I want to tell a story about something that happened the other night. It’s meant a lot to me and opened some new doors spiritually. The last few weeks I’ve been really asking God to help me tune into the Holy Spirit. I’ve been praying over and over for God to ‘make it real.’ What does that mean, exactly? I wasn’t entirely sure. I just knew that there was a level of reality that existed that I wasn’t feeling. I could sense the Spirit of God on others and was beginning to beg God to make this real to me, make it real for me. Wednesday night, God answered that prayer in a very powerful way.
I’ve always remembered my dreams. I’ve always had very realistic dreams with lights and sounds and feelings and emotions. Some are plausible, some are utterly fantastic, but they are always real at the moment. One of the things I’ve been interested in learning more about is the Spiritual gifts of dreams and visions. The dream I had that night was so intense that it woke me up and I was absolutely covered in sweat. I wasn’t zipped up in my bag and it was quite chilly in the room. I don’t ever remember waking up so thoroughly disturbed from a dream. But this was no ordinary dream. This was an attack from Satan. This is where the new doors become open.
Spiritual attacks are foreign to a lot of people, even to me. But when something that you pray for so earnestly comes to life, it changes how you look at things. In my dream, my group was assigned an exercise to go and pray for the people at the camp where we are. We were to just ask the Lord for discernment about who and what to pray for. I saw a toddler who was wrapped up in a small backpack and felt like I should pray for him. I began to ask God how I should pray and I felt a weird feeling. I told God that I wasn’t sure if the feeling was from Him or the Devil. At the moment I said that maybe it was a demon the child sat up, screamed, and lay back down. I was totally freaked out and began to pray, trying to cast out the demon in the authority of Christ. Every time I slacked on praying, the child sat up and screamed again. I was frantic, looking for one of my teammates to come help me, and began to shout at the top of my lungs in prayer for the child to be delivered from the demon. That’s when I woke up, sweating and petrified with fear. I really had to go to the bathroom, but the spiritual world had become so real to me that I didn’t want to get out of bed and go to the other room because I was scared of what might be out there. I was truly expecting to see the unseen world of angels and demons which, quite frankly, scared me to a degree that I can’t accurately capture.
At the same time, in the same room, someone else was having dreams about a physical struggle with a demon that was killing him. He was whispering in his sleep, trying to rebuke the demon and call upon Christ to help him. When he woke up, he began searching for his Bible. I had been lying in bed praying that God would send me someone to pray with me, but had pretty much decided that I was the only one up and was going to have to face this turmoil alone. I immediately sat up in my bed and said that I was a bad dream too and wanted to pray. The other two men had been tossing and turning all night, barely sleeping and restless. Now they knew why.
The four of us prayed together for over an hour, praising God for His timing and power over evil spirits. We had been attacked by Satan, and it was as real as I could have ever prayed for. As I said, this has opened new doors for me and brought be closer to God. It has taught me that there are things that we cannot normally see or hear but that are very real. I really prayed to God to make those things real to me and He answered me. True, He answered me in a very powerful and terrifying way, but He is my protector and every time the demonic realm becomes more real to me, so much more does the angelic realm.
