Do you ever have one of those moments where you realize that your vision isn’t big enough? There may be a lot of different reasons for it from difficult situations to failures in the past, but as William Carey stated we should “attempt great things for God; expect great things from God.”
To be perfectly honest, many times I allow myself to dream big, formulate new ideas (because I love both), but then when it comes to practical planning, I revert to what I feel we can achieve. Big dreams can get watered down to unrecognizable levels.The reason all this came up again was that a while back on twitter, someone posed the question, “What would your ministry do with $20,000 a month?”
Interesting question, I thought, what would we do?
Now to some ministries and churches, $20,000 would be nothing, but to a church of under a hundred with a pastor who works outside the church too, that would be huge. I thought for a while, but didn’t have an immediate way to apportion this amount of funds.
That really slapped me in the face. Where are we headed? What is God calling us to do, not just what are we able to do now? Who are we supposed to partner with?
What bothered me was that besides nebulous ideas of “missions” and “outreach” I couldn’t come up with specifics. For days this bothered me, and the feeling stuck with me. It’s been some time since that wake-up call, and I can come up with plenty now! From transitional housing to church planting to orphanages in India and Bangladesh, we could spend it and then some.
For me, this question thrown into cyberspace (whatever the asker’s intention) showed me how much I was focused on myself and my abilities instead of God and His abilities. He has a vision for our city and it’s bigger than mine. I believe we can tap into that and align ourselves with it, then we all had better look out.
I know not everyone reading this is a pastor or leader, but you are a child of God. Have you allowed the vision for your life to become so small that you can achieve it on your own? Do you dream about a grand “someday” but don’t really have any specifics of what that will look like?
I’m not advocating just imagining great scenarios for your life and thinking positively. I hope you’ll allow God to show you more of His vision because I can guarantee you it is not small.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a mechanic with a heart for missions, a housewife with a vision of feeding the homeless, a pastor with a dream to impact a city—God is great enough to complete every single detail.
ShareThis
