Stop Casting Vision. Start Obeying the One You Already Have.
The King's vision was never lost — we just stopped treating it like a mandate
There’s a moment in many churches every January that has become almost liturgical in its own right. The stage is set, the slides are polished, and the leader steps forward to unveil something new — a fresh vision, a bold mission statement, a word for the year. It’s meant to inspire. Often it does.
But what if that whole exercise is built on a faulty premise?
About nine months ago, when our church was just getting started, I made a statement that landed with a thud in the room. I said: we don’t have a vision. I said: we don’t have a mission. I watched faces tighten and brows furrow. People looked at each other the way you do when you’re wondering whether the pastor just admitted something he shouldn’t have.
Then I finished the sentence.
We don’t have our own vision. But Jesus has one. And quite sure we’re not supposed to replace it!
The Vision Is Already Written
There’s a verse most of us could quote before we finished our morning coffee. It’s been prayed ten thousand times in ten thousand churches. It sits right at the centre of what Jesus taught us about prayer. And somehow, in all our vision-casting and strategic planning, we’ve managed to treat it more like a devotional warm-up than the actual directive.
Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. — Matthew 6:10
That’s the vision. That’s the King’s vision. Not yours. Not mine. His.
The prophet Habakkuk saw the same thing from a different angle: the earth will one day be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). Total saturation. Every corner of creation enveloped in his presence and his reign.
The Garden of Eden wasn’t simply a beautiful place. It was a theology. It was the overlap of heaven and earth — the place where the two realms intermingled, where God walked with humanity in the cool of the day. That’s what the King’s vision looks like. Not escape from earth, but earth restored to what it was always meant to be. More and more like heaven.
