“Suddenly”—God can intervene at any moment He chooses. Your world can look one way at one moment and completely different the next. All you need is for God to show up in power. The walls of Jericho looked exactly the same after Israel had obediently circled them seven times. But when everything was in place and everything God told them to do was done—“suddenly” the walls fell. Never forget the possibility of a “suddenly” from God in your life.

In “God gives us a dream to build our faith”, Rick Warren wrote this devotional on 21-May-2014 in “Daily Hope.” He said, “Faith is like a muscle: It can be strengthened. It can be weak or it can be strong, depending on how much you use it.”

How does God build your faith? He uses a very predictable pattern. If you understand it, you can cooperate with him in developing greater faith. It’s like when the father, seeking help from Jesus for his son, said, “Have pity on us and help us, if you possibly can!” (Mark 9:22 TEV)

Jesus replied, “What do you mean, ‘If I can’? … Anything is possible if a person believes” (Mark 9:23 NLT).

The first thing God does to build your faith is give you a dream. When God wants to work in your life, he always gives you a dream — about yourself, about what he wants you to do, about how he’s going to use your life to impact the world.

There are many examples in the Bible of this:

• God gave Noah the dream of building an ark.
• God gave Abraham the dream of being the father of a great nation.
• God gave Joseph the dream of being a leader that would save his people.
• God gave Nehemiah the dream of building the wall around Jerusalem.

How do you know when a dream is from God or when it’s just something you’ve thought up yourself? The Bible tells us that God “by his mighty power at work within us is able to do far more than we would ever dare to ask or even dream of — infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, or hopes” (Ephesians 3:20 LB).

In other words, if a dream comes from God, it will be so big in your life that you can’t do it on your own. If you could do it on your own, you wouldn’t need faith. And if you don’t have faith, you’re not pleasing God, because the Bible says whatever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:23).

God starts to build your faith by giving you a dream. He may be speaking to you now, but you just don’t recognize it for what it is. That dream you have, the idea or concept you’ve been thinking about doing that would be of real benefit to other people — where do you think that idea came from?

God will never tell you to do something that contradicts His words, character, His moral laws. In other words, he won’t give you a dream of leaving your family and kids and moving to Hollywood to be a movie star. If you have that dream, then you can know it is not from God.

God starts with a dream as he works within your life to build faith.

So we have become His poetry, a re-created people that will fulfill the destiny he has given each of us, for we are joined to Jesus, the Anointed One. Even before we were born, God planned in advance our destiny and the good works we would do to fulfill it!” – (Ephesians 2:10, The Passion Translation)

It is never by chance God places people in our life. Every dream is a gift. Every accomplishment of a dream is a gift. I have to always remember this fact: I am undeserving of His gift and nothing of my doing made it to come into existence. It’s a favor from God and I will just be a steward of His gift through His grace.