Pastor Rick Warren sermon Seeing Your Future With Faith Not Fear: Pastor Rick Warren begins with a mini-series on clarifying God’s vision for your future you can’t fulfill your life’s vision of course until first you see it and then you understand it proverbs 29 verse 18 says this, where there is no vision the people perish, now what does that mean?
There are at least three results of not having a vision for your life, an unclear vision leads to three things, it leads to indecision, it leads to division and it leads to a collision.
First, an unclear vision leads to indecision, double-minded people can’t make up their minds, they waver back and forth in everything they do without a vision for your future you’re just drifting, you wander you ramble through life, you’re not really living, you’re just existing.
God had promised these freed slaves a homeland of their own and he calls it the promised land, I’m going to set you free from Egypt and I’m going to take you to the promised land, it represented their future it, represented their inheritance that God wanted them to enjoy.
The promise land was to become the land of Israel, now after crossing the desert, they’ve gone through the red sea, all these freed slaves came to the edge of the Promised Land and Moses chooses 12 representatives one from each of the 12 tribes, to go ahead of everybody else and spy out the land, he says I want you to go in check it all out and return with the vision report, this was a fact-finding mission, in other words, it’s a vision trip and Moses says, go into the new land, that represents our future and find out everything you can find out.
Why did Moses do this? Here’s the reason, before people can succeed with a goal, they have to see the goal, if you’re a leader, you need to understand that we can only accomplish the impossible if we first see it in our minds, everything that’s ever been accomplished in history started as an idea.
The spies cut down a cluster of grapes so large that it took two of them to carry it back on a pole, can you imagine that a cluster of grapes, this promised land was so fruitful and so incredibly prosperous, they’re bringing back giant fruit you
Numbers 13:25-26 says this, after seeing this is a vision trip, after seeing the land for 40 days, the men returned to Moses and Aaron and the people of Israel, they reported to the whole community what they had seen and they showed them the fruit they had taken from the land, now all this sounds really promising but there’s a problem and it has to do with their vision, two of the spies Joshua and Caleb looked at their future with eyes of faith but the other 10 of the 12 spies looked at their future with the eyes of fear, we arrived in the land you sent us to and it is indeed a magnificent country the land flowing with milk and honey here’s some of the fruit as proof, but because (now that you get the but you’re going to see with eyes of fear), here’s the conflicting information but the people living there are powerful and their cities and towns are fortified and they’re very large and we also saw the Anakin the descendants of Anak who lived in the desert, now the Anakin were of the tribe of sky walker and the force was strong with them.
If you believe that I’ve got some land to sell you too, when you over emphasize the negative, it creates a lot more stress in your life. When you’re looking at everything with fear, you look, you worry that the glass is always half empty instead of being happy and grateful the glass is still half full, look at what you have left, not what you’ve lost, now of course life is filled with negatives, everything is broken by sin on this earth, not all news is positive but you do have a choice in choosing what you’re going to focus on, what you’re going to emphasize on and what is going to directly affect your happiness.