Characteristics of a God-Given Ministry Vision - a podcast by NLW International

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Worship Q&A podcast. I’m Dwayne Moore. Each week we try to answer questions that worship leaders are asking. Today I’m excited to talk to you about six characteristics of a God-sized vision for your ministry. Or, to put it in the form of a question, what do I do if I sense God has given me an idea or a ministry vision for something in the future? How do I know, and what can I do about it?

Well I hope you had a good Easter and had an amazing time with your church. You’re probably, like many of us, worn out from it. I want to encourage you as we look forward, just thank God for the opportunity he gave you to lead those Easter services. Now get some rest, much-needed rest, if you can at all. But I wanted to bring you this podcast today and this week, so it can help us all look forward to what may be next or what’s out there in the future. And that’s why I want us to talk about your ministry vision and talk about how we can sense, or if we can sense, and if we can know if God is moving us toward a new idea or a new approach to something.

One of my favorite things to do is lead a worship leader intensive. Really, a better word for it, to describe it, is a retreat. We do it each fall in the month of October. This year we will be in Louisville and also in southern Indiana, right in that area. We can only take a few people, so we’re select with that, but I love doing these intensives because we get to talk about how we can be visionaries for our ministry and how to move our ministry forward.

One of the things that we look at are these six characteristics that I wanna talk to you about today. Distinct characteristics for a God-given vision, a God-inspired vision. So whatever he has for you, you can be sure that every vision, so to speak, that he gives us, it will have six distinct characteristics. All of them can be clearly seen when God commissioned Joshua to lead his people into the Promised Land. And this is what I teach about, is one of the things we teach about, in the worship leader intensive.

So the first characteristic is that it’s bigger than you think. God told Joshua he was “giving them all the land I swore to their ancestors that I would give them.” That’s Joshua 1:6. It’s been estimated that the total territory for the Hebrews was upwards of 15 million acres. Imagine that. Well, it would be hard for anyone, including Joshua, to fathom that much land mass. So it’s bigger than Joshua could really think. On an even grander scale, Joshua most likely had no idea that he was a type of Christ, symbolizing through his own obedience and actions how Jesus would later save his people from their sins. God is always working through our lives to do things which are much larger than we can comprehend or see at the moment.

Not only will the vision God’s giving you be bigger than you think, number two, it’s harder than you can do. Joshua had been given a God-sized assignment. Leading a million Israelites across the Jordan to posses a new land certainly isn’t for the faint of heart. Like Joshua, following God’s plan means we’ll be in over our heads. We can roll the stone, but only he can raise the dead. In other words, we should do what he tells us to do, and then watch and anticipate what only he can do. Did you catch that? Let me say that again. In other words, we should do whatever he tells us to do, but then we need to watch and anticipate what only he can do.

Number three, it’s better than they can imagine. Joshua knew something about the Promised Land. He’d spied it out when he was a young man. So he knew what Moses meant when he said it was a land f...

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