This is what charismatic Christians fail to consider: every revelation from God is just as authoritative as the Bible. Every prophecy and every vision or supernatural dream from God is just as inerrant, inspired, infallible, and authoritative as the Bible. All revelation from God is equally authoritative, and God cannot contradict himself. Therefore every revelation from God demands obedience—including, apparently, the dream about my wife. For that reason, the dream almost destroyed my soul… My dream isn’t inerrant, inspired, infallible, and authoritative—the Bible is.

My wife isn’t the woman of my dreams. She isn’t black. She isn’t Ghanaian-Canadian. She isn’t the woman I dreamed about in my youth.
When I said “I do” to Annie 10 months ago, I knew I wasn’t marrying the woman of my dreams.
It all started when I became friends with a beautiful, Ghanaian girl soon after I became a Christian at 19. We were raised in the same Pentecostal church and we became believers together at a young adults retreat.
We had a lot in common, especially common interest in each other. So one Saturday night, we agreed to do what many Charismatic Christians do before they enter into a relationship: we asked God to reveal the identity of our spouses in a dream that night.
We were raised in the Word of Faith, prosperity gospel movement. Our church regularly held “healing” crusades and suggested that miraculous and supernatural events were normal experiences for Christians. So we prayed and went to sleep that night believing God would answer our prayers.
But what happened next isn’t what either of us expected.
I had a dream that I stepped out of a limo at our Pentecostal church wearing a black tuxedo. I was several feet away from a bride waiting for me.
Halfway towards her, I was shocked when I saw the woman of my dreams. She was a beautiful, Ghanaian girl smiling at me. But it wasn’t whom I was expecting. It wasn’t my friend—it was her cousin.
But the biggest shock happened the following morning at church.
I couldn’t pay attention to anything that morning. I was amazed by that supernatural answer to prayer. But I was also disappointed that my friend wasn’t destined to be my wife. I knew her cousin. She was great. She was also a member of our church. But I didn’t like her at the time, I liked my friend instead.
Nevertheless, I was eager to talk to my friend that morning. So as soon as I saw her, I said: “I know who my wife is.” And she replied, “I know. It’s my cousin.”
In shock, I stepped back and almost fell to the floor. I couldn’t believe it.
She said she had a dream that I married her cousin: she and I had the same dream. It’s the most unexplainable thing to ever happen to me. I hadn’t said anything about the dream to anyone. She gave me details about the dream that no one else could possibly know.
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The role of the Church in these chaotic times is therefore to testify, with as much clarity and courage as God will grant, to the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who are perishing will cry that this is unloving, but those who are being saved will, by the Spirit’s power, receive this gospel as a fragrance of life to life (2 Cor. 2:16). 

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world that we might live through him. (1 John 4:8–9)
Our present age is one in which “love,” as we refer to it, has become so distorted as to be hardly recognizable. Acts of flagrant rebellion against God are gleefully sanctioned in the name of love; evil is everywhere celebrated, supposedly, for the sake of love; oppression is promulgated for the cause of love; and lies are disseminated throughout every corner of society under the guise of love. And lest we risk falling into abstraction, what I am referring to here are things like Toronto streets being filled with all manner of public sexual deviance in the month of June, libraries suddenly becoming the favourite haunt of bearded, cross-dressing weirdos, and untold numbers of children being murdered and mutilated each year precisely by those who ought to be protecting them.
There is scarcely a good thing left in the world that we have not perverted under the pretence of “love,” and yet most people are more upset that I referred to drag performers as “cross-dressing weirdos.” Such are the times, I suppose.
Even so, it continues to be true that despite our culture’s myriad distortions of love, love itself remains pure and undefiled.
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This emphasis on religion as spiritual and not ceremonial was a marked characteristic of godly preaching, and in time the Puritan preachers came to be known as “spiritual preachers” in contrast to the “witty” preaching of their opponents. They not only were to be understood by the people, but they were to stir their emotions, touch their imaginations, convert them to the Lord, save them from sin and death and hell, help them to discern the striving of the Spirit in their hearts as they struggled to make good their election, and point them to the true end of man which was to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

One of the great follies of which many studies on Puritanism are guilty is the practice of analyzing and criticizing the Puritans rather than allowing them to analyze and criticize us! It is not my intent in this series of posts to comment on the preaching of these godly men, but rather to allow their preaching to speak for itself and to comment on our preaching.
Of all the names used in the 16th century to describe the Puritans, such as “precisians,” “disciplinarians,” “the brethren,” “the consistorians,” and the name which best sums up their character is “the Godly preachers.”
The essential thing in understanding the Puritans is that they were preachers before they were anything else, and preachers with a particular emphasis that could be distinguished from other preachers by those who heard them. Into whatever efforts they were led in their attempt to reform the world through the church, and however these efforts were frustrated by the leaders of the church, what bound them together, undergirded their striving, and gave them the dynamic to persist was their consciousness that they were called to preach the gospel. “Woe is me if I preach not the gospel,” was their inspiration and justification. Puritan tradition in the first and last resort must be assessed in terms of the pulpit.
The Puritan preachers termed their style of preaching as “spiritual preaching” in contrast to the “ceremonial preaching” of the Roman (and eventually even the Anglican) church. John Foxe, the martyrologist, said that the true Christian is not the “ceremonial man after the Church of Rome, but the spiritual man with his faith and other fruits of piety following the same.”
This emphasis on religion as spiritual and not ceremonial was a marked characteristic of godly preaching, and in time the Puritan preachers came to be known as “spiritual preachers” in contrast to the “witty” preaching of their opponents. They not only were to be understood by the people, but they were to stir their emotions, touch their imaginations, convert them to the Lord, save them from sin and death and hell, help them to discern the striving of the Spirit in their hearts as they struggled to make good their election, and point them to the true end of man which was to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
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