Morning, brothers and sisters.
I’d like to read a couple of verses before we begin.
Starting first in Proverbs, chapter 29, verse 18:
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
And then I’d like to go to Hebrews 2, starting with verse 9:
But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor.
Maybe I should read that differently:
But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.
Or maybe I should read it this way:
But we see Jesus, crowned with glory and honor.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we do again thank You and praise You for the gift of Your Son to us, which brings us to You faultless, to stand before the throne, all because of Jesus Christ. And it is Him that we praise this morning, and Him that we lift up. He is our King.
And we ask, Lord, as we come to Your Word, that You would open Your Word to us and speak into our life and our time, that we might be encouraged to live in the times that we are living in, and we might be drawn to You. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, I bet you cannot, from the verse in Proverbs, tell what I am going to speak about. That’s right, perishing. No, vision. All right. I should have got a bigger laugh, but okay.
I want to speak this morning about vision. And I really, in some ways, tremble to speak about vision, because we look at vision and I think we almost make vision an icon. You know, it is something that is spoken about at conferences. It is a big thing.
And we do not want it to be so big that we look at it as a thing. We do not want it to be so big that we feel it is unattainable: “It is not for me; it is for super-spiritual people.”
Because when we look at vision, it is not perspective—how we see. It is not like, “My perspective of this.” And believe me, brothers and sisters, it is not a teaching. So, to come and talk about vision, I do not want to give you a teaching on vision, because vision is not a teaching.
Vision may come through somebody’s teaching, but it is not a teaching. We do not teach on vision and say, “This is vision,” and stuff like that, even though I am going to say a few words explaining these things about vision. Vision is something that is given to us, and it is given to us by God.
If you remember Peter, when Jesus said, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And what did Jesus say? He said, “Blessed are you, because flesh and blood has not shown this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”
I have one great example of what I think really defines vision as apart from teaching. You know that I am a teacher, and I have taught for quite a while, but I remember this like it was a few months ago. I would say yesterday, but I am old.
It was about my fourth year teaching, and I was teaching United States history. I was teaching on the American Revolution. Why do we have the American Revolution? You have the Boston Tea Party and all this. I had taught four years, so this was like secondhand to me. You teach something over and over and over again; it just becomes part of life, right?
I believe it was even the last period of the day. I believe the class before was a U.S. history class, so I had just taught it. I was really going through the motions: “There is no taxation without representation,” and I was just going through it, saying, “Why should we pay taxes? We do not have any representatives in government,” and stuff like this.
And a kid right over here jumped out of his seat. I mean, he literally jumped out of his seat. His name was Alex Mills—I still remember his name. He was about this high, black hair, and he jumped out of his seat and said, “That is what it means!”
That is vision. Do you understand what I am saying? It was not my teaching, even though my teaching, I am sure, was great. Certainly it was not my delivery.
But for some reason, there was something in that little explanation that I just blah, blah, blahed, and all of a sudden a light went on and he saw. That is what vision is: it is a seeing. It is the seeing that is granted to you by God.
It is not gotten through teaching. It is not a perspective: “This is how I see Jesus. How do you see Jesus?” No, that is not vision. Vision is something that is given to you by God. A light goes on.
The Hebrew word for vision that is used here in Proverbs—the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek; that is where we have the Septuagint—is chazon. Now, I do not speak Hebrew, but I think the “ch” makes that sound.
In that word, chazon, there is the idea that it could be translated not just as vision, but as prophetic vision. My version, the New King James, says, “Where there is no revelation,” or prophetic vision, “the people cast off restraint,” or perish.
So vision is prophecy. And what is prophecy? Prophecy is simply divine communication. It is God communicating something to us.
It is not just that He is communicating for the sake of communicating. He is speaking something into our life—not just knowledge that He is trying to give you, but something of Himself right into our lives.
It is kind of like what Lane was saying today when he was talking about reading in Philippians, and a verse kind of jumped out to him. There are three words for “word” in Greek. One of them is logos.
If you remember, when we were studying John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Logos is a conceptual kind of word, a word that gives you a concept. When we say that we have a concept of God, the concept of God became flesh in Jesus Christ so we could see it much clearer.
One of the other words that Lane was really talking about today was rhema. Rhema is the thing that Alex Mills got—boom, it was right there, right then. It was for today. It was for that time. That is the rhema of the Word.
It is the word for today. It is the word for this circumstance, this word for me personally. It is not something that you teach to everybody necessarily, but it is something that the Lord has quickened to you for that situation, so you can see, get on your path, and do whatever you need to do.
But it is something spoken directly to you. Vision can be spoken to you as an individual, as it was with Alex Mills. But “you” can also be plural. It can be something collective. A whole group of people can see at the same time, like at Pentecost.
There is also the idea that it is for a time. It is a word for this time, this specific time that we are living in. So there are three ways to look at this: vision as it affects the individual, vision as it affects the corporate body, and vision as it applies to our time.
Vision, then, is prophetic. It is divine communication. But it is God revealing Himself to us—to an individual, to a group, or to a time. He is revealing Himself in a way that He wants to be known.
He wants to be known in this way, and so He shows you. It is for you to acknowledge Him in the way that He is showing you, in the way that He is revealing Himself. You must acknowledge, “This is who You are.”
And then you must respond to that. Because our acknowledgment of who He is really is a response. We either respond in a positive way or respond in a negative way.
A negative response could be just blowing it off—not necessarily saying, “Well, I do not believe that,” but just saying, “Okay,” and putting it in our notebook. You know what I mean?
Sometimes vision is given not just to show Himself; sometimes it is given to show what He is doing. When we read the Old Testament prophets, we see some of the things that He is doing. Sometimes it is given to show what He has done.
How many of us have had our eyes opened to what Christ has done for us, and all of a sudden—boom—we see? I think of the time Watchman Nee was trying to die to himself, and then he came out and found, “I am dead.” Remember that? He saw it all of a sudden, and he took it up.
So vision is God revealing something of Himself, something that He has done, or something that He is doing to us as an individual, a group, or a time.
Vision is always given for a purpose. It is not just given because, “Hey, I want to show you something neat.” That is not vision. That is trivia.
Vision is always given for a purpose, and His purpose is always, always redemptive in nature. God gives vision to redeem. It is to recover something for Himself or something that you have lost. It is to correct, to bring people back to the path that they should be on; to save; and to establish you in His presence, on the path you are supposed to walk, and in the purpose that is purposed for you as an individual and as a people.
In other words, vision is always practical. It is meant to have an effect on our lives. I could even say it is meant to change our lives and redirect our path, our thoughts, or our perceptions about who God is and what He is doing.
When we receive vision and respond to vision, it is to bring about transformation. That is the same transformation spoken of in Romans 12:2. After we lay our lives down as a living sacrifice, it guides us into His purpose and into His perfect will.
Vision is given to individuals. Vision is given to groups. And, as I said, vision is given to a time. He gives it to anyone who will receive it.
Does that mean that everybody receives vision? There are things that keep us from receiving vision from the Lord. One is that our hearts are hardened.
Like the Pharisees—we are studying John, right? The Pharisees could not see who Christ was, or who Christ was showing Himself to be. Why could they not? Their minds were already made up. Their hearts were hardened. They could not receive anything.
We have the same danger. Our heart is hard: “I have heard this before. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Our hearts are hard; therefore, we get nothing.
Sometimes it is simply that we are distracted. We are distracted by other things. Remember when Jesus was giving the Sermon on the Mount: why are you anxious about what you will wear or what you are going to eat? And, “Martha, Martha, Martha, you are distracted by so many things, when only one is necessary.”
Today we are in a generation of total distraction. I do not know how many times I have had to tell a kid, “Are you texting? Are you playing this game?” The new thing is puppy videos. They are looking at cute little puppies while you are teaching class, as though I do not have something important to say.
But you see what I am saying? They are distracted. We are distracted in the same way by the things of the world, by the things that we are doing, so that we just cannot keep our minds straight.
We have a whole generation of—what is it?—ADD, ADHD. I am not making fun of this, but it is a whole generation like that. That is tough because we cannot sit still. We cannot sit still and listen.
What did the Lord say in Psalm 46? “Be still, and know that I am God.” One of the ways we get vision is that we are still. I am not saying that we hide ourselves away in some kind of monastery, but we have to have some quiet time where our minds are quiet as well.
I want to look at vision to an individual, vision to a group, and vision to a time at hand. I am going to look at four individuals as far as receiving vision. You know them all; some are more famous than others.
The first one is Abraham. In Acts 7, it says this about Abraham: “The God of glory appeared to Abraham.”
Now, you know something about Abraham when God first appeared to him? Abraham was old. He was an old dude. He was, what, seventy-five? Now, of us men here, how many are seventy-five or older? Oh, see, we are still young guys.
But is it not wonderful to know that God gives vision when you are old? Old men will see vision—not visions, vision. He was an old man, and he saw the Lord. It says that the God of glory appeared to him.
I do not know what that means. I cannot tell you what he saw. But I can tell you this: he saw a God that had an effect on his life. God said, “Leave where you are,” and Abraham obeyed.
The effect on Abraham’s life was that he left the city, and the rest of his life he lived as a pilgrim—not one of these Thanksgiving pilgrims. A pilgrim just means he journeyed; he was a sojourner. He journeyed from place to place. He had no permanent home.
We walk by faith. We go from glory to glory, from faith to faith. That is what Abraham’s life was: never settling down. Matter of fact, he only bought one piece of land. That was the cave at Machpelah, where he buried his wife and where he was buried later on.
Other than that, he roamed from place to place to place. He saw God in that way: God said, “Move out,” and God would provide. God would promise him these things, and then he acted on it. He acted on what he saw in God.
God is able to provide. God is able to bring me here. This is what God wants me to do. Because of that vision, he was even able to offer up his son.
Think about that: to see something of God so that he could say, “If I even slay my son, God will raise him from the dead because He promised that to me.” That is something that he saw of God in that vision. So he started a pilgrim life.
Secondly, we have David. David was just the opposite of Abraham. Abraham was about seventy-five; David was a kid, a young person, probably even younger than you guys here when he had this.
I think if we look at Psalm 8, it starts out:
O Lord, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
I want to stop right there. Many commentators say David was a kid, out there watching the sheep, when he wrote this psalm—or that he wrote it from his experience watching sheep as a kid.
The whole thing is that he is looking out at the heavens and sees how immense they are. He attributes that to God: if the heavens are so immense, what about God? How much bigger is God? How much vaster is God?
He had a revelation of how huge God is. And in that revelation of how huge God is, he also saw how small and insignificant he was.
A lot of times, when you feel small and insignificant, what is the effect? You mope, right? “Oh, I am not as good as so-and-so,” blah, blah, blah. But what did David do? He worshiped, because he saw something greater than himself.
It put him in awe, and it got him to the place of saying, “Lord, I am seeing You in Your immensity. You are so great and vast. Why do You even care about man?”
Have you guys ever gone to the Air and Space Museum in D.C.? Have you gone to the section on the planets? You need to go there. It talks about how big these things are, how fast some of them are spinning, and how long a year is for them.
Why does God care about us? Look at Jupiter. Jupiter dwarfs us. Why is He even concerned about Earth? Why not Jupiter, or this galaxy? What is man?
God was showing David Himself, and David started to wonder. God said, “I want to show you what man is to Me.” And He does in the rest of the psalm:
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—
Even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
When David was asking that question, it is wonderful that God did not remain silent. God spoke to him: “I have made man to have dominion. I have made man to rule. This is why I am concerned about man.”
Man lost that rule, but it has not stopped God. The gifts and calling of God are what? Irrevocable. Does that not mean that the calling of man to rule, to have dominion, is irrevocable? It has been renewed and made real in Christ, because the first man lost it and the second Man regained it forever.
For David, seeing the greatness of the Lord and receiving God’s answer set him on a pathway for kingly character. He saw, “This is who I am supposed to be as a man.” Not, “I realize I am going to be king,” but, “As a man, this is who I am. I am supposed to have dominion.”
It set him on a way to kingly character, and to have a heart that wanted what God wanted for man. We talk about David being a man after God’s own heart and talk about the temple, but it is more than just the temple. It is the place of man also.
Man is to rule. Man is to have dominion. Man is to be the dwelling place of God. Think about that.
All kings from that point on are compared to David. If you read Kings and Chronicles, it says he did not follow David, he was not as good as David, or he followed the ways of David.
As a man, our model is Christ. Not that we are trying to be like Him, but He is our standard. He is the standard for a man after God’s own heart, having dominion over self and sin.
The third one I want to bring up is Isaiah. Isaiah was a man in the court of the king. That must mean, number one, he was educated; and number two, he had to be well off. He was living at the court, right?
So far, we have a kid, an old man, and a guy in the court who was educated. Who does vision come to? Whoever will take it.
Isaiah had a vision in Isaiah 6. He saw the Lord in the temple, high and lifted up; His train filled the temple. In seeing this, he saw his own uncleanness.
This is really interesting, because if you read the first five chapters of Isaiah, the little titles in my Bible say: “The Wickedness of Judah,” “The Degenerate City,” “The Day of the Lord,” “Judgment on Judah and Jerusalem,” and “God’s Disappointing Vineyard.”
Those are Isaiah’s messages. The reason I bring that up is that Isaiah was pointing the finger at these dudes: “You guys need to clean up.” He was saying, “This is what I see in you guys.” And then he saw the Lord.
What changes? I have been pointing the finger at you, and I have three fingers pointing back at me. Boy. He was undone because he saw himself. He saw, “I am no better than these guys I am preaching to.”
“Here I am complaining about them. I am letting them have it with both barrels. You know something? I am no better than them. I quit. I am not going to preach anymore.” That is the effect of this vision on Isaiah.
But if you remember, in that vision the Lord takes a live coal, puts it on his lip, and cleanses him. Up to this time, Isaiah had been talking about uncleanness. Now he feels, “I cannot do it.” God touches him.
God showed Isaiah probably the clearest picture of redemption of any prophet. Not just in the touching of his lips, but when we read Isaiah—go to Isaiah 53—what do you see? Almost the clearest picture of redemption ever given: the suffering Servant, the One who died on our behalf.
This became Isaiah’s ministry. Yes, for a few years he was the judging guy. But after Hezekiah showed the Babylonians everything, Isaiah said, “This is bad for you guys. You are going to go into captivity.”
You would think the rest of his messages would be, “Woe is you, woe is you.” But if you read Isaiah 40–66, you have some of the most beautiful Messianic, redemptive prophecies anywhere in the Bible.
They are not just redemptive; they are the Lord saying, “You are Mine. You are Mine.” Isaiah becomes a prophet of hope. Judgment comes, but there is hope beyond judgment.
These are all Old Testament, or Old Covenant, examples. I want to give you a New Covenant example. It is not going to be anyone you think of, but it is somebody you know because I talk about her all the time.
I am not going to talk about Peter, Paul, John, the apostles, or anyone like that. But you know who my favorite person is, right? Besides me. Mimosa, right?
I am choosing Mimosa for a couple of reasons. Number one, she is a girl. All these other people are men, and sometimes I think we relegate things to only men seeing. No, it is not only men that see. God gives vision to anybody who will receive it.
The other reason is that we wrongly relegate vision to the highly spiritual. We think only the highly spiritual get vision. If that is so, how many of us will never get vision?
But that is not so. God gives it to anybody who will receive it. You do not have to be a mystic. You do not have to be meditating all the time. You do not have to be in some catatonic state, and then all of a sudden, “Oh, yeah, there is a vision.” It does not happen like that. God gives vision anywhere, anytime.
Mimosa got this vision, and she was not even the one who was going to go. She went to a missionary complex, not so that she could go, but so her sister could go. She was kind of just tagging along.
While they had the interview section—“Should we let this girl into this place?”—they took Mimosa aside. I am sure some of the people at the complex told biblical stories. Out of those stories, she saw God. God showed Himself to her as Father.
That vision stuck with her the rest of her life, and it shaped her life. The rest of her life, she was always talking about, “My Father. I go to my Father. I go into my closet and I talk to my Father.”
Her village’s god was Shiva. If you know anything about Hinduism, Shiva is the destroyer. Is it not amazing that God gave her the vision of Father when all she knew of god was the destroyer? “You better make him happy or else,” you know, that kind of thing.
Then she sees Him as Father. When she gets home to her village, they are having the festival for Shiva, and everybody has to take the ashes. She will not. It is not that she will not; she cannot, because she has seen who God really is.
She says, “This is not God.” Because she will not take the ashes, her father savagely beats her. But she still will not take the ashes.
You go through her life and see this whole story. I have told you about reading this book before, and you should read it. You should read it once every year, because it is a good story of how God is so kind, like we were talking about this morning.
This was in the 1930s, and she was illiterate. She was a woman in India. Where does that put her on the totem pole? Not very high.
But this revelation put her through the most severe tests that you would see any martyr go through, and yet she came through it. She came through the whole way because God is faithful and God is kind. He will bring you through those things that He is showing you.
These are examples of individuals who received vision. But it does not stop there. There is also collective vision.
I do not want us to get into a place of thinking, “There is a second phase of vision. We have had the individual; now we are coming to the corporate.” Like there are little stages you go through. It does not happen like that.
Vision is vision. It is given to individuals, to groups, and to a time. The only vision God really gives us is always of His Son. There is nothing else He is going to show us other than more and more of His Son.
If we look at vision that way, vision is like a long corridor. You keep going, and you keep going, and you keep going, finding more and more as you go along. You can stop anywhere you want, but if you continue going, you will find more and more and more.
God’s purpose involves more than just an individual walk. I think we all know this. In Judges, it says the people did not have a king, and they did what was right in their own eyes.
For a long time I thought the biggest thing about the Lord was that you have your personal walk. You do have a personal walk with the Lord, and that is true. But that is not the end-all. That is the beginning. That is the beginning of everything.
God never meant man to be alone. Think about this: why did He create Eve? He had Adam. Adam could have ruled the world with eternal life forever. Was that not enough?
What did He promise Abraham? “You are going to be a father of two kids”? No! Many nations. Is that not what He said to Abraham? “You are going to be a father of many nations.”
And 1 Peter 2:9 tells us that we are a holy nation. A nation is a bunch of individuals who come under one headship, one government. That is part of God’s purpose for us.
It is not that we all say, “Jesus is King in my life.” No, it is Jesus is King in our lives. That is a big thing.
A vision like that comes when people are looking. In other words, they have come as individuals, and they are saying, “There has got to be something more.”
From my own personal experience, there were six of us who met at a church in Covina Park—the hippie church. Everybody there was hippies, but they were doctrinally sound because they were all Free Methodists.
This was a specific college. They came from Azusa Pacific College, and Azusa Pacific is a Free Methodist college. There were six of us: myself; my two brothers, my older brother Mike and my younger brother Bill; Jerry Lineberger; my best friend Eddie Lee; and Lou Police, who was Floyd’s son.
We were all meeting there, and all of us had seen Jesus as our Savior. All of us had seen Jesus first. All of us were walking with Him. We were having our devotions, we were doing everything.
But we were going to church and saying, “Is this it? Is this all? Is this what Christianity is? We just come here, we go to church, and we go home?”
I am not saying you cannot do that here. You understand. I am not knocking places that are not like us, because even here you can do that.
Anyway, we came to this place of saying—not that we actually got together and said it, but it was like we came and said, “What do we do now? Now what do we do?”
So we got together, and we went to the Person who could tell us. We went to Jesus. We said, “Lord, as a group, what do we do?”
Out of that came this Bible study. But the thing is, we became like those men who came to David at the cave of Adullam. Remember, there were people who were disgruntled with things, and they did not know where else to go, and they met with David.
Why did they go to David? Because they had already seen something in David. David had already slain Goliath. He had already gone out for Saul and battled the Philistines. He was being chased by Saul but was not going after Saul.
What they saw in David was a person they could trust, a person who would have their interests. They made him their captain. That is what it says in 1 Samuel 22: all these guys came, and they made him their captain.
It was not, “He is my captain. Is he your captain? Oh, good.” No, all of a sudden it was, “He is ours.” As a collective group, He is ours. We want to serve You. As a group, we want to serve You. How do we serve You? We want to follow You.
That Bible study did not become something that we went to and then left. It became something that we went to, and all of a sudden we started carrying it with the Lord. We were becoming responsible for things.
Whoever told us that? No one did, but the Lord was showing it. “You need to do this. You need to step up here. Does so-and-so have a ride? Go give him a ride. So-and-so is having a bad time. Why do not a couple of you guys go and visit that person?”
All these things were coming out of that. We even started praying for that meeting before the meeting. We had gathered together for that because we knew we wanted to serve Him, and this was part of serving Him.
Out of those four hundred guys who met with David came the mighty men. Not all of them became mighty men, but there was the potential for everybody who met around him to become mighty men. David became their king. It is a wonderful thing.
That is collective vision. We all saw Jesus, and Jesus was our King. I am not saying this is the picture we saw, but as things were going on, this is what we were saying: Christ is our King. He is not just my King; He is our King. We are moving in unison with Him.
It was so different and so glorious. We were built together.
In Isaiah 9:6, we have another prophecy. We used to sing this at Christmas:
For unto us a Child is born,
Unto us a Son is given;
And the government will be upon His shoulder.
And His name will be called
Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of His government and peace
There will be no end,
Upon the throne of David and over His kingdom,
To order it and establish it with judgment and justice
From that time forward, even forever.
The zeal