Pastors Ponderings

A dream by Bill

I was awakened at 5 am in the morning because of a dream which I wrote down so as to not forget it. This was the dream.

I was with a friend (the people of God) – we were walking in the country (a wilderness) and we came upon many small gold nuggets upon the ground – ripe for the picking, so we began to collect them until our hands were full.

We began to drop them as our hands were overflowing, we could not hold enough of them. We began to fill our pockets. We could not get enough, the wealth was abounding, so much so that the dream took us underground – into a cave, or a mine (formed in God’s creation).

Once again, the gold was abundant, its seams of ore ran through the earth.

I felt that collecting the nuggets represented a thirst in the people of God for the word of the Lord—the Bible. The riches of the earth, contained in the earth since creation, are like the riches of God that are contained in His word. It is written for His people, all of mankind are His creation whether we believe or not. The Bible is the story of God for His people – it is full of valuable, priceless, wisdom; full of good news of a loving God, who chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4) and forgave us though the unadulterated love of Christ displayed on the cross.

In the dream, the surface gold was easy to collect—maybe that is akin to when we read the Bible to only take it at face value, and our interpretation. The underground gold was in narrow crevices, hard to get to, and required work in a dangerous, dark environment. It needed refinement to obtain purity – the contaminants had to be removed; a process that is costly, time consuming, and again hard work.

The dream left me questions. How eager am I to read the Bible? Am I willing to mine deeper and discover its wealth? Or am I only interested in skimming the surface? Am I willing to follow and be obedient to the Bible ways of living? Reading God’s Word (remaining in God), standing firm in God, is not easy whilst living in the world but God requires it to have a wholesome relationship with him.