He will come like the rain

Right now I am sitting in my sister's new apartment in Birmingham listening to the rain pour down and am reminded of God's passionate pursuit of His people. Last night I had a dream, well a nightmare really. And although God doesn't often speak to me in dreams, there are times when He does. Now, I don't keep a dream journal and I rarely analyze my dreams, but God has spoken to me clearly through the use of dreams just enough for me to pay attention to them.

Last night was one of those times. If you would have asked me what the dream was about this morning I could have told you. Now, I could not tell you. What I can tell you is that the message and the feeling I won't forget. I was barely conscious of what was happening, but it was going on inside of me and externally in the room around me. It was a battle, and I awoke literally gasping for air.

Fear gripped me for a moment. I said a prayer acknowledging God's power in the moment and asking for assistance. He was there. Suddenly I knew there was a battle going on in the spirit realm, a fight between Good and evil.

God confronted me and told me I had turned to idols. He told me to list them and repent. I did, as well as repenting of every other sin I could think of. Idols? Me? I knew it was true. I listed them so easily. Some were harder to repent of than others. Even though I was fighting against gripping fear, I told Him He was my Prince of Peace and asked for Him to send me back to sleep. I woke up this morning with an odd sense of peace about me.

The reality of the night's spiritual warfare sat with me from the moment I first opened my eyes. As I got ready for the day, I kept singing this song, "I believe He will come like the rain...." over and over and over. I had already been singing this song due to a pin from Pinterest this week. But now it felt significant.

(print can be purchased here)

I grabbed one of my sister's Bibles off of her shelf and asked the Lord where to read. This verse was from Hosea and it speaks of an unfaithful people and Israel's turning to idols. I figured I would start there. I turned to Hosea and it fell to a daily devotional reading labeled "A Prayer of Repentance." Hmm, that sounds familiar. Turns out God told Israel exactly what He wanted them to say and exactly how he would answer them in chapter 14, the last chapter. (Gotta love a good ending.) It seems God was asking the same thing of me.

I turned back to chapter six to read the verse from the song. The whole verse reads, "Let's try to learn about the Lord, he will come to us as surely as the dawn comes. He will come to us like rain, like the spring rain that waters the ground."(Hosea 6:3 NCV). 

Ladies and gentlemen, I think after a year and a half of running and fumbling and holding on to the way things are for dear life, I cannot continue to learn about the Lord without His Word, the Sword of the Spirit. And apparently I need the Sword for this battle I believe we are all fighting, whether we want to or not. He has actually been nudging me for quite some time to return to daily Bible reading, but I have been more than a little resistant. I surrender.

Earlier this year the Lord used this song to really do a work in my heart. I love the way He speaks to me. I want to hear Him more. I'm still fine tuning my listening skills.

Song: Only One, By Harvest Bashta one of the worship leaders at my church when I was in Atlanta.