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By Pastor Glenn Pease
One of the most famous speeches Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ever gave was his "I have a dream" speech.
It was a dream about a future America where prejudice was eliminated, and there was peace and unity among all races.
This dream could only become a reality if men learned to use power in a way that was pleasing to God.
On Palm Sunday we see the King of Kings showing the world how to use power to make God's dream come true.
All of history and all of life is about the use or abuse of power.
Jesus is the only perfect man, and the one and only perfect king to ever reign, for he is the only one whoever demonstrated the perfect use of power.
By his perfect use of power he made God's dream come true.
Does God actually dream?
Not in the sense of going to sleep and dreaming, for the Bible says he never slumbers or sleeps.
God is ever conscious and so his dreams are like those we are talking about in our 50 day adventure.
They are desires and goals and plans.
God had all of these, and our goal as Christians is to make His goal and purpose our own.
Jesus did that perfectly, and He submitted to the dreams of God.
He prayed, "Not my will but Thine be done."
God has a will and a purpose, and we re either going with the flow of His will, or we are resisting it.
Luke 7:30 says, "But the Pharisees and the experts in the law rejected God's purpose for themselves."
God had a dream for them.
He had a purpose for their lives to achieve for His kingdom, but they rejected it.
We see them on Palm Sunday, when the crowds were shouting, "Blessed is the king of Israel," sulking and complaining.
They refused to join in and acknowledge that Jesus was their long awaited Messiah.
Then they became the perfect examples of the abuse of power, for they used their position to see that this king was nailed to a cross.
Their abuse of power did not hinder God's dream, however, for He uses their evil for good.
He had a Son who used His power to serve, and one of the ways He would serve all mankind was to die for their sin.
So God even used the abuse of power to fulfill His dream for man.
God's dream will come true.
Nothing can stop that, but the big question for all of us is, will I be a partner with God in making His dream come true, or will I be one trying to frustrate the dream by abuse of power?
The whole Bible is about God's dream for man, and either man's cooperation or conflict with this dream.
Thomas Curtis Clark has written this poetic summary.
Dreams are they-but they are God's dreams!
Shall we decry them and scorn them?
That men shall love one another,
That white shall call black man brother,
That greed shall pass from the market-place,
That lust shall yield to love for the race,
That man shall meet with God face to face-
Dreams are they all,
But shall we despise them?
God's dreams!
Dreams are they-to become man's dreams!
Can we say nay as they claim us?
That men shall cease from their hating,
That war shall soon be abating,
That the glory of kings and lords shall pale,
That the pride of dominion and power shall fail,
That the love of humanity shall prevail-
Dreams are they all,
But shall we despise them?
God's dreams!
The leaders of Israel did despise God's dream, and they did abuse their power.
Jesus desired God's dream, and He used His power to fulfill it.
Palm Sunday is about the clash between God-centered and self-centered dreams.
Self-centered dreams are about having power to control and manipulate others.
But God's dreams are about having power to serve others.
Jesus had it in His power to do what the crowds hoped He would do.
They hoped He would use His power to defect the Romans and set them free to dominate the Gentiles like they had been dominated by them.
This was the dream they thought was about to come true as they shouted, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord-blessed is the King of Israel."
This, however, was not God's dream at all.
God's dream was that Israel would fulfill its purpose and become a channel of God's good news of salvation to the whole world.
God's dream was for His Son to die for the sins of the world and provide the good news to proclaim, and that Israel would proclaim it.
God's dream was that power would be used, not to control others, but to serve others.
Abuse of power is one of the major sins of all intelligent beings.
Satan abused his power and used it to try and hinder God's purpose.
He used it to manipulate man to disobey God.
He tried to get Jesus to abuse His power, and use it to turn stones to bread, and thrill the crowds with His magic by leaping off the temple.
The masses were in favor of this abuse of power.
They longed for a Messiah who would feed them by miracles, and lead them by miracles to rule the world.
The thinking of man is often like this: "What good is power if you do not use it to become top dog."
This is the thinking that makes it true that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Any person who can have power and not abuse it is truly Christ like, for this was the major temptation Jesus had to fight and win.
He had the power to be abusive, and to fulfill any self-centered dream He could think of.
He could have been the world's greatest conqueror, and the king of all the world.
He could have had the Pharisees serving Him as His slaves.
He could have had all His enemies at His feet begging for mercy.
Every dream Satan could dream for Jesus could have come true if Jesus would have chosen to follow those dreams.
He chose instead to dream the dreams of God.
He dreamed of being the Savior of all, and the servant of all.
This was not easy for Jesus.
It was His hardest battle in life.
We see Him fighting it on Palm Sunday, even before the great conflict in the garden of Gethsemane.
In John 12:27 Jesus says, "Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say?
Father, save me from this hour?
No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.
Father glorify your name."
In Gethsemane He had to fight the battle all over again, and finally even on the cross He had to resist the temptation to call legions of angels to use heavenly power to rescue them.
The power struggles of Jesus are in a category beyond our comprehension, but Jesus won every battle, and He came out of each conflict saying, "Not my will but thine be done."
Jesus fulfilled all of God's dreams for Him, and because it is so we too can dream God's dreams and see them come true.
We have to make the same decision that Jesus did, which is to abuse power for selfish ends, or to use power for godly goals.
When Jesus said to deny yourself and take up the cross and follow me, He was saying that we need to choose what we are going to do with power.
This will mean different things for each of us, but it will always mean breaking out of some comfort zone.
Bill Hybels, the pastor of the fastest growing church in America, tells of the choice he had to make to fulfill God's dream for him.
He was in the family business ready to make a fortune when a camp director asked him, "Bill, what are you doing with your life that will last forever?"
He realized that his life was self-centered and caught up in planes, boats, and fast cars.
He gave up that life to follow God's dream, and he went on to become one of the greatest Christian influences in our world today.
David Mains in his book Never Too Late To Dream says some guilt producing things that we need to hear.
They don't fit our comfort zone, and his quote from A. W. Tozer offends our use of our freedom of choice.
They are not pleasant things to hear, but you determine if they are true for your life.
He writes, "Our lives have become so busy that we have little time for God.
Our lives have become obsessed with climbing the ladder of success and resting in the easy chair of entertainment.
A prayerless church exists in this generation.
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