Keep Calm – Don’t Look Down – Look Up #2

Psalm 121:1-2 I lift up my eyes to the mountains — where does my help come from?  My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. (NIV).

In Brief Word #58 April 2016, I said, ‘God wanted Abram to move, so the first thing He does is to say; “… lift up your head, have a look, see, from where you are, to, where I want you to be”’.

Sometimes in life and ministry and just going about our daily chores — spiritual and natural — we get burdened and weighed down, and our gaze drops.  We lose sight of the vision we once had.

Distractions creep in that take away the passionate vision and dream we used to have, and we’re left looking down at all the stuff going on around us.

The thing is, like the 747 illustration we mentioned in the last Brief Word, if the pilots don’t have that aircraft pointed in the right direction, when it starts rolling down the runway, there’s going to be a disaster.

We too can unintentionally sabotage parts of our future if we are looking in the wrong direction.  If we lose sight of what God wants us to see, then sooner or later some form of loss will occur.

The truth is, you can’t look from anywhere else but where you are!  God wants to give us things to see, FROM THE VERY PLACE WHERE WE ARE!  Not someone else’s place.  But right where you are.

i.          David — a humble shepherd boy, and God showed him the kingdom.

ii.         Nehemiah — God gave him a vision of a rebuilt Jerusalem while he was a humble cup-bearer to a king in a foreign land.

iii.        Jeremiah — the Word of the Lord came to him while he was still young.

iv.        Zacharias the father of John the Baptist — serving as Priest, as he no doubt had done many many times, and God speaks to him of the miracle birth of John the Baptist.

v.         Saul/Paul — well, he got knocked off his horse!

vi.        John the Apostle — in exile on the Isle of Patmos, and God gives him the book of Revelation.

Don’t despise the “place” where you are, God can give you a prophetic vision, of your future, even right where you’re at.  It’s not like we’re in some impenetrable building, or in an inaccessible jungle where God can’t get to us!  No!  God can reveal and speak to us anywhere.

“The place where we are”, is no problem to God.  It is not a limiting thing to Him.  He has no problem getting to us no matter where we’re at.

Poet Henry van Dyke put it like this:

“I am standing upon the seashore.  A ship … spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.  She is an object of beauty and strength.  I stand and watch until … she hangs like a speck of white cloud where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.  Then someone at my side says, ‘She’s gone’.  ‘Gone where?’  Gone from my sight.  That’s all.  She’s just as large in mast and hull and spa as she was when she left … her diminished size is in me, not her.  And just at the moment when someone says, ‘There, she’s gone!’ there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the joyful shout, ‘Here she comes!’”.

Let’s be those other voices who say, “Look!  There it is!”.

God wants us to see where He wants us to be.  That’s a prophetic vision.

Remember: God wanted Abram to move, so the first thing He does is to say; “… lift up your head, have a look, see, from where you are, to, where I want you to be”.

God would say the same thing to you and me.

God wanted to change Abram, to transition him, from ‘Abram’ — exalted father, to ‘Abraham’ – father of a multitude, so He gets him to come outside the tent — the limits of his vision — and shows him the land.

Vision always precedes transition.

Here’s a truth: whatever you focus on, you empower.  Whatever you focus on, gets bigger.  If we look down, the things ‘down there’ seem to be bigger than they really are, BUT, when we look up, our peripheral vision gets less and less, and our upward vision get clearer and clearer.

In our text for this Brief Word, we read of the Psalmist looking ‘up’ to something bigger than they are.  But the hills he saw, simply reminded him that there is Someone even bigger, the Lord!

Remember — God wants the full power and potential of your design and engineering to be released! 

It happens as we Keep Calm, don’t look down, look up!