Casting Visions

“Cast their vision” is a term heard a lot lately and it means to project an idea for the future. Also called “vision casting’” it is a term heard in many of the latest leadership seminars and life coaching workshops as a tool you can use to help you communicate an idea to the people around you. It's a relatively new term and it often is given in a positive connotation whenever someone has a goal or project in mind and wants to get people working together for a particular end, but sometimes casting a vision is more like fishing for trout.

You know the expert angler, the one who has learned clever techniques in casting. He knows how to present his idea in just the right way and can cause people to act on that vision and make it happen. Like a good salesman, with the right bait, the right angle, the right time of day, he knows the hungry fish will be biting. Then all he has to do is reel them in and he's got them on his team. They caught the vision and are happily working toward the same end together.

Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish;” indicating that it is scriptural to have a vision for the future and to have a goal in mind. In fact, you will even find fishers of men, preaching God’s word and casting His vision in even the deepest waters. Unfortunately there are some slick-willie type fishermen who lace God's words and vision with human politics and the illusions of unregenerate man.

Lately, even in the church, having the ability to “cast a vision” is a pre-requisite for “leadership.”

So there are leadership training seminars, classes and workshops to learn to lead and to learn how to release the leader within. There you will be equipped with words of wisdom, tools you can use, techniques... so people will follow you and you will then get the respect and success that you, as a "leader" deserve.

The Christian who buys into these leadership would do well to examine them carefully and be conscious of the visions that they cast.

James 4:13-16 says to those with their own visions, “Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.”

Paul the Apostle didn’t go before the people and project his own ideas about where he planned to take the church. He preached God’s Word and went where the Holy Spirit lead him. Paul preached the word of God as faithfully as he knew so that the people would not grow hungry and he taught that the Christians’ faith should not be in the wisdom of men who think that they have vision for the future, but rather in the power of God who raised Jesus from the dead. (1 Cor 2:1-5)

He never told them to be leaders, but said to follow him as he too was a follower... of Jesus.

In Revelation 4 verses 10 and 11, twenty four elders cast their crowns, not their visions, at the feet of Almighty God in honor of His eternal reign, saying, "Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and because of Your will they existed, and were created."