Seeing What Is To Come
Vision Shaped by God’s Future
In a recent M3 Weekly article, we observed that “few ideas are more widely acknowledged in business than purpose.” Perhaps one such concept is the one to which we turn our attention today: vision.
Just as companies and organizations typically develop a purpose statement, statements of vision are at least equally common. As missional entrepreneurs, our faith as followers of Jesus adds even more importance to the topic of vision. We remember the biblical warning that “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” and we feel even more profoundly the weight as Christ-following leaders to discover, develop, and cast vision for the people and organizations we lead.
Vision as Revelation, Not Projection
Unfortunately, many so-called vision statements just sound like lists of what we would like to do. But, as we return to the framework of biblical revelation as a four-act drama or Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration, we now have an opportunity. Just as we sought to ground our purpose in God’s purpose revealed in Creation, we can now learn to ground our vision in God’s vision, revealed in the Restoration depicted at the end of the Scriptures.
In fact, the biblical book of Revelation is an unveiling (apokalypsis in Greek), and the last two chapters of Revelation especially give us a true Vision of the future that God will accomplish. Revelation 22:1-5 gives a beautiful picture of that future, employing Garden of Eden terminology to depict the new heavens and new earth.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
Here we see God’s creation as it was always meant to be: God and the Lamb on the throne, a river and tree of life, not just seasonal but monthly fruitfulness, and leaves that do not just fall to degrade, but somehow become an agent of healing.
And all of this is experienced in an eternal relationship of identity, relationship, and co-reigning with God.
They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
In summary, John is not given a task list. He is given a vision:
A renewed heaven and earth
God dwelling with his people
The removal of the curse
Healing for the nations
Light without darkness
Work that continues, now freed from futility
This vision is not achieved through human ingenuity or institutional success. It is received as a promise and a gift. God shows his people where the story is going so they can live faithfully where they are.
Christian vision, then, is not primarily about imagining what we want the future to be. It is about learning to see what God has promised it will be.
Rethinking Visioning Exercises
What might this mean for how we approach vision in practice?
Instead of beginning with trend lines or aspirational headlines, what if we lingered in Revelation 21–22? What if we allowed God’s promised future to form our imagination before we asked what our organization might become?
We can ask, “What aspects of God’s grand vision of eventual Restoration can I see Him bringing about, albeit imperfectly for now, here in my corner of his creation, because of my enterprise?”
The questions shift from:
What future do I want to create?
To something more grounded:
If this is where God is taking the world, what kind of future am I working toward here?
As author John Mark Comer explains in his book Garden City:
What I’m getting at is all this eschatology, all this talk about the future, about resurrection and the age to come, should have a tectonic, pivotal, inspiring effect on our work in the here and now.
Living Toward the Future God Promises
For missional enterprise leaders, vision shaped by God’s future steadies us. It frees us from the illusion that everything depends on us, while calling us to live deliberately and hopefully in the present.
In the weeks ahead, we will turn to mission and values: how we steward what has been entrusted to us in the long middle between Creation and Restoration. But vision reminds us why faithfulness matters at all: because the story is going somewhere very, very good.
Verse of the Week:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” (Revelation 21:1)
May God’s revealed vision that he has promised to bring about shape the way we see, decide, and lead this week.