Martin Luther King, standing in Washington, D.C., once heralded his cry to the millions, "I have a dream!" On the basis of such inspired vision, black and white Americans were able in time to surrender the heat in their smoldering prejudice.
Karl Marx wrote in his famous Thesis XI, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." (cited in Klaus Bockmuehl, The Challenge of Marxism [Downers Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 1980], p. 27.)
To see the better way and offer our perception is a way to heal -- all vitality in churches or corporations roots itself in such perception.
Vision! Vision! Vision! It drives and inflames us and pushes us forward!
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Visioning is the new centerpiece word of corporate existence. Companies crave it. Leaders lust after it. Churches which have it thrive, those which don't fall quickly away in membership.
Proverbs 29:18 calls out a great truth, "Where there is no vision, a people perish."
Perishing is the most common result of visionless living. Always life drifts when vision sleeps at the wheel. Israel wandered for forty years in the desert, walking refugees without a homeland. These meandering sojourners had rejected the wondrous vision, and without their vision they were as blind men before the purposes of God.
In
Acts 9:15, Saul, the Christian killer, receives a vision that changes his life:
But the Lord said to Ananias, "Go! This man [Saul] is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name" (
Acts 9:15-16, NIV).
Saul, the night-stalker, now sees and the hunter becomes the hunted. Saul became inflamed with a new vision of himself in the plan of God.
Some years ago I was on a very prominent religious campus whose world-famous chancellor had just had a vision of a 900-foot Jesus. The whole nation was talking about the Jesus Gargantua; some were critical of its size. In some ways the vision seemed a little excessive, even to me, but when I left the campus, it seemed to me that I have seen Christianity suffer more because of people who live without any vision of Jesus. Having a 900-foot vision must be better than visionless living.
The admen sell fastest when they deal in vision and image. Posters that say, "Be all you can be in the Army!" draw a high-schooler toward his macho, martial destiny. Most all of us are sold products on the basis of a better self image.
Some years ago I saw a men's cologne commercial on television. I've never forgotten the impact it had on me. The commercial pictured a half-clad man, going through the jungle. He followed a black panther he held on a short leash. Ever and again, the savage man would stop and growl. Then the camera would switch to the panther and it, too, would snarl and growl. Obviously this was a very macho cologne.