2024 Week 47

Hello, Springers!

Our family enjoys watching movies together. We also enjoy documentaries that explore the making of our favorite movies. These documentaries always show storyboards and concept art.

Storyboards are imagined scenes drawn in a quick cartoon-like manner. The director considers the camera’s point of view and how it will tell the story. Concept art involves imagining settings, costumes, and creatures that will be part of the movie. It gives the different designers and artists a target at which to aim as they create the world of the story.

Storyboards and concept art are ways to visualize success.
Do you take time to look at the future through your mind’s eye and visualize success?

Visualizing success is a valuable concept in my life. I am trying to remember when I first encountered it. I often find myself silent when alone, musing about something and staring off into the distance. It’s more awkward when I do this in a meeting with others. In these strange moments when it may appear that I’m “checking out,” I’m looking in my mind’s eye to visualize success. What does it look like, specifically?

Visualizing success is essential because life has a way of blocking our view of the future. The immediate interruptions of daily life keep us from the destinations we long to reach.

You might be tempted to dismiss this as the sort of general babble we find in books on productivity, but the Bible describes how Jesus visualized success while he was on earth. Two crucial passages spring to mind.

In Luke 9:51 it says that Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem. Luke doesn’t say he merely went there. He set his face. Looking in the distance, he determined and decided where he would go and why.

Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus endured the cross because of the joy set before him. If he had visualized the cross as the end rather than the peak performance of his work, he would not have been successful as the leader and completer of our faith. But he looked into the distance and saw the joy – the Father’s joy, our joy, and his joy.

So on that day when Jesus first spoke plainly to the apostles about his death (Mark 8:31-33), it was easy for Jesus to lovingly put Peter in his place when he said to him, “Get behind me, Satan, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

Jesus wants us to visualize success, too.
However, it differs from the kind of success we read about in productivity books.
It’s a biblical success.

It’s the kind of success you find that Joseph had when he was wrongfully imprisoned (Genesis 39:3). It’s the kind of success that Jesus commends to the disciples when he says, “Rejoice that your names are written in the book of life,” (Luke 10:20). It’s the kind of success that the sheep on the master’s right hand will have when they hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master,” (Matthew 25:21).

I am praying for you today that God will give you the ability to visualize success.

in Christ,

Pastor Tag