Considered the gold standard for Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," the film version starring Alastair Sim, released in 1951, was the version played every year in our grammar school when I was a boy.

Without VHS, disc, or streaming available, the teacher brought in a small black and white TV, after struggling to get it tuned. We waited until our local station aired the show, and sat in class and watched in complete silence.

I went through every emotion a little boy could feel—fear, awe, sadness, anger, and at last, when the Christmas Goose was bought by Scrooge from a boy in the street, there was relief, joy, and the re-birth of hope in all humanity.

But it wasn’t over.

The slide into agnosticism, doubt, and hopelessness took years to show its true evil nature. Listening to others and watching the result of wars, hate, and worldwide confusion ripped at the moral fiber of my innocence and youth.

It would take more than a Christmas goose to pull me up again.

I journeyed through this world to places, events, and situations that would take volumes to explain, and not many people would believe most of it.

I had no plan for my life, but God did.

In the mid-sixties, I began to question everything, even what I decided I would not believe.

Deciding that you just don’t know everything is the best starting gate for learning.

I finally got around to the question of faith in God.

But this article is not about me, rather it is about how God took a spiritually-blind person and made him a seer.

New to the Bible and just learning to walk with God was a great adventure. Stumbling in grace seemed a better life than streamlining my own destruction.

No one could have convinced me that God still spoke directly to anyone. I was satisfied with just the Bible and would look for no further revelation.

Then came my first dream.

In fact, there were three dreams in one night.

I was active in all three dreams. The first two I fully recognized as something in my very distant past, followed by something in the present. The third dream was unknown to me. It was detailed and fully visible, but it was a series of events that I was totally unfamiliar with.

I did not know if the dream was prophetic or just some Freudian reaction to a few bad events from my past. If it were prophetic, I had no way of knowing that.

I sat up and puzzled over the dreams. When I grew too tired to reason any further, I said a short prayer asking God to help me understand it and what the dreams meant, if anything.

I reclined to sleep again, and a picture of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" came to me as clear as a bell.

The lights went on.

I popped up in bed and exclaimed "that’s it"—one dream was the past, the next was the present, so the third must be the future. A gentle flow of the Holy Spirit came over me as a confirmation.

Exactly eight days later every event I saw in the third dream came to pass in every detail.

While I had no more three-dream events again, from that day on, it only took one dream for God to show me a future event.

The ice had been broken, and with that one series of dreams the Lord showed me how easy it was to see the future.

Hundreds of times each year I would see events—some minor, a few quite major.

Sometimes, I would see events for every day in the week. It frightened me a bit, so I prayed for God to help me understand why it was happening to me. I was part of a regular evangelical denomination, but none of my Christian friends seemed to ever have such revelations.

God led me to a single verse of scripture which served to satisfy me, although it could hardly prepare me for all the implications and repercussions yet to come.

This was the passage.

And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream (Numbers 12:6).

Every year at Christmas, I see "A Christmas Carol" being shown again, and I am reminded of how far God will go to call someone to a journey they would never believe or dare to undertake.

I never put any message above the Bible, in fact, I check all my visions against the scripture. After that, any doubt, criticism, or argument floats off, as it should.

One of the great guides of my life came from my first pastor, Dr. Richard Land, who said, “A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.”

I give God the glory.

I give people the warning.

The warning is singular—time is running out. The second coming of Jesus Christ is near.

You can count on it.

Further Reading

Best of Archive Series – America’s Economic Collapse: Revisiting a Dire Prophecy

Best of Archive Series – Is the Second Coming of Christ the End of the World?

Photo: IMDB

To read more articles by Michael Bresciani click here.