Looking at God's Will: "Obedience to the Heavenly Vision"

Obedience to the Heavenly Vision is a short book written by Sam Doherty, the former CEF co-director of Ireland and regional director of Europe along with his wife Sadie. I read it as a part of my support-raising training through CEF, but even if it hadn't been assigned, hopefully I would have picked it up at some point and read it through. I can't tell you how encouraging it was to me!

As I read Obedience, the personal nature of God’s vision stood out to me. Sometimes I’ve been frustrated with God’s call: why are there things He asks me but doesn’t ask my friends? Why does He send them through one route and me through another? I’m like the pot that asks its creator, why have you made me like this? I also frequently wonder if I’ve botched things up enough so that God will give up on me and take His vision elsewhere. But when I doubt my place in His plan, He continues to bring things into my life to remind me how He brought me into ministry, and that my place is here until He takes me out – things like this book.

For someone who tends to pressure herself and compare herself to others, it is liberating to read that His purpose in sending His vision isn’t merely for me to complete a task, nor is it to make me more like someone else. Rather, His revelation is to help me understand who He is; His purpose is to draw me closer to Him. Whatever God has for me will look different in some ways from what He gives to others, in the same way He made me different in looks and personality. Through this plan, He shows me that He values me, that He understands me better than I understand myself, and that His purpose for me is specific.

Paul also needed specific encouragement from God to stay in ministry (page 24). Sometimes no one else believed in Paul or what he was doing. In 2 Timothy he wrote, “At my first defense, no one came to my support, but everyone deserted me… but the Lord stood by my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed…” (4:16-17, NIV). In 1 Thessalonians 2, Paul also says that he and the apostles spoke as they did only for the sake of Christ: “we are not trying to please men but God, who tests our hearts… we were not looking for praise from men, not from you or anyone else” (vv. 4, 6). Paul never accepted another authority over what he personally heard from Christ in his heavenly vision, because he knew that God would tell him what he needed to know and send him where he needed to go.

On a similar note, it struck me that God’s vision is relational; the purpose to His revelation is that we know Him more fully.  Granted, the entirety of God is too much to see and grasp –Elijah heard God’s Spirit as a “still, small voice” and Moses only saw a small part of God on Mount Sinai – but rather than rendering Him unknowable, He shows us parts at a time through His word. I often forget that this is the first step of vision: “to know Christ and then to make him known” (page 15), and it requires time and dedication to learn who Christ really is. Paul taught in Athens that “[God] determined the times set for [men] and the places that they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:19-20). His plan for my entire life is one big plot to get me to seek Him.

Seeking Him brings things into focus. Mr. Doherty wrote that, to deal with difficulty and depression, we should “reflect on God’s character” (page 51). Knowing Him for who He is shows everything as it is – really, what do we or anything in this world matter except in relationship to Christ? This is one of the most encouraging reminders from this book: that even when my ministry seems to be a failure, if I am learning God’s character and in a right relationship with Him, I am living in victory! “We do not lose heart… we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen” (2 Corinthians 4:16, 18).

Similarly, and finally, is the power that God gives with the vision.  Sometimes seeing the needs of the world is overwhelming. Every child needs security and love, and they need to get them from Jesus. There’s no way I can minister to all who need Him; I can’t even reach a fraction of the children in my area! But now I recognize that I can’t tell how God will use my obedient response. Paul couldn’t guess that he would write canonized books of Scripture, or take the Gospel to Europe (page 38).

 It’s also overwhelming to look at my faults. I’ve failed at recognizing God’s calling, and done worse at following it. But there is a two-part nature of the vision in Mr. Doherty’s prayer on page 21: first to see and then to be enabled to do something about it. “TRUST HIM,” he says, “AND THE GOSPEL” (page 23). In Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, he says his prayer for them is that God would sanctify and keep them blameless, because despite their sinfulness, “the one who calls you is faithful and he will do it” (5:23, 24).

Sometimes the victory is simply perseverance (page 58). Again, this harkens back to God’s intimate knowledge of my shortcomings, and His desire to make Himself known to me (and through me).  If I am faithful to the vision, God will make it complete; He will never put that responsibility on me, but rather reveal His power in my weakness. This is the power that I recognize I need right now.