. These words remind me of Paul actually. He bore extreme hardships for the sake of the gospel. He went where few dared with the courage of Christ. He assaulted the gates of Hell with the gospel (remember, the gates of Hell will not overcome it). The hope of Christ made Paul dream of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth.
In our study of Romans we have come to a peculiar place. Our passage (15:22-33) speaks of Paul’s travel plans and personal prayer requests. How do we apply Paul’s travel plans to the church today? What does this have to do with us? I believe that Paul’s dreams, which are shared with us here, inspire us to go beyond the ordinary in responding to God’s incredible mercies.
1. Dreaming beyond the borders of Normal
a) Dreams of fellowship – The travel itinerary is brief. Paul wants to go to Rome, but first to Jerusalem, and ultimately Spain.
The amazing thing about his desire to visit the believers in Rome is that he has never even met them. Consider the depth of passion with which Paul wrote this letter to them, the details of our salvation, the work of Christ on our behalf, and then consider that these are basically strangers. This beautiful theological letter is written to people he doesn’t even know.
But he longs to see them. Paul loves them even though he can’t picture their faces. Are they blond? Are they tall? Are they friendly? He doesn’t know. All he knows is that they love Jesus. And because of this he wants to meet them.
Paul has been delayed in this plan (22) because of the work of the gospel. So many needed to know Jesus where he was that he could not get out to see them. “But now that there is no more place for me to work in these regions, and since I have been longing for many years to see you, I plan to do so when I go to Spain” (23).
So by way of introduction he writes this letter to them. In the beginning of Romans he testifies to the faith that they have in Christ which is being reported all over the world (1:8-10). Then he explains salvation to them from sin and the sacrifice of Christ. Finally he says, “I have written you quite boldly…as if to remind you…” (15:15).
What does Paul want from these people? What is he getting at in telling people about faith in Christ which they already know?
Fellowship! Coffee and sweets? No, fellowship, koinonia, a shared experience in the gospel of Christ. He says, “I hope to visit you while passing through and to have you assist me on my journey there, after I have enjoyed your company for a while” (24). He longs to see them, to be encouraged by their faith, to enjoy them. Then he desires their partnership in the furthering of the gospel as he goes west.
I dream of going to Rome, but not to visit fellow believers. I just want to see the ruins. Paul’s idea of vacation is to visit believers from around the world and rejoice in the spreading faith of Christ. He dreamt of going anywhere and calling someone brother or sister in that land. What a cool dream.
b) Dreams of a unified Church – Sometimes before dreams can be realized though, we have to do the hard stuff. Facing a conflict of personalities, resolving issues, or paying old debts of the heart often require us to put our dreams on hold. Some things need to be settled before we go on to further blessings.
Before Paul could visit Rome, he needed to go to Jerusalem. Sitting in Corinth, where he wrote Romans, Paul was closer to Rome than to Jerusalem and halfway to Spain. But a mission of mercy called him to Jerusalem first. “Now, however, I am on my way to Jerusalem in the service of the saints there” (25).
There may have been a famine in Jerusalem and the believers were in desperate need. One theory suggests that because the believers shared everything, selling property to give to the common needs (Acts 2:45) that they were all poor now.
Whatever the situation, Paul was collecting a gift of money from the churches that he had planted. Here’s the rub: they were Greek or Gentile churches. We don’t fully appreciate the friction between Jews and Gentiles, so we miss the conflict. Good Jews, even Christian Jews, don’t accept gifts from Gentiles whom they consider unclean. If you are going to follow the ritual cleanliness laws of Moses you don’t accept money from Greeks – you don’t know where it’s been.
Here is Paul’s second dream – to see one church under Christ, to see a church undivided by race or gender or class. If the believing Jews accepted the gift from the believing Gentiles it would show that the church was truly one in Christ. It would show that our faith in Christ is not divided by where you were born, to whom you were born, or to what race you were born. God has made for himself one new people out of the many, joined together by a common faith in his Son.
c) Dreams of breaking new ground – Once the Jerusalem quest was accomplished, Paul would go to Rome briefly, then on to Spain. Why Spain?
Paul must have been an A-type personality. He could not stay in one place too long. More than that, he said “there is no more place for me to work.” And even earlier he wrote, “It has always been my ambition (dream) to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation” (20). In his perspective he had done all he could in Asia Minor (Turkey) and Greece, so it was time to branch out. Spain was the end of the earth as they knew it in those times. His dream was to go to the ends of the earth with the gospel of Christ.
I suspect if he had lived long enough he would then have gone as far east as he could go. Wherever he went Paul was a foundation layer – a church planter. He loved to go where the gospel was new. “By the grace God has given me, laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it” (1 Cor 3:10).
Robert Moffat was a nineteenth century missionary who worked in Africa. He came home to England one year to recruit missionaries. He made this statement, "Every morning when I get up and look at the horizon, I see the smoke from a thousand villages where the name of Christ has never been heard." That’s how Paul must have felt.
Paul’s dreams could be summed up like this: Paul dreamed of a worldwide church of Jesus Christ where a believer could travel the world and meet brothers and sisters who had no barriers between them and worked together to spread the name of Jesus.
If this dream seems foreign to you that is because it is not a human dream, it is a God-given dream. It is born out of the overwhelming realization that God has shown you incredible mercy and grace and you just can’t help responding to that mercy. Henry Blackaby said, "You never find God asking persons to dream up what they want to do for Him...Without doubt, the most important factor in each (Biblical) situation was not what the individual wanted to do for God. The most important factor was what God was about to do."[i]
This is where knowing an untamable, absolutely wild God, is not safe, but terribly exciting as he shares his dreams with us. So what are you dreaming about?
2. Prayer, the Power of Dreams
a) Wrestling with God in prayer – Paul’s dreams are powered by prayer – this is where the dreams take root.
Paul asked the Romans to join him in this prayer. He said, “I urge you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in my struggle by praying to God for me” (30).
What is the struggle? Praying? Or the work he is involved with? Probably both.
First of all, the “urging,” which is the same as 12:1, the call to serve, is to wrestle together along with Paul in prayer.
It is not hard to picture Jacob in Genesis 32:24-29 wrestling with the stranger at night. Jacob was about to face his brother Esau whom he assumed was going to kill him. Jacob split his party into two groups so that when one is attacked the other might escape. Then he goes off by himself into the dark of night. He meets a man who wrestles him to a draw. “When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man” (32:25). The man told Jacob to let him go because the sun was coming up, but Jacob replied, “Not until you bless me.”
It is revealed to Jacob that he had wrestled with God himself and if the sun had risen so that Jacob saw his face, Jacob would have died. So Jacob wrestled with God and received a blessing – God’s dream for his people. That became Jacob’s dream and his name was changed to Israel.
We are urged – called – to wrestle with God in prayer, to cling to him to and not let go. We find our blessing, our dreams by wrestling with God. We wrestle in prayer on behalf of others as well. We are told by Paul of Epaphras who wrestled in prayer for the Colossians (Col 4:12).
Second, why is prayer such an ordeal?
We wrestle against the self. Jesus said the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Tiredness and repetition become obstacles to prayer. We let go instead of clinging to God because we grow bored with prayer.
We wrestle against sin. Psalm 66:18 says, “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” Unconfessed sin hinders our prayer life. Russell Moore said, “One of the first ways you can tell that you are moving beyond temptation into a pattern of sin is if you find yourself in a time of prayerlessness…If you are reluctant to pray, it just might be that you, like Adam…are hiding in the vegetation, ashamed to hear the rustling of the leaves that signals He is here.”
And we wrestle against an unseen force that discourages prayer in any form. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood…” (Eph 6:12).
b) Laying it out before God – As Paul struggled to realize his God-given dream he knew that he needed specific things to happen. There is a conviction in his words that he believed if the Romans prayed to God that God would answer.
I lack this conviction at times, I am sad to say. I pray specifically like Paul but I confess I don’t always have my eyes open for the answer. It’s almost as if I don’t expect these prayers to be answered. The other day I challenged myself to pray about something trivial thinking that I needed to start believing that God cares about little things. I opened my eyes and to my astonishment the answer was there before me. I could not see the answer until I prayed.
To pray specifically is a prayer of faith. To pray about the little things exercises our faith so that we begin to believe that God will accomplish the big things too. Faith is all-encompassing; it takes in all of life. So why not pray about all things?
Paul asked for prayer for:
Safety (31) – “Pray that I may be rescued…” Paul had been warned in Acts 21 that unbelieving Jews would try to stop him in Jerusalem and maybe kill him.
Success (31b) – “and that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints there.” This request was aimed specifically at the dream of Jews and Gentiles being one in faith.
Satisfaction (32) – “so that by God’s will I may come to you with joy and together with you be refreshed.” Oppression and trials can steal our joy and we can’t see what God is doing anymore. Praying for satisfaction is really asking for the ability to see what God has done – even if we haven’t done much ourselves.
c) Trusting the God of Peace – There are three parts to Paul’s closing of his requests, and they are significant to the answer to his prayers and ours. He says, “The God of peace be with you all. Amen” (33).
God’s peace – In the OT God is called Jehovah Shalom which means “God is our peace.”
God’s presence – God is with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you.
God’s power – From “Amen,” which means “so be it” or “it is so,” we declare that we are leaving everything in God’s hands to do what only he can do with our prayers.
Now here’s the interesting thing: How did things turn out for Paul?
• Safety (Yes and No). Paul was rescued from three mobs and from a flogging and an attempted assassination but he was also arrested, tried and imprisoned (see Acts 21-23).
• Success (Yes). From what we can tell, Paul was able to deliver the offering and the believers found it acceptable. Acts 21:17: “When we arrived at Jerusalem, the brothers received us warmly.”
• Satisfaction (Wait). Paul eventually made it to Rome but he had to wait about three years and the way he got there was not how he planned it because he came as a prisoner, suffered a shipwreck and was put in prison in Rome. However, this prayer was eventually answered as seen in Acts 28:15: “The brothers there had heard that we were coming, and they traveled…to meet us. At the sight of these men Paul thanked God and was encouraged.”[ii]
What about Spain? As far as we know Paul never made it. Tradition says that he was executed in Rome under Nero. Does that nullify the dream? No, Christ was eventually proclaimed all over Europe. It was God’s dream, not Paul’s alone, and that’s why it succeeded.
“To dream the impossible dream,” Don Quixote sang, but with God all things are possible. Still, the song ends with an unintended meaning for us:
And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest
And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star
Jesus is the focus of the believer’s dream. He is the man scorned and scarred from his death on the cross. Jesus is the dream, not a fantasy, but as yet an unrealized goal to strive towards. He is my destination. And because he loves me so well and so deeply, his dream is my own.
What do you dream about?
I dream of a church where the believers love each other so much that they forgive failings and errors and flaws. I dream of a church that never says “no” to God when he says “go!” I dream of a church that hungers for God’s Word and kneels regularly before the Cross of Christ in humility and declares Jesus Lord.
What do you dream about?
AMEN
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