Vision Must Include Plans

“And Joshua said unto the children of Israel, How long are ye slack to go to possess the land, which the LORD God of your fathers hath given you?” (Jos 18:3 AV)

Lack of plan and lack of vision are related.  Joshua is rebuking Judah and its neighboring tribes for not being industrious to take the land that was given to them.  It wasn’t because of fear of an enemy.  Manasseh was guilty of this.  The rest were not.  What they lacked is found in the following verses of this chapter.  They saw the entire land well enough.  They knew that entire land needed to be taken.  What they lacked was a survey of how they would divide the land and the assigned lot fallen to each tribe.  Joshua choses three men from each tribe who has interest in the unclaimed land to journey through the land to survey it.  Joshua would them draw lots guided by God’s hand to assign each tribe their inheritance.  What they lacked was not opportunity.  What they lacked was not a general view as to the task at hand.  What they lacked was a game plan and specific goals that would reach the overall goal of taking it the land.

This may sound like common sense, but it bears our mediation.  I grew up living in an old house that is went through renovation.  This house was over one hundred years old and had never gone through an extensive renovation.  When my parents bought the house, it had to seem overwhelming. The house looked uninhabitable.  It looked like it needed to be torn down and hauled to the dump.  However, there was a plan put into place.  The first was to solidify the bones of the house.  Then there was a plan for the downstairs and the upstairs.  Attention was given one room at a time.  Repairs were made on a most important to least important basis.  Little by little, there was a game plan put into place one room at a time.  A little paint here, a little patch there, a bit of rearranging and the larger vision of a repaired and updated house slowly came into view.  The challenge was not the overall view of what the house needed to be.  The challenge was to see the individual changes needed and a plan to get it done.

As a leader of God’s people, a vision alone is not enough.  We are slack if we do not survey the land and prioritize what needs to be done.  Many visions die on the altar of lack of planning.  These surveyors could not advise the best plan on conquering the land until they first drew up borders.  They could not advise the men of war on how to best overcome the enemy until the first surveyed the enemy, its strengths and weaknesses, and any kind of advantage the landscape might provide.  If our ministry is failing, it may not be for lack of a general vision.  Rather, it may be failing because we are slack to come up with a specific plan to accomplish that which the LORD has called us to.