The Power of the Vision Within

Jesus understood that when He spoke during His earthly ministry, He was representing the heart and will of God and the image people would form of God. This is one reason He taught in parables or word picture stories. In fact, Mark 4:34 says, “But without a parable He did not speak to them…” The Weymouth New Testament says of this verse, “But except in figurative language He spoke nothing to them….”  

Another reason Jesus taught in parables or stories was to paint word pictures that develop images so people could see beyond where they were.

He understood an important principle of learning: begin with the known to connect with the unknown. In the process of this, we don’t see with our eyes alone—but with our minds, experiences, and life perspectives.The truth is, we cannot move beyond the actual image we have in ourselves. We can only go as far as we can see ourselves going in life.

We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

Twelve Spies

Remember the twelve spies in Numbers 13-14 who were sent to survey the land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants? Moses was in leadership after Israel had spent centuries as slaves in Egypt, and the Israelites had been set free from their captivity. They were poised to enter a new era of promise and prosperity.All twelve of these spies saw the prosperity of the land promised to them, but ten came back doubting they could defeat the people and take the land as their own. In fact, the ten inflated the description of the people in the land to be giants, and they reduced the description of themselves to be grasshoppers. Was that the case in reality? No! Nevertheless, that’s how the spies saw themselves and their newly formed nation compared to the people of the land they were to conquer.The ten didn’t see things the way they really were or they would have agreed with Joshua and Caleb, the other two sent on this mission with them. Joshua and Caleb saw things the way God saw things, the way it had been spoken to them. Because they held fast to God’s promise and God’s will,  Joshua and Caleb saw themselves properly, and as a result, they also saw their circumstances accurately.As a nation, Israel collectively couldn’t go beyond what they could see. What’s the lesson to be learned?

If you can’t see beyond your current circumstances, you can’t go beyond where want to go or are even destined to go.

Because of the limited ability to see how God saw things, these ten leaders limited what was available and possible for an entire nation. Unfortunately, it took decades to change the image of what Israel saw, and subsequently experienced, as a nation.

Christopher Columbus and Barracudas

New things—new ideas and new opportunities—come to people’s lives all the time. Some see things for what they are and what they can be to them, and some don’t. When Christopher Columbus and others of his century presented the belief that the world was round, many scoffed at the notion. There were those of that time who genuinely believed the earth was flat. They believed if people sailed far enough across the sea, they would get to the edge of the earth and drop off into a great and unending chasm. Until it was proven false, this belief limited travel and exploration.

Even today, far too many people are “flat world” motivated. They see the limitations in life and style their way of living to accommodate the limitations.

When you see the world as round, you lift untrue limitations and can travel much further than you ever dreamed was possible. I’m not talking about unrealistic pursuits. I’m talking about the barriers people construct from within or voices from without that tell us we can never go beyond the life we currently live.A barracuda is bred by nature to kill its prey for food. If you put a clear, see-through barrier in a fish tank between a barracuda and its food, the barracuda will try to break through the invisible barrier to eat. But after hitting the barrier between itself and its opportunities multiple times for provision, the barracuda will stop trying to go beyond the barrier. You can even remove the “see-through” partition, and the barracuda won’t try to cross that invisible barrier because of its previous conditioning.If we don’t press through to acquire new and better knowledge, our past experiences, pre-formed perspectives, and pre-conditioned beliefs can restrict us and separate us from our answers, rights, and blessings despite them being within our reach.

How we see things will determine how far we’re able to go in life and what barriers we’ll break through.

Our perspectives and beliefs affect our capacity to see, hear, learn, receive, and grow. People reject new information for any number of reasons. Some limit themselves because they don’t like the channel through which new knowledge is broadcast. Sometimes it’s because of the way a thing is being presented. Some like things that are more entertaining. Some like things that are more scholarly. When you boil it all down, none of those things should matter as much as getting what’s needed.To reject new knowledge on the basis of not liking or relating to the person delivering it would be comparable  to a man dying of thirst but refusing water that could save his life because the cup is the wrong size, wrong shape or wrong color in his thinking and to his liking. If you were thirsting to death for water and came across a water well with a certain color vessel, you would be foolish to reject the life-giving, refreshing waters of the well because of the size, shape, or color of the vessel being lowered into the well to gather those waters.

‘Lift Up Your Eyes’

Jesus knows that most people are hard pressed to change their beliefs and mature if they don’t have a picture to cling to in building a new image within. Jesus’ parable-driven messages built images in the hearts and minds of His listeners. They were designed to activate a law of dominant images, expand the boundaries, and lift the limitations in the lives of the hearers. This law of dominant images says that, “You and the events of your life will always go in the direction of the most dominant thoughts and images you allow to reside in your heart and mind.”The twelve spies spoken of earlier demonstrated this law. The ten had contradictory thoughts and images that were greater in their hearts and minds than what God had stated as His will. God had promised the land to Israel by covenant. He told Moses the land was theirs to take. But the ten, who were national leaders, had images within that opposed both what their eyes saw for the taking and what their ears had heard about God’s promise. These ten leaders fed the image of a nation and millions were limited and restricted from experiencing the very thing God had promised and authorized them to have.

Joshua and Caleb were different. They both had thoughts and images within that were rooted in God’s will, which would have given them authority to do exploits mighty enough to take the land.

They both decreed that the people that would oppose them were like bread for them to eat and that the enemy’s defenses were incapable of stopping Israel from taking what was rightfully promised them as part of God’s covenant with Abraham and God’s will for Abraham’s descendants.God taught Abraham the power of having vision to see beyond where he was. God trained Abraham to build an image within of what He said. Abraham wasn’t flawlessly perfect along the way. There were times where he made more of what he could see naturally than what he could see with the eyes of his heart, but Abraham did come to have what God promised through keeping right images alive inside. The training began when he and his nephew, Lot, had a problem over land and space for their herds to graze and grow. Abram, as he was known at this point, chose the high road to refuse strife from developing between himself and Lot and gave Lot the best of the land that was available.After Lot left, God began speaking to Abram. And the Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him: “Lift your eyes now and look from the place where you are—northward, southward, eastward, and westward; For all the land which you see I give to you and your descendants forever. And I will make your descendants as the dust (sand) of the earth; so that if a man could number the dust (sand) of the earth, then your descendants also could be numbered (Genesis 13:14-16 NKJV).Look carefully at what God said to Abram: “Lift up your eyes, because everything you can see from where you are today is yours to have and use.” God was saying to Abram that the land was within the scope of his God-given authority to have, possess, and experience. God specifically said that all the land was going to be given to Abram and his seed or descendants.What he could experience wasn’t limited to what he might have taken in with his physical eyes, but ultimately included every place the sole of his foot would tread, every place that God directed him, and every place that his heart and mind could comprehend.

God was putting before Abram’s eyes the sights necessary to create the reality of his future. We must do the same thing!

This has to be done physically, and just as significantly, it has to be done with the images that we see within. That’s where the parables come into play.Notice in Genesis 13:16, God said, “And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth…” This was a parable like use of an image with which Abram could easily relate. In that part of the world, the dust or sand, was plentiful. Abram would have seen grains of sand just about every day of his life. Every time he saw sand, he would have a visual reminder of the promise of God. Every time he saw sand, the image was reinforced and grew stronger.Now, what is God speaking to you? What picture is He painting in you? “Lift up your eyes” to see within the vision He’s giving you.