What You See Is What You Get: Part 1

By Pastor Mitch Horton | January 2003 | Posted in • Archives | (0) Comments

What is the plan of God for your life? What do you see yourself doing this year? How do you see yourself? God created all of us to be dreamers! He wants us to be filled with His ambition for life and go after it!

God originally created humanity to rule the earth under God’s sovereign will (See Genesis 1:26-27). You could say that God placed ambition in Adam and Eve at creation. He placed within them the ability to dream, to progress, to perform. This nature did not leave mankind after the fall. It was only twisted by selfishness and the ambition turned to self-will. History is full of examples of men with ambition that have turned sour and harmed their society.

When we are born again, God does not want us to lay our ambition aside. He did not plan for us to live passive lives! He wants us to fulfill His purposes for us! If we are passive, it’s because we’ve been wounded by some past event that has stifled our personality! God made us to be dreamers!

When God called Abraham from his pagan family in Ur of the Chaldees, He gave him a dream to follow. God told Abraham that he was going to have lots of children, and then bless the whole world through them. He then changed Abram’s name to Abraham. Every time Abraham mentioned his name, it reminded him of the promise of God!

One day while Abraham was outside under the starlit sky, God told him to look up at all the vast expanse of stars. He told him that his children would be as numerous as the stars. God then told Abraham to look down at the sand. He told him again that his offspring would be more numerous than the grains of sand. In doing this, God actually surrounded Abraham with a vision of His plan for His life.

The way God wired us is that WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET. We become what we envision of ourselves. As it says in Proverbs 23:7, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he!” God wants us to see ourselves fulfilling His vision for our lives! He may not demonstrate it in the same way He did with Abraham, but He will in some way show us His plan if we will seek Him for it!

Joseph is another example of a person who was given a vision of his life by God, and that vision shaped his future. When Joseph was seventeen years old he had two dreams that left a dramatic impression upon him. In both dreams, he saw himself as a leader over his people. He made the mistake of telling his brothers of his dream, and was sold to a band of slave traders. (Genesis 37 - 39)

Because he had the dream, and because he believed it, Joseph succeeded wherever he went. He no doubt saw himself a leader though he was temporarily a slave!

We can learn some great lessons from Joseph’s life. The first one is that many times those closest to you will not understand the purposes of God for your life! You can’t allow other people opinions to rule you if you’re going to succeed in fulfilling God’s plan for your life! You’ve got to push past what others think and press into the yearning that God h as placed deep within you!

The next lesson we can from Joseph is that if you keep the dream that God has given you before your eyes, no circumstance can stop you from fulfilling the will of God. Joseph was sold as a slave, Potipher’s wife wrongly accused him of rape, he was imprisoned under false pretenses, and yet he excelled at everything he did under all circumstances. And the reason he prospered is because he kept before his eyes the vision of his future that God had given him. What you see is what you get!

It’s not the circumstances of life that defeat us. It’s our own thoughts about ourselves that keep us from God’s best. And God wants to give every one of us a vision for our lives. He plans for that vision to propel us through every storm of life!

Moses is another example of a man that was motivated by what he saw! Moses was skilled in all the learning and wisdom of the Egyptians, and the Bible says that he was mighty in words and deeds (Acts 7:22). He was raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter, and was trained to be what we would call the president of Egypt! He had a dream within to free his Hebrew brothers from the harsh taskmasters of Egypt. He took things into his own hand and killed an Egyptian who he saw abusing one of his fellow Israelites. He was marked as a murderer and fled to the desert for refuge. Moses was forty years old when this event occurred. He lived as a shepherd over his father in law’s sheep for forty years!

Moses hindered the plan of God for his life by trying to make his dream come true in his own ability without waiting on God’s plan and time. It took God forty years to root the dependence on self-ability out of Moses! Moses had the burning bush experience of Exodus 3 when he was eighty years old! When he saw the bush not being consumed with the flames that engulfed it, he knew that he was in the presence of God. During that experience, God renewed the dream to set his Hebrew brethren free from Egyptian slavery that He had given Moses many years earlier.

Regardless of age, God has a purpose for your life! You may feel that your prime has passed and that God can no longer use you. But if God can use an eighty-year-old man to lead over two million of His people out of Egypt, though a desert and up to the edge of their promised land, then he can certainly use you, regardless of your age or inability.

Perhaps God has given you a desire to do something and you’ve failed in your own self-effort. If you will humble yourself as Moses did, God will pick up the pieces of your failure and mold them into His purposes for your life. The lessons that Moses learned in the desert qualified him to lead a great nation, and the burning bush experience ignited Moses lost passion for life, and propelled him for forty years as God’s leader for His people Israel.

If God can use Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, then he can use you, too. Following God’s dream and purpose for your life can erase your past, change your present, and thrust you into God’s ultimate plan for your future. I’ll continue this theme next month!