The Heavenly Vision

Reading: Acts 26.1-23


The Christian Church – like society itself – seems to go through a series of phases and fads. In themselves they may have been helpful pointers, enabling us to refocus on our central task.

Some twenty years ago, we were told we needed to have a missional statement and supporting goals. We were in Balmoral Parish at the time. We studied the Great Commission together and came up with some fifteen or so points in a missional statement, each point supported by practical measurable goals to be delegated to different individuals and groups for implementation.

No good! we were told. A missional statement should be no more than a sentence in length so that every congregational member can remember it. Here in the Burdekin our stated mission is “We aim to preach, teach and practise the Good News of Jesus Christ.” It is brought to our attention every week at the head of our Weekly Newsletter.

Soon we noticed that mission statements seemed to be multiplying. Some schools proclaimed their mission on a public notice-board facing the street. Businesses declared their mission next to the service desk. Some dental and medical practices had a mission statement on the wall. To this day Centrelink prominently and clearly lets clients know their mission.

Today, just after we have all got used to the idea and when we had shifted from “missional” to plain “mission” statements, we find we should really be going much further with vision and values statements as well!

There’s an old quip that lots of people have an aim in life but forget to pull the trigger! Goals are important. We may not achieve all we set out to do, but we get much further than we would if we had no goals at all!

The Heavenly Vision

Saul of Tarsus had a mission and a set of supporting goals. He was committed to the elimination of this new movement – the Way – the followers of Jesus. He was on his way to Damascus for this very purpose – “so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem” (Acts 9.2).

On the way there he was blinded by a bright light and heard the risen Lord Jesus calling him to turn from his acts of persecution to a life and mission of faith – “I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you” (26.16).

Saul the persecutor became Paul the great Christian missionary. His life’s mission and the priorities that followed were radically changed. From this point forward he would describe  himself as the servant – literally, the “bond-slave” – of Jesus Christ. The whole direction of his life was to know Christ and to make him known.

Coming to Jerusalem at the end of his third missionary journey, he was attacked by an angry mob and taken into custody by the Roman guard. For two years he was detained in prison at Caesarea while governor Felix hoped for a bribe (24.26). When Festus succeeded as governor and seemed willing to compromise with the Jews, Paul appealed, as a Roman citizen, to be tried before Caesar in Rome.

There was, however, no charge against him, and Festus asked the visiting King Agrippa to listen to Paul’s story. In the course of his speech, Paul described his conversion and the commission the Lord Jesus had given him – “I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (vv. 17-18). So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven” (v. 19).

As one who was now a Christian, Paul hadn’t in some way decided what his mission should be and worked out a plan by which he could achieve it. That’s not what happened at all! Through the vision of the Lord Jesus on the Damascus road he was converted to faith in Christ and lived under a commission from Christ.

Did Paul achieve all he had hoped? No, he didn’t. In 2 Corinthians 11 he describes some of his adversities – “I have been… in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles… in danger from false brothers” (v. 26) – not all his hearers had been converted and some who were turned false. There was immorality among members in the church in Corinth. Demas, one of Paul’s supporters when he wrote to the Colossians (4.14), later deserted Paul in jail in Rome “because he loved this world” (2 Tim. 4.10). In his final address to the Ephesian elders, he warned, “I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them” (Acts 20.29-30).

Humanly, the work was far from complete. Yet Paul had been true to the heavenly vision and could write, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day – and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing” (2 Tim. 4.7-8).

Call to Ministry

Nearly fifty years ago in a communion service in Warwick I was overwhelmed by the awareness of what Christ had done in dying on the cross for my sins. Along with that awareness was a deep sense of God’s call to ministry. That call had to mature. There was hard work to do and general education to be completed, then the specific testing and training by the Church in readiness for ordination and specific appointment. That service has taken us to Toowoomba, Childers, Stanthorpe, Balmoral (Brisbane), Buderim and the Burdekin. I have had opportunity to preach in every state except Western Australia and the Northern Territory I have been a member of two national Assemblies and have been National President of the Fellowship for Revival within the UCA.

Have we done – in general, and here in the Burdekin in particular – all we have hoped to do? Quite frankly, the answer is, No! The theory of ministerial priorities is very different from the practice. In our time you came out of college to discover you had no training in many of the duties expected of you. And in college, you had to wrestle with attitudes to the Scriptures and brands of theology with which you strongly disagreed and which have never worked in practice anyway.

As we leave the Burdekin – and this phase of ministry – and move into retirement (whatever that is), I ask you to forgive me all the ways I have failed to come up to your expectations. I haven’t matched my own expectations, either! But I want to say that God is faithful, that his Word is true, that the gospel of Christ is God’s power for the salvation of everyone who believes (Rom. 1.16)…

With Paul, I have endeavoured to keep ever before me the heavenly vision – and to fight the good fight, to finish the race and to keep the faith. As we leave, we commit you to our faithful Lord who hasn’t finished with any of us yet.

God’s Call

The real question today isn’t what we – the Blackburns – will be doing next, but what you – the Burdekin Uniting Church – will be doing next.

Have you seen the heavenly vision? As you work through a whole range of details and arrangements with the Clarks in the new year, will you focus on human hopes and aspirations or on the call of God to you in Jesus Christ?

Don’t expect a new minister to do the work to which the Lord is calling you. By God’s grace and with the enabling of his Spirit, work together with him as a congregation – and as part of the wider Christian community – to obey the heavenly vision.

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it” (1 Thess. 5.23-24).


© Peter J. Blackburn, Home Hill & Ayr Uniting Churches, 26 December 2004
Except where otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New International Version, © International Bible Society, 1984.


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