Michelangelo supposedly said, “I saw an angel in the marble, and I carved until I set it free.”1 The difference between chipping rock and freeing angels is the ability to envision imprisoned potential in the stones of life. A monotonous, boring life can be transformed into an exhilarating journey by learning how to capture a vision for your own destiny. Vision gives you the ability to connect the daily grind of life to your eternal purpose. Vision makes life meaningful and gives you the motivation you need to press through the tough seasons.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHIPPING ROCK AND FREEING ANGELS IS THE ABILITY TO ENVISION IMPRISONED POTENTIAL IN THE STONES OF LIFE.
Maybe you are convinced that life will begin when you graduate, get healed, pay off all your bills, get married, or reach any other milestone. But when you make God’s promises wait for you to be ready, you undermine your ability to perceive His handiwork in the world around you and miss your divine opportunity to prosper. The truth is that many good people sit on the porch of faithlessness and watch the world go by. Instead, you must anticipate that something meaningful, profound, powerful, and wonderful could happen to you at any moment, because anticipation is the fruit of faith.
Faith inspires vision, that part of us that sees the angel in the marble when everyone else just sees a rock. In fact, everything in the Kingdom is obtained by faith. Faith supersedes your circumstances, overcomes your obstacles, and overrides the facts. Faith sees the invisible, believes the impossible, and empowers the incredible!
The author of Hebrews explained faith in this way: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. 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” (11:1–3).
Faith opens your eyes so you can understand the incomprehensible, and it changes your behavior because you see things that are not yet visible and act on them long before others can. The writer of Hebrews illustrated this beautifully when he wrote this about Moses: “By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured, as seeing Him who is unseen” (11:27). Moses saw God, although He is invisible, and therefore Moses left Egypt. In other words, Moses had faith. Faith opened his eyes so he could envision the invisible, which ultimately gave him the courage to defy the most powerful ruler in the world.
Vision
So what exactly is vision, and how do we pursue it? True vision is rooted in His vision, which is inspired by faith, not imagined through selfish ambition. Thus, true vision is foresight with insight that comes from His sight!
Many years ago I became sick of being overweight, so I decided to join a gym to get in shape. I was determined to lose five pounds the first day, so I spent three hours exercising on every machine in the gymnasium. When I woke up the next morning, I was so sore that I had to roll out of bed and crawl to the bathroom. My body hurt in places I didn’t even know existed! That was the last time I ever worked out with weights.
I learned something that week: it is very difficult to get skinny by hating being fat, because reacting to a negative rarely creates a positive! Rather, it is vision (in this case, picturing yourself with a healthy body) that causes a person to restrain his or her eating habits, reorder his or her schedule, and push past the discomfort of muscle pain to obtain the goal. Vision gives pain a purpose.
What Do You Think You Are Doing?
In the first Karate Kid movie, Mr. Miyagi used practical work (waxing his car, painting his house, and fixing his fence) to teach his protégé, Daniel, karate. But Daniel thought Mr. Miyagi was taking advantage of him by having him do chores around his house. In a rage, Daniel yelled at his mentor, protesting that Mr. Miyagi was using him and not teaching him how to fight.
Mr. Miyagi responded, “Daniel-san, show me how you wax car!” So Daniel demonstrated as Mr. Miyagi corrected his form, repeating, “wax on . . . wax off.”
Miyagi then said, “Show me paint the fence.” Again, Daniel showed Mr. Miyagi how he painted the fence, while Miyagi adjusted his form, repeating, “up, down, up, down.”
Finally, Mr. Miyagi said, “Daniel-san, show me, hammer nail!” And Daniel-san illustrated hammering, while Miyagi again corrected his form. Soon it became clear that Mr. Miyagi had disguised his karate lessons as house projects. Daniel was actually learning how to fight as he waxed the car, painted the fence, and hammered nails. In other words, what you think you are doing is more important than what you are practically accomplishing. Greatness is often hidden in the mundane.
Picture two young men working at a fast-food restaurant grilling burgers. One guy has no vision for his life; he is just watching the clock and flipping burgers. He hates this dead-end job and mourns every minute that he’s making kids’ meals. The other guy wants to be a great businessman, so he decides to grill burgers the way Solomon’s servants waited on tables: with excellence. He challenges himself to grill the best burgers anyone has ever eaten in a fast-food restaurant. He realizes that greatness is often demonstrated when doing ordinary things in an extraordinary way.
Vision is the invisible manager that guides, encourages, and inspires everyday people to change the world. From a distance it may appear that both guys are just flipping burgers, but nothing could be further from the truth. One guy is just working in fast-food, but the other guy has started his business career. Both of them seem to be standing behind the same grill, but the second guy is already sitting behind a huge desk in a plush office, running his multimillion-dollar company.
To be truly successful in life you must envision your future with God; otherwise you don’t really know where you are going. When you have no destination, no road can get you there, and running faster won’t help you to arrive sooner. Your perception of what you are doing—your vision of the future you are creating—is more significant than what you are actually achieving practically in the moment.
Inspiring Vision
Vision is the pathway to greatness in all walks of life, in every vocation, and in every exploit. You must see it to be it!
“Okay, Kris, I get it, but how do I develop a vision?”
You can’t become what you haven’t seen or heard. One of the easiest ways to capture a vision is to expose yourself to someone else’s dream. For example, let’s say you are interested in becoming a ballet dancer. Nothing will awaken your soul like watching someone else who is an extraordinary dancer. Or maybe you want to build a house, but you don’t know what kind of home inspires you. Go look at some beautiful houses.
If you are called to be a great leader, read biographies of famous leaders, interview leaders you admire, and watch personal documentaries. It won’t be long before you begin to envision yourself similarly saving the day or accomplishing a great feat. In fact, I encourage you to practice greatness by imagining yourself in the place of someone you are studying.
I have been doing this for twenty years. In fact, I remember reading a biography about George Washington. As the author began to describe the conditions of Washington’s troops during the War of Independence, I closed my eyes and imagined myself in his shoes. I began to hear his soldiers moaning as they staggered through the snow-covered woods, their bloody, bare feet staining the path behind them. I felt the conflict within Washington’s soul as he was beset with the impossible task of defeating an immense, well-trained British Army with a bunch of ill-equipped, poorly-trained militia farmers. I paced the dirt floor of his ragged tent with him at night as we pondered the suffering of his courageous men who were literally starving to death in the camp.
I joined him as his troops hurried quietly across the Delaware at night to escape the advancing British onslaught. I could feel his heart pounding as he compelled the last of his men into the boats, narrowly eluding capture.
As I journeyed through the pages of the book, I asked myself hard questions: Do I have what it takes to be a courageous leader? Would I have surrendered in light of the immense disparity? How would I have motivated an army of weak, sick men who were outnumbered, fearful, and unfunded? Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was living through George Washington’s experiences and envisioning myself as a courageous leader. I imagined being a great leader long before I truly was a good leader.
Working Your Butt Off
Once you have captured that vision, what comes next is a lot of hard work. Vision gives you motivation and energy. It is the cure for apathy and slothfulness. This is not a new idea. In 1921, editors of a local Indiana newspaper encouraged their readers, “The reason most people do not recognize an opportunity when they meet it is because it usually goes around wearing overalls and looking like Hard Work.”2
The truth is, you were “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand” (Ephesians 2:10). You are also commanded by Jesus to work in such a way that people “see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). For some reason, though, work has become a nasty four-letter word, taught as anti-grace and viewed as the curse of the law. In actuality, hard work is the manifestation of great grace in the life of a believer.
HARD WORK IS THE MANIFESTATION OF GREAT GRACE IN THE LIFE OF A BELIEVER.
Grace is not only undeserved favor; grace is also the operational power of God. Grace gives you the ability to do what you couldn’t do one second before you received grace. Simply put, grace gives you the skill, the motivation, and the unction to work hard.
Many leaders teach that hard work is for those who don’t know God, and striving is unspiritual. Actually, the Greek word for striving, agonizomai, is used five times in a positive sense in the New Testament alone. Jesus commanded all of us to “strive to enter through the narrow door” (Luke 13:24).
There is a difference between laboring and striving for the Kingdom and laboring and striving with no discernible purpose. Because we live in a performance-driven rat race on an are-we-there-yet? hamster wheel, we often expend huge amounts of time and effort with relatively little to show for it. We can get so busy racing the other rodents that we seldom pause long enough to truly envision our divine destinies.
Vision is the compass that helps us navigate the seasons of life and allows us to dream with God, not just about God. When we dream with God, we cocreate masterpieces of His imagination and ultimately fulfill our divine destinies. In other words, vision gives meaning to our lives and the hard work that successfully extends the borders of the Kingdom. Vision turns hard work into a labor of love, a work of passion.
Courageous Visionaries
Vision is also a catalyst to courage! Of course, being courageous and being fearless are not the same thing. Most people who are fearless live risk-free lives. They are coddled souls who value security over significance and comfort over conquering. People who are courageous, on the other hand, refuse to let their fears dictate their destiny. You might say that “courage is fear that has said its prayers.”3 Courageous people peer into the future and live with a passion to leave a legacy. They confront their fears, take captive their thoughts, and conquer the obstacles that obstruct their divine assignments—those giants inevitably present in every Promised Land.
Andrew Wommack put it this way: “If you never bump into the devil, it’s because you are going in the same direction.”4 Often, just about the time you find your divine connection and step into your heavenly purpose, all hell breaks loose. Your inclination might be to retreat to find peace instead of pressing in to obtain your inheritance. It’s important for you to understand that the “world forces of this darkness” (Ephesian 6:12) only trouble themselves over world-changers and His-story makers. There is no victory without a battle, no conqueror without someone conquered, and no armor necessary if there is no enemy.
THERE IS NO VICTORY WITHOUT A BATTLE, NO CONQUEROR WITHOUT SOMEONE CONQUERED, AND NO ARMOR NECESSARY IF THERE IS NO ENEMY.
It is the process of envisioning your destiny, conquering your fears, and defeating your giants that forges the character you need to live a successful life. Unfortunately, many people reduce their lives to make peace with their fears, thus they never reach their full potential in God. But if you learn how to be courageous in the face of trepidation, you will rise to the heights of your calling and be fully actualized as sons and daughters of God Himself.