Leadership Lesson No.55–“Vision: Don’t Leave Home Without It”

If you plan to lead, it might be a good idea to know where you’re going. The folks coming along behind you would like to know where you plan to take them. That concept, that goal, that’s your vision. Your vision is the answer to the question: when you get where you are going, what will it look like?

“Some men see things as they are and ask why; I see things that never were and ask why not.”

That memorable line, often attributed to Robert F. Kennedy, actually belongs to the playwright, George Bernard Shaw from his “Back to Methuselah.” The mixup resulted from Senator Ted Kennedy’s quoting it about Robert at his funeral in 1968.

It’s a great line. It’s reminiscent of something from the famous 11th chapter of Hebrews. “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.” (11:3)

There is among us a breed of humanity who see things no one else sees, who hear music unheard by the human ear, who know things not revealed in the physical world. These are people of a faith-vision.

The writer of Hebrews gives numerous instances of people with faith-vision which enabled them to see what God wanted them to do, where He wanted them to go, how He wished them to live. By faith, Abraham went out “not knowing where he was going.” (11:8) “By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land…for he was looking for a city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” (11:9-10)

“All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance….” (11:13)

“By faith (Moses) left Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king, for he endured, as seeing Him who is unseen.” (11:27)

People of faith see things otherwise unseen. Faith vision.


But there are specific visions which God provides for those individuals He calls to particular tasks. I’m not referring to the individual going into a trance and being raptured, as actually did occur once or twice in Scripture. I’m talking about something much more regular. It’s more along the lines of the Lord opening your inner eyes to something He has for you, some task He wants you to achieve.

Now, I must have twenty-five books on leadership. Each writer uses the word “vision,” each stresses its importance, but not all agree on what it means. I’d like to try to strip away all the confusion, if possible, and lay it out in the simplest terms.

A vision is not a dream and not a plan on how to achieve anything. The vision is what you see as your promised land. The mountain climber stands on the slope and peers into the sky at the distant peak; that’s where he’s headed. It’s his vision. The pastor unveils the architect’s drawings of the new church plant. “That’s my vision for us,” the minister announces. That is the direction he will be leading the congregation in the foreseeable future. Another pastor envisions something entirely different, perhaps not involving building projects at all, but he sees a congregation saturating the community with ministry and service and witness.

A businessman knows exactly the kind of company he is setting out to build. The maestro begins assembling musicians with a definite idea in mind as to the kind of symphony he is creating. The chef prepares a feast for a wedding party. An engineer draws a picture of the bridge which will span the river. Each has a vision.

A vision is not about leadership. It comes before leadership. One can have a vision but no leadership, but real leadership requires a vision.

In 1984, Bobby Evans of the Texas Department of Transportation was driving through Tyler, Texas, watching trash blow out of a truck in front of him. He thought of the rising costs of street and highway sanitation, and he wondered if there was not some way of engaging civic clubs, businesses, and churches to adopt sections of highways and keep them clean. The more he thought about it, the more excited he became. Evans had a vision of clean roads and pristine countrysides. Soon, he was speaking to organizations about taking responsibility for a mile of highway.

Everyone agreed it was a great idea, but no group volunteered. Evans clearly had the vision, but it would appear that he lacked leadership.

One year later, the public information officer for the Texas DOT, Billy Black, took Evans’ vision and ran with it. He worked up a training program for volunteers and reflective vests for them to wear while working on the side of the road, and soon had numerous clubs and businesses signed up. Today, the city of Tyler, Texas, holds the honor of being the initiator of the adopt-a-highway program, which has since spread to countries all over the world.

Vision comes before leadership, otherwise the leader has no direction and no goal.

President George H. W. Bush was regularly assailed for his lack of a vision for America during his presidency. It became such a sore spot for him, he began referring to it as “this vision thing.”

As a pastor for over four decades, I am well-acquainted with Bush’s problem. I recall interviewing with a pastor search committee when a member would ask, “If you become our pastor, what is your vision for our church?” I would try to explain that’s not how the process works. A pastor does not have a one-size-fits-all plan for every congregation and move from town to town, putting it into place. well, perhaps some do, but they shouldn’t.

Churches are as unalike as children in a family, with each one having distinctive features, strengths, and weaknesses which play a major role in who they are, what they will become, and how they will work.

The best I can figure, the process for a leader receiving the vision for his particular assignment involves three aspects.

1) Above all, there is THE WILL OF GOD.

God is the Owner, Creator, and Master Architect. “I know the plans I have for you,” He told Israel (Jeremiah 29:11). The challenge for us is to learn what that will is, what those plans are, if we are to do anything of lasting importance in this world.

Above all, we must want the will of God to be done. Jesus taught us to pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

2) As he grows in the Lord, the believer receives A BURDEN ON HIS HEART.

Something begins to bother him. It may be the plight of the homeless in his city, the lost multitudes in the world, or the immigrants in his neighborhood unable to speak English. Something is eating at his soul.

Not everyone has the same burden. That would seem to be the most obvious of statements which no one would dispute, but every pastor has seen church members fume with anger because the other members were not burdened with the same conditions that were breaking their hearts. God made us different and for good reason.

If everyone shared the same burdens for all the bad conditions in this world, since there are so many wrongs needing addressing, the heavy load would be unbearable. Everyone would be running helter-skelter trying to meet every need in the world, all at the same time. Chaos would follow and complete breakdown would result.

So, the Lord did something truly brilliant: He let one person respond to the educational needs of the little children, another to their need for food, another for their health problems, another for their family life and still another for the safety of their neighborhoods. One person wants to see clean highways, another is burdened for smoke-free buildings, and another for the health of our churches. No one has to do everything; each one responds to the burdens God gives him.

Sometimes when an Old Testament prophet rose to speak, he prefaced his message with, “The burden of the Lord.” That was a dead giveaway this was not going to be a humorous after-dinner speech that would have them rolling in the floor. This was serious stuff.

Scripture says of Jesus, “Seeing the people, he felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36) That was his burden.

3) In God’s own timing, in His own way, as the believer makes himself available to the Lord, God may give him THE VISION for his future ministry.

Suddenly, he becomes aware he is to build houses in a blighted area of New Orleans. She is to organize the women of the city to minister to the streetwalkers. He is to initiate a program of disaster relief and train thousands of volunteers in order to respond to hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods.

He sees what he needs to do. He now knows what his purpose is in life. God put him here for this.

Now and only now can he begin to exercise his leadership skills.

He’s now ready to lead.

The obvious question, then, is, why do so few followers of Jesus Christ seem to know God’s vision for them? They have a general picture based on Scripture that God wants them to serve Him in the world, to love their neighbor, help the poor, support their church, and bear a witness to outsiders. But specifically, individually, few can claim to have received the vision of God’s purpose for their work here on earth.

Since not everyone is intended to be a leader–every movement needs large numbers of followers and supporters–it may well be that only the leader is required to sit in the Lord’s presence and wait for the vision. That is, not everyone needs to seek the vision, but simply to get the Holy Spirit’s word as to which movement–which church or business or enterprise, which organization or cause or campaign–they are to support.

So, if we grant that only those chosen and gifted by God as leaders need the vision, how does it come?

The answer is found in a scalding sermon Jeremiah preached to the false prophets of Babylon, sometime in the 6th century B.C. The message is found in chapter 23 of his prophecy.

The ominous message begins: “‘Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture!’ declares the Lord.” “They speak a vision of their own imagination, not from the mouth of the Lord.” (23:16)

That’s one kind of vision–your own imagination. But it’s not God’s. And that’s the only one we want.

“If they had stood in my council, then they would have announced my words to my people and would have turned them back from their evil way….” (23:22)

He contines, “I have heard what the prophets said who prophesy falsely in my name, saying, ‘I had a dream, I had a dream!’….The prophet who has a dream may relate his dream, but let him who has my word speak my word in truth. What does straw have in common with grain?” (23:25,28)

Three kinds of false visions were being put before God’s people as though they were God’s grand design: the imaginations of the false prophets (23:16), the dreams of these charlatans (23:25), and ideas plagiarized from other preachers (23:30).

I don’t have any facts and figures to back it up, but it would not surprise me to find that many churches and other organizations today are falling for the same concoctions of self-appointed prophets today.

They’re all like straw, the Lord says, and have nothing in common with grain. Straw will choke anyone swallowing it; grain gives life and strength.

So, the simple answer to our question “whence cometh vision?” is “from the Lord.” If the prophets had come to the Lord and “stood in my council,” they would have heard what He had to say to the people and would have had a true message.

What does it mean to stand in the council of the Lord?

I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet, as the saying goes, but I don’t think He has left us in the dark. This is basic Christianity 101.

We are to put ourselves in the presence of the Lord in worship and wait upon Him. We are to take in large amounts of His word and give ourselves to Him in prayer and then be quiet. We wait in His presence. It may mean fasting, it probably means throwing away the clock, and it surely means aligning our lives to His pleasure, stripping them of anything displeasing to Him.

“What would you have me to do?” was Paul’s first prayer after meeting Jesus Christ. (Acts 22:10) He was instructed to go into Damascus and to wait. A few days later, a disciple named Ananias arrived, laid hands on Paul, and prayed. The scales dropped from Paul’s eyes, so to speak, and from then on he knew–he saw–what God wanted him to do. Paul was to be a missionary and apostle to the Gentiles. That was the vision God had for him.

He had his assignment. Everything else about Paul’s life resulted from that moment, from that vision. Sometimes when he shared that testimony, Paul would conclude, “Wherefore, I have not been disobedient to that heavenly vision.” (Acts 26:19)

The will of God exists. The burden of your heart is your response to needs God places before you. The vision of the Lord is His specific call upon your life as to your assignment.

Once you have your assignment, go to work. But only then.

As our resurrected Lord met with the disciples over the six week period before His ascension, He instructed them “not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father has promised.” (Acts 1:4)

Later, He promised, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)

Then, they watched as Jesus was lifted from them into Heaven. As He disappeared from sight, they remained in place as though their feet were set in concrete. Finally, remembering His instructions, they returned to the city and began their time of waiting. Over the next ten days, they prayed, they fellowshiped, they talked, and they waited some more. Then, Pentecost arrived, the Holy Spirit filled them and drove them out into the streets with a message relevant to every person they met, and nothing has ever been the same since.

3 thoughts on “Leadership Lesson No.55–“Vision: Don’t Leave Home Without It”

  1. I am, for the first time in my life at a crossroads (My children will all be in school by 2009), where I am actually taking the time and asking God “What would you have me to do?”.

    Before I would “reason” things out- What major should I go with in college, what job should I take, etc… without any intense prayer or intential watching for where God was working.

    Everyone expects me to get a secular job and “contribute” to my family. How exactly a secular job and more money will contribute to my family I do not see. I want to do ministry of some kind but I yearning for God to show me His path for me.

    He keeps pressing two things on my heart:

    1. Walk with God in Blind faith(seek Him in His word, His Church and in prayer no matter the obsticles).

    2. It’s all about people and how you relate to them.

  2. Kellie,

    I too have struggled with the “where do I go from here” question. As of this moment I am in a secular job but I know this is where God wants me as He is using me as a witness to those people who otherwise might never hear about Him.

    I agree that to take a job to “contribute” to the family is not the answer. When a family develops a second income, many times that extra money gets turned into need for additional items that were never truly a need in the first place. When that happens, it is hard to go where God wants us due to extra expenses incurred.

    Whether you choose to work in a secular job, at home, or in ministry, as long as you remain in the will of God, He will take care you. Remind people that it is not what they expect you to do but what God wants you to do.

    I pray God continues to guide you on your journey! Nikki

  3. Thanks again, Dr. Joe: This brought back memories of some of our walks and talks around “the park” in Charlotte. Your counsel was wisely given but a few times not wisely received. It took a little longer for me to catch the vision but all in God’s time.

    People, you better listen-up to hear what the “Good Doctor” is telling us!

    Bro. Fred

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