Yielding To God's Vision-Part 4

Too many times we miss God’s best because things do not always match our concept of vision in ministry.

Verse 15 “And when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us.”

Many pastors do this with churches they pastor, they think they are all going to pastor mega-churches running in the thousands and they will be senior pastors of huge staffs and so, they never are content where they are, or find any joy in the reality of the vision they are in.

 Christians do this too with spouses, children, and ministry in general. It’s tragic when we can’t see in our spouse, our children, or in others God’s plan bloom because it doesn’t measure up to what we thought we were going to get or should get from God. Too much joy is wasted on false perceptions of visions or at least our ideas or visions in our churches, homes, and lives.

It may have seemed like a lousy start to fulfilling the vision God had given Paul, but he takes great delight in preaching the Gospel anyway to these women and finds a harvest and a start, albeit a bit different than he expected from the manly vision he had seen in his dream. Paul is neither disappointed nor bitter. We could learn something here about unfulfilled expectations or ideas.

We need to trust God more in the way reality unfolds in our lives. If we are proclaiming trust in God, then we ought to show it in our attitude even when things don’t pan out exactly like we expected.

There was a little girl who was frightened by thunder storms. As she was about to go to bed a real storm kicked up, lightening, thunder, and wind. She remembered how such storms sometimes knocked out the lights and how she hated the dark. She was heard praying, “Dear God, I hope it doesn’t thunder and I hope the lights don’t go out” … then after a brief pause she continued, “But I thought it over, and you can do what you want, in Jesus’ name, Amen!” –

Paul wasn’t about to throw the vision away because it looked a little different from what he anticipated. He had the privilege of baptizing this woman Lydia and her entire household. It was a small start but it produced one of the most stable churches. In fact the Philippian church became Paul’s home church and his epistle entitled “Philippians” in our Bible has as this central theme-Joy.

It is clear that Paul did not get hung up on the minute details of the “Man from Macedonia” vision. He holds on to the meaning of the vision without getting lost in the details and yields himself to the plan that God had to set revival in motion.