Advancing God’s Kingdom in Other Cultures

Beyond Rational into Supernatural

By Fred Markert

I started to go to sleep and suddenly my bedroom was filled with light. At the foot of my bed stood Jesus, and I knew He had come to kill me.”

This is how a new convert, a university professor, excitedly recounted her conversion experience to one of our Youth With a Mission (YWAM) workers in the 10/40 Window. The day before, she had marched out of his English class after he began to share about Jesus with his students. As she stormed out, she cursed the worker.

“I cursed you all the way home,” she told him. “I went home and I lay in bed and I was praying, ‘Allah, I want you to kill those people because they are not English teachers—they are missionaries and I want them out of my country! Kill them!’”

It was then that she saw the vision of Jesus standing at the foot of her bed.

“I knew He had come to kill me because I was asking Allah to kill His workers. So, I got out of bed on my hands and knees. I was trembling, waiting for Him to slay me. As I was trembling at His feet, I started to feel love wash over my body—love and mercy.”

“I looked up at Him,” she said. “Jesus was so beautiful, I had to give Him my heart.”

God Works Supernaturally

Stories like this are amazing and plentiful. Thousands of documented stories—about real people who need real breakthroughs and real revelation that lead to salvation—have poured out of the 10/40 Window. If you have any doubts God is still using dreams and visions in the lives of unbelievers who need a touch from Him, you won’t have to look far to find proof.

YWAM shares the gospel in 10/40 Window nations (which includes Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African countries). In just one of those countries alone, experiences of supernatural dreams and visions occur about twice a year. Converts are mostly brought to Christ through blood, sweat, and tears: hours and hours of witnessing.

But there are times when God uses the supernatural to break through. God wants to support His people who are doing His Kingdom work, and He sometimes does that through dreams and visions.

One worker, an engineer who felt ill-equipped when recruited to teach English in a Muslim country, witnessed such an experience of God’s power and support. One of his students, a 19-year-old woman, asked him if he had any American movies that she could take home to practice her English. He used the opportunity to give her a copy of the Jesus video.

When she returned the next day, she told him, “My heart was warmed to learn about Jesus! But my English was not good enough—I couldn’t understand it all. I wish I could understand more.”

So, he sent her home with the Jesus film in her own language. She was back in class the next day with a huge grin on her face. She did not talk through the whole class but continued to grin until the worker finally stopped the class and took her out in the hallway to ask if she was all right.

“Oh, yes!” she replied. “I was watching the Jesus video last night and Jesus stepped right off the television screen into my living room. He was so beautiful, I got down on my knees in front of Him and I gave Him my life.”

God’s Unconventional Ways

You may be wondering why God would use these unconventional methods in other cultures. He does it primarily to get their attention. He does it so they’ll be able to say, “This happened to me.”

The cultures of the 10/40 Window are mostly storytelling cultures. They have a strong oral tradition. They sit around dinner tables and chai (tea) shops and share what happened to them with others.

But God also uses dreams and visions to link the supernatural with the practical or natural. Jesus said, “. . . true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth” (John 4:23, emphasis added). The Spirit side pertains to the supernatural things that are outside of our “normal” experience—the unexplainable things that only God can do. The truth side deals with God’s practical work and revelation that are part of our everyday journey with Him. Spirit, for example, would be when Peter stood up and spoke extemporaneously on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2). Truth would be to study to show yourself approved (2 Tim. 2:15).

In western culture, our worldview shuts out the spirit side of things. Our rationalistic, linear way of thinking keeps us operating in the natural realm rather than the supernatural. But the rest of the world is more open to the supernatural, and God meets people where they are. He will use whatever avenues people are predisposed toward to reveal Himself.

Islam is a religion with animistic leanings. Trying to appease the Jinn (bad spirits, from which we get our word “genie”) so that they won’t mess up your life is commonplace for the Muslim. So YWAMers in the radically Muslim countries typically ask God to use dreams, visions, and revelations to communicate God’s truth to the people.

One of the first YWAM converts from Islam was a university professor. YWAM workers developed a relationship with him, and he was given a copy of the New Testament. He took the copy home and was reading it in bed. He got very angry because it declared that Jesus was God. In his anger, he threw the New Testament against the wall. He reported later that the Jinn showed up and kept him awake all night by jumping on his bed.

The Jinn are keeping me awake because I threw a holy book against the wall, he thought. (The New Testament is considered a holy book by Muslims, even though they believe it is corrupted.) This happened every night for two weeks. The professor finally went to the Muslim holy men and asked for prayer. Nothing changed. After two exhausting weeks, he turned to the ones who gave him the New Testament. He asked for and received a deliverance prayer from the workers.

That night the Jinn showed up, jumping on the professor’s bed as usual. But an angel appeared and the Jinn fled. The angel continued to stand guard until the man was able to go to sleep. The Jinn never came back, and the professor became a convert.

In all these instances where we see God using dreams and visions, it is always to advance the purposes of God’s Kingdom on the planet. There is always a practical application of the supernatural spirit side to a real-world situation.

Paul’s vision of a man calling him to Macedonia (Acts 16:6–10), for instance, changed the direction of the gospel. Paul was about to take the gospel eastward when that vision caused one of the biggest shifts in spiritual history. From that point on, the gospel moved westward toward Greece, Europe, and then the United States, only later moving into Asia. If Paul hadn’t had that vision, we would be the equivalent of the 10/40 Window! The people from India and China would be coming to share the gospel with us.

Kingdom Expansion

As our post-modern culture looks more to imagery and the power of story, God will undoubtedly begin to use supernatural channels in our society as well. He makes the gospel “user-friendly,” and this generation is ripe for these kinds of experiences. Today’s society has an increasing hunger for the supernatural, which is evident even at the box office. The influx and incorporation of foreign religions and world views into our society has left our country looking for—desperate for—supernatural things. It has brought an unhealthy interest in the “magical” side of the supernatural that is devoid of morality. But it has also opened an avenue for God to begin speaking powerfully through dreams and visions.

God will do this—not for the “chills and thrills” of subjective experience, but for the expansion of His Kingdom. He will supernaturally inject the Kingdom into everyday life to move the world closer to His purposes.

I ask God continually for spiritual gifts—for spiritual expression in my own life. I pray for supernatural direction in my ministry. Every night I ask the Lord to give me dreams of things that will be significant for the ministry. As many as two or three times a week I see people in my dreams. The content of the dream is usually inconsequential, but I clearly see faces of people I have never met before. Because I travel so frequently, I spend a great deal of time in airplanes and airports. Invariably I recognize people from my dreams on a plane or in an airport terminal. When I see these people, I know they are people God has been preparing. When I share my faith with them, nine times out of ten they are ripe to hear the gospel. This happens so regularly that I have come to expect it. It is a supernatural experience that I have prayed for, but it’s used solely to extend the Kingdom in people’s lives and hearts.

God wants to awaken His Church to become the place where the world can find the supernatural solutions it is looking for. We need to begin to seek the spiritual gifts in earnest, praying for a powerful release of dreams, visions, and revelations to our society—just as has been prayed for years for the 10/40 Window.

Some of the best advice I ever got was from a Bayou priest in Louisiana with an eighth-grade education: “Fred, if you keep doin’ what yer doin’, yer gonna get what you got.”

What we “got” in our country today is a result of how we’ve lived and prayed. If we keep doing the same things, we are just going to get the same results. If we want to see greater breakthroughs, however, especially as we move into a future where we are facing some of the greatest challenges our country has faced in any generation, we need to start living and praying in very different ways. We need to ask God to do here what He is doing in the 10/40 Window.

As we move into a season of history in which we need supernatural guidance more than ever, we need the power of God beyond the natural realm to help us live out His purposes. 

FRED MARKERT is the international director of Youth With a Mission’s Strategic Frontiers. In this capacity, he focuses on planting churches that will disciple nations among the unreached people groups of the 10/40 Window.