This past weekend Pastor Dale continued his ?Turning Point? series with a message entitled, ?Correct You Vision? and he spoke about the need to have good ?vision? so that you can see what you need to see so that you can be what God wants you to be and do what He created you to do. That is a struggle for us in life and when we get it wrong, we suffer the consequences. When we get it right, our lives change dramatically and we live better lives.
It?s easy to lose focus and to lose our ?vision? in the midst of living our lives. There are a lot of distractions and a lot of things that harm our vision and cause our vision to get distorted. Distorted vision is dangerous! When our vision gets distorted, we make mistakes and bad choices that affect our future. This happens all too often in marriage relationships. If we do not have the right vision for our marriage, we can get into trouble very quickly. Satan knows this and therefore works overtime to try to affect our vision in our marriage relationships. While we need good vision for a great future, Pastor Dale?s second point of his message was that ?hell works hard to rob, reduce or distort our vision.? This goes right along with Satan?s overall plan to destroy us completely:
John 10:10a (NIV) The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy;
The thief that Jesus was talking about in the scripture verse above in none other than Satan Himself. He is an expert at illusions?bad illusions. He can make something that God said was good to seem worthless and hopeless. I know it first hand because many years ago, the thief came for my marriage and he did it by robbing, reducing and distorting our vision?and it almost worked. But God intervened and corrected our vision. This happened at the very beginning of our marriage and the nightmare lasted 2 ? years. We were in the dark for that long and in that darkness we lost hope and almost gave up. What is interesting about this is that a word from the Lord had been spoken over us several times, with the last time being on our wedding day. God was speaking to us and letting us know that he had a plan for our lives that was bigger than just me and my wife. He was going to bring glory to his Name through our marriage. It was all very overwhelming when this occurred and especially when it happened on our wedding day! But when we started out in life after our wedding, we tripped over ourselves and began to quarrel and fight. It seemed as though we could not agree about anything and we began to give in to our flesh and say hurtful things to each other that began to break down the relationship. All of the strife and disunity that we experienced robbed us of the vision that God had given us of our marriage. All the while Satan was on the sidelines eating it up! He was causing confusion and making his diabolical suggestions and we were falling for it. We were easy prey because we didn?t do what we needed to do to protect ourselves. As our vision in our marriage got more and more distorted, we became more and more despondent and we lost all hope. Thoughts of divorce raced through our minds and my wife was very close to just leaving. We had been robbed of the vision that God had shown us! We believed a lie and we were in trouble. Listen to what the Bible says about people who are without vision:
Proverbs 29:18a (The Voice) Where there is no vision from God, the people run wild?
But God in His rich mercy rescued us. He woke us up and He opened our eyes. He restored our sight and He let us see that there was hope for our future. We had been robbed by the enemy but the great news is that God recovers what Satan steals from us! God showed us (miraculously so) what our problem was and here it is in a nutshell: we did not give God control of our marriage. He was not Lord of our marriage. We were leading and controlling and we almost lead and controlled our way into the total destruction of our marriage. When God is not in control, Satan begins to prowl around, waiting for the right time to strike. When you leave God out of anything, that?s like whistling for the enemy to come and mess with you.
God had shown us something that He wanted to do in us and through us and we almost blew it. Thank God for His great mercy and grace and for the fact that He does not give up on us. Jesus gave sight to the blind while He was here on this earth and He restores sight to us when we lose it. God had a plan for my wife and I and it was to be heralds (messengers) to tell other married couples that there is hope and that there is a future for them and that hope and future all depend on where they are with God. We usually try everything else before we go to God for help while all the time He is the only One that can save us.
Who would have thought that God could have used us for anything? It just goes to prove that with God, nothing is impossible (Luke 1:37). Don?t let hell or Satan rob, reduce or distort your vision of what God has for you and your spouse. What do you see right now? If you have lost your hope and cannot see that you have a future, that is a sure sign that you have been robbed! Don?t stand for it but run to God so that He can heal you, restore your vision and bring peace, joy and love back into your relationship. Then when you look again, you will be able to see it; to see that God?s plan is to not only bless you but to use your marriage as an example for others. Let God restore and correct you vision and live!
Pastor Joey
Source: http://cormarriagematters.com/2013/01/what-do-you-see/
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