God’s Promises

God-sized visions are not about coming up with big plans.  God-sized visions happen when we start with God.  God is much bigger than we can possibly imagine and God’s picture is always perfect.  (God doesn’t have any problem seeing how things are and how things are going to be.)  Imagining God’s vision, then, begins with God.

One of the easiest ways to see God’s vision is to pay attention to what God has said.  That’s why we read God’s Word: the Bible.  In Scripture, we find stories of people interacting with God over the course of thousands of years.  People in the past were given the same opportunities to see God’s vision that we are given still today.  Here’s how it works.

God tells people what He is going to do.  He tells them why He is going to do it.  Often times, He even tells them why.  Then God does what He said he was going to do and reminds them why He did it that way.  This may seem like an oversimplification, but it holds true throughout the Old and New Testaments.  When God tells people what He is about to do, He is casting His vision for the future.  He is giving them a promise.  Here are some examples:

So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey--the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. (Exodus 3:8 NIV)

God is giving Moses two promises here:

1. I will set my people free.
2. I will give them the land I promised to their ancestors.

When God makes these promises, He is casting a vision as to what will happen in the future.  In this case, God also makes another promise.  This promise is sandwiched between promises one and two above.  It goes like this:

And God said, "I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain." (Exodus 3:12 NIV)

When God sets His people free, they will make it as far as Mt. Sinai, where they will worship God for performing this impossible act.  Once they make it to the mountain, this will fulfill two promises God made to Israel.  These two promise-fulfillments, then, are intended to give them the courage to go to step three – entering the promised land.  God gave them reason to believe His promises, because God was true to His Word.

How about you?  Do you see God being faithfully true to His word?  Do you know His word well enough to compare a vision to His Word?  Do you trust God’s promises?