The American Dream is a Human Nightmare

The disillusion of many believers, and every unbeliever, rests in trying to attain what can only be obtained.

The American Dream is rugged individualism, goal-setting, painstaking effort, diligence, discipline, and dedication, and you will achieve all that you want.

What happens, though, when the dreams come true? When everything that you ever wanted comes to pass, and yet the lingering longing for more still gnaws at you?

Goal-setting is not a bad thing, if a man is living by a greater light and life than trying to reach for that goal. For many, though, setting a high standard, chasing something has been the prime instigator of one's life and liberty. This programis a regressive one, one that creates more bondage than freedom or life.

We are not free to get something. We are free to be and become what God has called us to be. We live out His life in us, or we have no life at all, and any success, any results in our lives, will either leave us embattled or embittered.

The American Dream is a Human Nightmare. In one sense, it is fraudulent and unnecessary, for every believer who has received God's grace by faith has been transferred from death to life, from despised to prized, from rejected by all to accepted in the Beloved. We change from undertakes of a fallen nature to partakers of the divine nature. Alienated to adopted. From low estate to sitting in high places. From victims to more than conquerors.

We do not see this victory in our lives to the extent that we depend on our own efforts, that we expend our own energies, that we rely on our fallen minds instead of our born-again spirit, being led by the Spirit who witnesses that we are children of the Living God.

In other sense, the American Dream is a Human Nightmare which provokes people to seek something that cannot be attained, to miss out on the satisfaction of life, which must be received, not achieved, worked out, not worked up to.

From The Great Gatsby to "Death of a Salesman", chasing a dream instead of living out a reality has brought many people into bondage.

People are dreaming about what they want to become instead of learning who they are, and then acting accordingly. We have to learn how to sit, so that we can learn how to walk, and they we will knoww how to stand.

For man to dream anything as a directive for fulifllment is just plain folly. We need to learn what we already have, or we have to accept that we have nothing to give in the first place.