Chapter 15

Vision, Purpose, and Calling

Seeing the life you were made for

Somewhere along the way in this book, I hope a question has begun to surface in you that wasn’t there before.

What is my life actually for?

It is, in my pastoral experience, the question that quietly arrives in almost every renewed mind, sooner or later. Once the noise has begun to settle. Once the lies have started to lose their grip. Once the patterns of fear and comparison and self-protection have begun to loosen their hold on the daily traffic of your thinking. A different kind of question rises up underneath, almost like a spring through soft ground.

What was I made for?

What is the unique shape of the life God has placed inside me?

What am I doing here?

This is not, despite what our culture might suggest, a question about finding yourself. The self-help industry has spent fifty years telling people to look within to discover their purpose, and it has produced, by and large, a generation of exhausted seekers who have not found very much. The renewed mind asks a different question. It does not ask what do I want? It asks what has God put me here for? And the answer, when it begins to arrive, almost never comes from looking inward. It comes from looking upward, and then outward, and then — only then — at the person you actually are.

This chapter is about that question. About vision. About purpose. About calling. About the strange, quiet, glorious business of beginning to see the life you were made for.

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Why the unrenewed mind cannot see vision

Before we talk about how vision arrives, I want to name something honest. There is a reason most people never live with much sense of purpose, and it is not that God has forgotten to give it to them. It is that the unrenewed mind is structurally unable to see it.

Vision requires altitude. It requires the ability to lift your head above the immediate, to look beyond the next bill and the next deadline and the next argument, and to imagine what your life could become if it were not bound by the limits you currently believe it has. And the unrenewed mind, almost by definition, cannot do this. It is too busy putting out fires. It is too crowded with the voices we have spent this book naming. It cannot see past the next twelve weeks, because it cannot yet imagine a self capable of more than the last twelve.

The proverb puts it bluntly. Where there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18, in the older translations). The word translated perish is actually closer to cast off restraint — to flounder, to scatter, to wander without direction. The point is the same. Without vision, a person drifts. They take whatever job comes along. They drift into whatever relationship is offered. They follow whatever ambition is being modelled by the people around them. They live a life shaped by what happened to them rather than by what they were made for.

But once the mind is being renewed, something begins to change. The altitude rises. The fog of the small clears. And the question of purpose, which the unrenewed mind could not even hold long enough to consider, begins to feel not only possible but necessary.

You start to suspect that you were made for more than the rut you have been walking.

That suspicion is one of the most important sensations you will ever have. Do not dismiss it. It is the renewed mind beginning to do what it was designed to do — see the life God has been quietly preparing for you all along.

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A man called Saul

There is no more famous example of vision arriving in a renewed mind than the man who started life as Saul of Tarsus.

I want to walk you through his story, because I think it is one of the most extraordinary illustrations of purpose, vision, and calling that the Bible offers. And what I want you to notice — the thing that has only become clear to me in the last few years — is that Saul did not lack purpose before he met Jesus. He had a vision. He was passionately on mission. The trouble was that the mission was the wrong one.

Saul, before his Damascus road moment, was, by all accounts, an exceptional human being. A Pharisee of the Pharisees. Trained under one of the greatest rabbis of the age. Brilliant. Disciplined. Driven. Convinced he was doing the work of God by hunting down the followers of Jesus and dragging them, men and women, to prison.

He was not lazy. He was not aimless. He was not drifting. He was, in many ways, a more focused human being than most of us will ever be. And he was running, full speed, in the wrong direction.

This is, I think, one of the most pastorally important observations about purpose that the Bible offers. Having a vision is not enough. Plenty of people have visions. Plenty of people are driven, focused, accomplished, persuasive, and on a mission. The question is not whether you have a vision. The question is whether the vision you have is the one God has put you here for.

Saul’s whole life was about to be turned around by a single encounter.

You know the story. On the road to Damascus, on his way to arrest more Christians, a light flashed around him. He fell to the ground. He heard a voice. Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? He asked the obvious question. Who are you, Lord? And the answer arrived. I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting (Acts 9:4–5).

In a single moment, Saul’s entire vision of the world collapsed. The mission he had given his life to was, it turned out, a war against the Messiah he had been waiting for. Everything he had believed about himself, about God, about who was in and who was out — all of it was wrong. He was blinded, literally, for three days. He could not eat. He could not drink. He sat in a stranger’s house in Damascus, with the architecture of his identity in pieces around him, waiting for whatever was going to come next.

What came next was a new name, a new vision, and a calling that would change the course of human history.

Saul became Paul. The man who had hunted Christians became the apostle who carried the gospel to the Gentile world. The brilliant zealot who had been weaponised against God’s purposes was, almost without modification, weaponised for them. The same intellect. The same drive. The same willingness to suffer for what he believed. Same person. New direction. And the man who had been racing in the wrong direction with a fierce sense of purpose became the man who, two thousand years later, has shaped Christian theology more profoundly than almost anyone else who has ever lived.

I think there is something quietly beautiful in this story for any reader of this book. God did not throw Saul away and start again. He did not say we’ll get someone else for this. He renewed him. He took the existing material — the gifts, the personality, the intensity, the intelligence — and pointed it in the direction He had been planning for it all along.

That is what He wants to do with you.

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Vision is not the same as ambition

I want to pause here and say something important, because the Christian world has been confused about this for a long time, and the leadership world has not been much better.

Vision is not the same as ambition.

A great many people in our culture have ambition. They want to be successful, recognised, comfortable, wealthy, influential. Ambition asks the question what do I want to achieve? It is fuelled by what the world rewards, by what other people are doing, by what would impress the imagined audience inside our heads.

Vision is something altogether different.

Vision asks the question what has God put me here for? It is fuelled, not by what the world rewards, but by what God has whispered to us in the quiet places. Vision is often unimpressive on paper. It rarely sounds dramatic in the early days. It frequently doesn’t make sense to anyone except the person who has received it. But it has, inside it, a kind of quiet fire — a slow-burning sense that this is what you were made for, and whatever else you do, this is the work you cannot abandon.

The Bible is full of people who lived from vision rather than from ambition. Moses spent forty years in the wilderness before God called him back into the work of liberating a nation. Joseph spent thirteen years in Egypt — most of them in prison — before the dreams God had given him as a teenager finally came true. David spent years running for his life through caves and wilderness before he sat on the throne God had promised him as a boy. None of these people, in their unspectacular middle decades, looked like people of vision by the world’s standards. But they were people of vision by God’s. And the vision held them when the circumstances did not.

If you are renewing your mind, and a sense of purpose is beginning to rise in you, I want to gently challenge you to interrogate it. Not to crush it. But to ask yourself, honestly, is this ambition, or is this vision? The two can look similar at the start. They live very differently over time.

Ambition is loud, impatient, and dependent on visible results. Vision is quiet, patient, and survives long seasons of obscurity.

Ambition compares. Vision focuses.

Ambition burns out. Vision endures.

Ambition is for the unrenewed mind. Vision is for the renewed one.

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How vision arrives

If vision is not ambition, then where does it actually come from?

I want to suggest, gently, that vision arrives differently for almost every person, but almost always through some combination of the same three things.

The first is stillness.

You cannot hear God’s voice in the middle of a constant roar. The reason so few people have any clear sense of calling, I am convinced, is not that God is silent. It is that we are never quiet enough to hear Him. But I want to be careful with the word stillness, because it is more than simply being quiet, or switching off, or having an empty diary for an afternoon. The stillness I am describing is an active thing. It is the deliberate seeking of God in solitude — turning the quiet towards Him, rather than merely away from the noise. And solitude, it is worth saying, is not the same as isolation. Isolation is being cut off from people and left alone with your own thoughts; it tends to shrink a person. Solitude is being alone with God, and it tends to enlarge one. Vision arrives, almost without exception, in these sought, God-ward quiet moments of a life — the morning when you finally close the laptop and turn to Him, the walk you take without your phone but with a prayer on your lips, the season of unwanted solitude that you initially resented and only later came to bless as the place where you finally heard Him. The Bible knows this. Be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10). Stillness is the precondition of knowing. And stillness is the precondition of vision.

If you want to discover what God has put you here for, you are going to have to slow down enough to listen.

The second is the desires of a renewed heart.

This is where things get interesting. Because once your mind is genuinely being renewed — once you are spending time in the Word, in prayer, in honest reflection — the desires that arise in you stop being purely about you. They start to align, slowly and almost imperceptibly, with the desires of God. The Bible says it directly. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart (Psalm 37:4). I used to read that verse as a transaction — be nice to God and He will give you what you want. I now read it differently. I now think it means: delight yourself in the Lord, and the desires of your heart will start to change. He shapes the desires while He answers them.

A renewed mind, in time, begins to want different things than an unrenewed one. It wants the wellbeing of others. It wants the spread of the gospel. It wants to build, to bless, to repair, to create. And often, the specific shape of those desires — the particular thing you find yourself drawn to again and again — is one of the clearest fingerprints of your calling.

The third is the affirmation of others.

This is the one we tend to discount, but I think it matters more than we realise. Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed (Proverbs 15:22). Vision rarely arrives in a vacuum. It almost always arrives partly through other people. Friends who say I think you’d be brilliant at this. Mentors who notice a gift you hadn’t seen in yourself. The quiet, repeated observation from people who love you that this is what you should be doing. When several voices, over years, are saying something similar to you about your life, pay attention. God often speaks in confirmation, not in monologue.

Stillness. Desire. Affirmation. Where these three converge, you are usually close to your calling.

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Calling is rarely glamorous at the start

One more thing, before we move on, because I have watched too many people abandon their calling because they did not understand this.

Calling almost never arrives in a form that looks impressive at the beginning.

We have absorbed, somewhere along the way, the idea that a real calling from God should feel obvious, important, and validated. It should come with a platform attached. It should be the kind of thing that makes for an impressive story. If it doesn’t look like that, we tend to assume we have misheard.

The Bible, again, says something quite different.

Moses started his calling tending sheep in a desert. David was a teenager looking after his family’s flock when Samuel arrived to anoint him king. Gideon was hiding in a winepress threshing wheat when the angel called him a mighty warrior. The disciples were fishermen, tax collectors, and ordinary men of no particular qualification when Jesus said follow me. The vast majority of biblical callings began in conditions that nobody would have filmed for a documentary.

Your calling will likely begin small. It will begin in obscurity. It will begin in a season where nobody but you and God knows what is unfolding. And it will be tested, in those early years, in a thousand ways. Was I just making it up? Have I misheard? Should I do something more sensible? What if it never amounts to anything?

Hold on.

The acorn does not look like the oak. The yeast does not look like the loaf. The kingdom of God, Jesus says, is like a tiny seed (Matthew 13:31–32). It does not start out looking like its eventual self. Faithfulness in small things is the doorway to everything else (Luke 16:10).

So if you have caught a glimpse of what God has put you here for, do not despise the smallness of where it begins. Steward the small thing. Show up faithfully. Keep listening. The rest, in God’s good time, will come.

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A renewed mind sees the long game

There is one more shift I want to name in this chapter, because it is one of the most beautiful fruits of a mind that is being renewed.

You begin to think in the long game.

The unrenewed mind lives in the urgent. It is constantly chasing the immediate. What can I get this week? What can I achieve this month? What will it take to feel okay by the end of the year? It treats every season of difficulty as catastrophic and every season of blessing as the new normal. It cannot, almost by definition, see far enough into the future to make wise decisions in the present.

The renewed mind, by contrast, starts to think in decades. It plants trees it will not sit under. It builds things it may not see completed. It invests in children, in relationships, in disciplines, in habits, that will not yield their full fruit until twenty or thirty years from now. It is content, in a way the unrenewed mind cannot quite manage, to be underway without being complete.

This is one of the rarest and most undervalued qualities of a renewed life. The capacity to take the long view. The willingness to delay gratification. The patience to keep walking when the path stretches far further into the distance than the eye can see. The Bible calls it running with perseverance the race marked out for us(Hebrews 12:1). It is not a sprint. It is a marathon. And the marathon mind is what God grows in a person whose thinking has been renewed.

If you are at the beginning of this journey, take heart. You do not have to see the whole map. You only have to take the next step. The God who has put the vision in you is also the God who unfolds it, year by year, decade by decade, until what looked small and almost-foolish at the beginning becomes something you could never have engineered on your own.

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Personal reflection

•       What is the quiet fire in you that has refused to go away — the thing that keeps coming back, no matter how many times you have tried to set it aside?

•       Is what you are pursuing right now ambition, or vision? Honestly?

•       Have other people, over the years, repeatedly said something to you about your gifts or your direction that you have been dismissing?

•       Where in your life are you living in the urgent, when God is asking you to live in the long game?

•       If you stood at the end of your life and looked back, what would you most regret not having attempted?

Declaration

I was not put here by accident. There is a calling on my life that God has been preparing me for since before I drew breath. I will not chase ambition; I will pursue vision. I will not despise small beginnings; I will be faithful in them. And I will trust the God who knows the end from the beginning to unfold, in His time, the life I was made for.