Vision or Revelation?

The world's thinking say that you cannot be a leader unless you have vision. However the people of God are not to be a people of vision; they are to be a people of revelation. ...I have been in hundereds of conferences where the leader has asked,"What is your vision of what you want to accomplish over the next five years?" That is the wrong question. We are not a people of vision - we are a people of revelation. We are a covenant people. We belong to God. We have no business telling God what we want to accomplish for Him or dreaming up what we want to do for God.
~ Henry Blackaby in Chosen to be God's Prophet - Lessons from the Life of Samuel.

My heart skipped a beat when I read this yesterday. Some of you who knew of the recent episode I had with the church leaders over the upcoming visioning exercise, would see the relevance of the above quote. Three years back, I was in a group studying Experiencing God, also by Blackaby. In this study, Blackaby pointed out that God calls or raises up servants to join Him in His work. Biblical heroes didn't dream big things for God - Moses certainly didn't want the job at the beginning, it was God's plan to set the Isrealites free; Paul was zealously persecuting Christians, definitely not in his agenda to spread the gospel to the Gentile world. Thus what set such men of faith apart was their hearing God's call and obeying it.

Coming back to the visioning or re-dreaming as the leaders call it, I hope we will be asking what God wants us to join Him in doing for the next 5 years and not what we want to do for God in the next 5 years. There is a difference.