The vision that God gives us for our ministry to others is so vital to the life of that ministry. Without God’s dream for our lives placed in our hearts, we will always burn out and lose focus. But WITH God’s calling, we cannot STOP being on fire for it!
However…just because God gives you a vision doesn’t mean He gave everyone that same vision. And sometimes it is really easy to try and force your vision onto others, because you think it’s right and it’s what God wants. But you can only know what God has called YOU to do, not anyone else. And forcing your vision onto others results in them burning out and losing focus, because you are not God, and He is the only one that can inspire people beyond their imaginations. If you want someone else to be sold out on your vision, you’ve got to rely on the wind of the Holy Spirit to spread the fire in your heart to others – it cannot ever be forced on someone. As Brad Cooper said, “Vision is caught, not taught.”
With that being said, every single person that is involved in one particular ministry MUST be sold on the vision. When two people are working together but have different goals, it will cause a split. So many different ministries fall apart because not everyone is sold on one vision, and end up trying to steer it in multiple directions. “The vision must be identical or it’s ‘double vision,’ which is the same as ‘division,’” Perry Noble said. When we have double vision, we can’t see straight, depth perception is gone, focus is impossible, and nothing is accomplished. When we have division, things simply keep getting smaller and smaller, and there are remainders (that in ministry end up being people who need God to speak through you) that we push off to the side. If we want our ministry to succeed, we have to all be clearly seeing the same goals, be in agreement on how God wants us to get there, and be absolutely zeroed in on our purpose…and when that happens, God makes things bigger and BIGGER and BIGGER and instead of leaving people behind in our hurry to accomplish our own individual passions (see 2 Samuel 4:4 for a Scriptural example) God continually brings people to us so that they can see and be a part of the unifying power of Jesus.
