Transcription
We go. Here are the ten components of writing a vision, and I give you a chance to ask some questions in the last five minutes.
Okay, number one: A vision should be clear and simple. When you're writing a vision down, please do not be afraid if you're writing many pages. And let me just explain this to you, the process I sometimes take my classes through in training to write vision, especially when I'm dealing with corporate companies. I tell them, I said, "Look, first you gotta do is go find a quiet place. Get away from everybody. Take no music with you. Get away from television. Get away from all distractions. Go on the beach or go in the bush." Because in order for you to to hear your insides, you got to get rid of distractions on the outsides.
If you study the Bible carefully, the characters in scripture, most of them received their vision for their lives when they were out in the hills somewhere. Moses used to live in Egypt, remember? That was big civilization, big city. Time for 40 years, God didn't show him anything. But now he's stuck in the back of the desert as a fugitive with sheep who can't talk to him, no trees, barren land. Because I think I get him now. David stuck out there in the hills with them sheep, little hop, nothing to do all day. While the sheep are eating, just kind of sitting down there, worshiping God, gets a vision. Joseph out there in the back of the hills, no big city lights, no shopping centers, no malls out there by himself. God shows him his dream. The reason why you can't see is because you're looking too much. Your heart cannot see because your eyes have too many distractions.
If you're gonna write your vision, you gotta first capture it. And you capture it by getting positioned in a certain way where you can hear what God has been saying all these years. Let me just stress here that your vision is not outside of you. God hid your future where you can't miss it. You've been told by religion, "Go and find God's will." And so for the past 30 years, you've been going from this prophet to that prophet, to this meeting to that meeting, this conference, that conference, this crusader, this bishop, that bishop. You've been trying to find something. You even went to, I want to say, astrology. Calling me now. I mean, you meant all kind of stuff to try and find why he was born. And God is saying, "This is stupid."
There's a book out there. Hold on. Three books out there. I want to recommend you buy them. Three books on potential. Please buy all three of them and read them in succession. The first one is "Understanding Your Potential." Read that one first. "Understanding Your Potential." And read number two, "Releasing Your Potential." Number three, "Maximizing Your Potential." Why? I, I spent 30 years studying this thing and I discovered life is very simple. Simple. Life is simple. God hid everything that a thing is supposed to become in itself. So your future is not ahead of you, it's trapped on the inside. A forest is not ahead of the seed, it's in the seed. Your future is in you. Been there all along. But there's too much noise.
So as you get home, remote on in the car, boom. God is saying, "Man, this is a lot of noise. For the last 50 years, I can't even get to this person." How did God talk to Abraham? God says, "Leave your home. Let's talk in the mountain." See, the reason why you can't discover even what you were born to do is because you don't even make time to discover it. Sometimes that's why God would allow you to get sick and drop in hospital for a couple of weeks on your bed, and then you finally hear God's voice for your life. Because you, you don't take no time. By the way, please get that book on prayer. It's very important. Because did I lose that? In the name of Jesus. Because it is important for you to understand that God doesn't play cat and mouse games with us. He wants you to know what you were born to do. So you got to write it down. You have to write it down. It might be the plug now. This book on prayer. Oh, you got one here. The book on prayer. Write this down, please. Write this down. It's gonna be very shocking for some of you, but please write it down. Meditation. Meditation. Write it down. Meditation is the most important aspect of prayer.
What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? If you never meditate, never. You talk too much in prayer. You never hear from God while you're talking. And 99% of your prayer is you talking. And when you finish talking, fast, you're concerned the exercise is over. So you leave. Please buy this book. Let me tell you, your dream is never revealed to you while you're talking. And we think prayer is talking. A God of mercy on us. I want you to go back home changed. Are you? I said, are you? When you go to prayer again, please pray 10 minutes and sit for 60 and just listen. You'll be amazed how loud He speaks. Finally, He gets to talk. Meditation. Prayer is you talking. Meditation is you listening. Suppose you and I have a conversation. You come to see me to ask you some things. You tell me everything. And then don't wait for me to even tell you what I want to do. You just leave. That's stupid, isn't it? We do it to God all the time. And God goes and says, "Wait. Don't wait. I didn't answer you yet. Where are you going?" Wait. And you're gone. You think you already did your prayer time. See? And you keep asking God, "How come I'm not hearing from you? How come I'm not getting any direction from you?" God's saying, "Because you don't, you don't wait for the directions. You give me instructions." Is this good? Yeah. Dangerous stuff, right? You must know where you came from. Now, am I lost? God forgive you. Okay. And yeah, everything I know is already downloaded in me because it came out of me.
All right, number two: Write all of your desires on paper. All of them. Now, this is important. You might end up with 10 pages. Don't be alarmed. We're not ready for simplification yet. Write all your desires down. Think about everything you would desire to do before you die and just put it on paper. It may end up being 10 pages. Man, my own was about maybe eight or nine pages when I worked with this as a teenager. Don't panic. You're getting out your desires. The Bible says, "I will give you the desires of your heart." But he says, "What you got to trust me first." Say, "Trust in Him." Means what? You trust in what you're hearing. And then He will give you what the desires of your point at your heart. Gotcha. He's talking about the mind. In other words, all these things you've been thinking about and ignoring for the last 40, 50 years has been the voice of God.
You know, let me, let me give you something very important. The voice of God is so simple, we ignore it because it's not sophisticated enough. You ever heard quote unquote, "men of God" talk like this? Quote unquote, "Man of God, the Lord spoke to me last week and said..." and then it made you feel bad, right? I mean, you sit there going, "How come he never speaks to me?" Okay? And you begin to feel like these are very super spiritual people. So let me just destroy all the stuff you think about that. All they meant was, "I had an idea that wouldn't go away." Well, then if that's the case, then God's been speaking to you for a long time. Don't mystify this thing. Your vision is the thoughts that won't leave you. Your vision is the dream that keeps coming back for 30, 40 years. It started when you were 10. Your vision is the desire for you to do something that keeps coming back. It's your deepest desire. I'm not talking about desire for house and car. I'm talking about the desire to change a situation in your world. It's there. I know you've been feeling it. That's why I told you that your purpose in life is the thing that makes you angry. It's the thing that you keep seeing and you get mad. No one else gets mad at it. Just you. Whatever makes you angry, you were born to solve. Start writing that down. Write down what you feel is a solution to the thing that makes you angry. Because those thoughts. I remember reading this as a young teenager in the book of Psalms. It says, "The thoughts of a righteous man are always right." I couldn't believe that when I read that because I was taught by the church to not trust your thoughts. The thoughts of a righteous man are right. Righteous means what? Properly aligned with God. That's why you trust in the Lord. Get yourself aligned properly, and then He will give you whatever comes out of your heart when you're in that alignment. The desires that you have. That's why you came to this summit. There's some desires in your heart that you want to accomplish, and they're being refined here. You, you, you go back to your hotel room in the night and you begin to think, look at the window, out of the ocean. You begin to think, "My God, what am I doing in this place? I'm feeling some things that frighten me." That feeling is good. Feeling is good. Don't be afraid to dream while you're here. Most importantly, write it down.
Now, when you write all of your desires down, like I say, you may end up with a lot of information on paper. It's important for you then to simplify those nine pages of paper to concise one-sentence statements. In other words, you may have seven or eight different things that you really feel strongly about. Just write them down and simplify them in sentences, simple sentences. I remember mine when I began to crystallize mine. I had a passion to see young people changed. Just a teenager. I had this passion. So I wrote it down. And then I began to think, "How can I do this?" I can think I can do it through music because I had this natural gift of music. So I wrote down, "I would, I will write music specifically to attract young people." I began to simplify it. Then I said, "Okay, so then I will write music, form a group of the same music that will attract young people." And my vision began to get clearer and simplified. I end up with this idea: "I'm going to form a group that will produce contemporary Christian music to attract young people so I can tell them about God." I had it all on paper. And then a vision began to grow. We start having, we, I formed a group, we started writing music. Music began to attract young people. We had four, five thousand teenagers in the same island coming together to hear our music. We tell them about God. They got saved. I was 16, 17 years old when we started doing that. And then the problem started. What do you do with these young people? Because they weren't going to church. They came on the streets. So the vision grew. We had to form, we had to form these relationships with these churches to send these kids to these churches. Now, the churches didn't know to do the kids because the church, you know, were not prepared. So develop a whole new system of meeting on Saturday nights. So we formed this other little place called, you know, a Crossroads Lighthouse, where we think, "How about the kids meet?" Because they had to find somewhere to go. And we started these coffee houses. In other words, as the vision is simplified, it begins to grow. Because your vision creates more new opportunities for you to solve more problems that are that are raised by those solutions that you already given. Your vision may start very simple and it ends up being a conglomerate. I mean, today our organizations were, you know, multi-millions of dollars, but it started with seven people in in my apartment just to solve a problem.
There's a passage of scripture that is very, very simple but profound. Proverbs 19:21. My favorite verse. It says, "Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails." Proverbs 19:21. Many are the plans in a man's heart. Vision must be captured. You ever heard these these scriptures? Paul says, "Capture every thought." You ever read there and bring them down to the beginnings of Christ. In other words, don't just sit there thinking. Capture them. Bringing them to the beach of Christ means that you compare them to the word. And if it's in line with the word, He says, "Hold on to that thought." No matter how big the dream is. "Casting down imaginations and every high thought that what exhausts itself against what you know about God." All the others you capture. Why? That's Him talking to you. So you get an idea that you're going to build a boys' school to help young boys in your city, or you're going to build a girls' school for girls. You check the Bible. See if that, that God's against that. If God's against that, you better start writing down your dream fast. That's your assignment. So I got this idea of robbing banks. Got a big dream. How to rob banks, but effectively. You could compare with the Bible. "Thou shalt not steal." Okay. So then that can't be God. See, it's not difficult to figure out God's will for your life. Are you with me? Yeah. Have a desire to be a multi-millionaire so I can be rich and go play golf and go on boating all my life. You play with the word of God and no one gets just doesn't fulfill the Great Commission. So that's not a vision from God. No one gets saved with me having a billion dollars in the bank.
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"Casting down imaginations and every high thought that exalts itself against the sufficient knowledge of God." Then it says, "What? Bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of who? Christ." All right. Capture. Number two, simplify. Number three, document it. Document means you write it down. Put it in a form that you know that you can understand. And what your goal is, is to try and get your entire life's purpose in one sentence. Now, that may take a long time to do, but it is possible to do it. You want to reduce your life to one sentence. Write that down. If I can ever get you to get that point, I'll be successful in this last session. Reduce your life to one sentence. In other words, you have to somehow identify your gifts and your talents and summarize them in one sentence to the point where you know, "This is who and what I am. This is what I bring to the world. This is what I give the world. This is what I offer my generation. This is me, and this is what they need from me." That's your vision in life. You got to capture that in one sentence.
Next, you must communicate that simple sentence. Put it in a brochure. Make a plaque out of it. Put it everywhere you are. Talk about it. Talk about the people. I told you earlier this week that people exist to help you, but they got to find you first. So you got to capture that. Then make a plan based on that sentence. A plan is your strategy to get to your vision. By the way, I'll learn something about planning. God doesn't plan for you.
Next point: Revise your vision. Notice the word "re-vision" has "vision" in it. "Re-" means what? To go back. So a revision of your vision means you keep going back to check to see if you're on course. Because God may even adjust some things. He may even. Don't be afraid to give God something to adjust. And finally, evaluate your vision. Evaluate your vision means that you keep judging yourself. Am I doing what I said I was born to do, or am I getting off track?
A few suggestions. Suggestion number one: Your greatest enemy is distraction. Suggestion number two: The greatest distraction is not bad, but good things. The greatest distraction to your vision is not doing bad things, but what? Good things. Important lesson to learn. And finally, vision comes in phases. It comes in phases. It's fulfilled in phases. It's a term I use in my book. It's called "phasal." I created that word. Vision is "phasal." F-A-S-A-L. It's phaser. What I mean by that is vision, God gives it in phases, and is fulfilled in phases. What you're doing right now, you might not be doing in 10 years. This may just be a phase of the vision, a part of it. God expands it. In my book on leadership, there's a chapter I did on the purpose for leadership. Make sure I read that chapter twice. In that chapter, I talk about the fact that the greatest enemy of right is good. Write that down. The greatest enemy of right is not wrong, it's good. Satan knows you are too smart to do something wrong. So he'll basically focus on getting you to do something good. Because when you do something good, you think you're doing something right. You were born to find out what is right for you. When you find out what's right for you, then that's that's what's right for you. Everything else may be just good or wrong. So preoccupation with a good thing is no substitute for the right thing. Stay with what you're born to do. That means you should not accept every opportunity that comes along, even if they are good. Are you listening? Don't let people come into your life and change your vision to do something good with them. Statement I make often. Simple statement I live by. "Learn from others, but never become them." Learn from others, but never become them. It's important to learn from people. We don't want you to be like us, any of us, any of our team. No. We want you to learn from us. We want you to be yourself. That's the ultimate joy of life is to be yourself.
I have so much more to say to you now, but you could not take it. Are you happy you came here today? Anybody feel pregnant? Come on, man. Say yes. Yeah. My brain is pregnant, and I will have delivering of babies. I believe that the greatest thing in the world for you to discover is yourself. What you're doing now is not all you were born to do. Your greatest enemy of your progress right now is your last success. I'm afraid of success. Successful events. I'm afraid of them because success can stop you from progressing. What you were born to do, ah, is so much bigger than what you're doing right now. I don't care how great you think you are right now. Don't get stuck in that stuff. You're awesome. I say you're awesome. Some of you took a week off from work. I know that. Listen, you have a great day when you go back to work. Just remember that the job is not your permanent address. Yeah. Go back to the job with a good attitude now, okay? Tell them, "Enjoy me while you can. I know you can't pay me what I'm worth, but I'll be here for a little while. I'll exercise my gifts in your environment, and I'll use your materials to develop myself."
Any questions? Please let me quit. Yes, sir. Important to get questions here, so please listen. We'll leave together in a minute. Yes. Yes. Uh, let me, let me give you a little suggestion here. If you have a vision statement already written, and you would like for myself and others in our team to take a look at it and critique it for you, then we'll be happy to do that. If you are a member of our association, that is one of the things you have access to immediately, our input. We can go beyond that. If you join our association, we will even offer you monthly tips in our newsletters that we will be producing this next year, teaching letters, we call them, for leaders. And this will help you understand these things we're talking about in practical terms, to check you on. You also have opportunity for us to answer you personally. You send us your emails of your vision statements, we review them, and we can send you back our comments to help improve it, refine it. If you're not, uh, sure of how you want to do it, how it should be done, we'd be happy to help you. All right, I'm finished. That's fine. Okay. Oh, you wanna put them there? You can write that list down too. That's the list of instructions. Uh, that list. You wanna teach? Okay, you better write that down. That's good stuff. Uh, so that, that question is important. Yes. Do you have it with you? Do you have one with you? Okay, so when you do it, you send it to me. Make sure you, you pull an application to join the association, and we can have an ongoing dialogue. Myself and some of the others, we'll be able to help you through all of that, okay? Because we want everyone to make it to the top. That's what we want. We want everyone to make it to the top. And you are one of those people who deserve to be at the top. Really. It doesn't matter, you know, at any level. You can join the association. You have access to our resources. There are different benefits at different levels. We'll be talking about that tomorrow when we close out on our last graduation session. You'll have a lot of information about the association. So, uh, we'll deal with that. But right now, I want to focus on vision. Yes. And mission. Very purpose. Very important. Okay, I didn't get to that because this computer went off. But let me give you three things. Write this down. Purpose. This question was, what's between purpose, mission, and vision?