The Frontier of Vision

Editor’s note:
This is the fourth installment in a series called “The New Frontier: Reflections on the Future of the Church. View the entire series here.”

Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

Proverbs 29:18 KJV

Between the ages of eight and ten, I would wait at the bus stop and think about the future. I was a quiet kid, the only boy in my family in a neighborhood where most of the other children were older than me. I was not socially skilled. I didn’t engage much, but I watched. I imagined.

My favorite television show was called Space 1999, which was about “the faraway future” of the 1990s where humans lived on the moon. It seems comical in 2026, but as I stood at that bus stop, my favorite show sparked my imagination over who I would become by then. I wanted to be a scientist. I thought I might become like First Officer Spock from Star Trek—logical, disciplined, capable of understanding and discovering things ordinary humans could not. 

Somewhere in those quiet years, I also had a vision of God. Not a religious vision. A personal one, as I wrote about in my book, He’s Not Who You Think He Is: “My earliest impressions of God are from a dream I had. In this dream, God was a big kid, wearing a striped T-shirt. God was my playmate, friend, and big brother. He was the older kid who became like a little kid to hang with his younger brother. I liked this view of God, but it has been a difficult one to sustain.”

How I saw God as a child was simple: he was on my side, supportive, wanting good things for me. The view was incomplete, but it was real. And it kept something alive in me that life and the world would spend years trying to extinguish.

The childlike imagination—the ability to see possibility before problems, to perceive what could be before being overwhelmed by what is—is not naïveté to be outgrown. It is the very capacity for vision that God designed into every human soul. 

Jesus understood why this matters. When his disciples tried to keep children away from him, Jesus stopped them. He was teaching them something about themselves and about all people— that vision is something to be protected, not managed. That God’s kingdom belongs to those who guard this capacity rather than surrender it to the weight of the world:

But Jesus said, “Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like these children.”

Matthew 19:14 NLT

Children think in terms of future possibilities rather than present realities. This is imagination, and in my view, imagination is spiritual thinking produced by faith. 

“Imagination is spiritual thinking produced by faith.”

As adults, we lose this when we experience the inevitable suffering of life, becoming so focused on problems, overwhelmed by troubles, and loaded down with despair that we find our vision extinguished. We can even experience this as children. I know I did. But hope always seemed to reappear. My family, my friends, and my environment did not snuff out my vision. Even when kids made fun of the size of my head—they often called me the Astrodome—and my bespectacled, quiet, bookish look, they eventually started calling me something else. They called me The Professor. They gave me a vision despite the jokes. Nurture, they say, can overcome the limits of nature. And despite my insecure, introverted fear of speaking my thoughts, my vision grew as it was nurtured by these influences.

One of these ways my vision grew was when a friend said I could be good at basketball, even though I couldn’t play. So I spent a summer learning. I even prayed; I wasn’t a religious kid, but I needed all the help I could get. That prayer was the first time I reached toward the God I had glimpsed at the bus stop. Eight years later, at nineteen, I would find him again. But in the meantime, I played. 

I played basketball in high school. I became known. And somewhere in that process, the vision of the scientist and Spock faded, and the vision of the basketball player took its place.

By my junior year of high school the NBA had become a clear unlikelihood—though my sense of vision kept hope alive longer than the evidence warranted. Rather than fully letting go, I joined the intramural basketball team at my college and threw myself into it with intensity, bringing us close to a championship in my junior year. The intramural success extended my identity as a basketball player even though I already knew the answer to my dream of playing professionally. The vision that had shaped my identity for years had an expiration date. And I had reached it—I just was not ready to admit it yet.

What I did not understand then was that I had made the choice every human being eventually faces—the choice between temporal vision and eternal vision. I had chosen the mist:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

James 4:13–14 NIV

Living for the “mist” is living for the temporary vision. The mist is not a moral failure, but a failure of perception. The person living for the mist is not necessarily greedy or selfish. They have simply built their entire identity around something with an expiration date, and they do not know it yet. I did not know it yet.

No one talks enough about what happens to a person when their vision expires. The professional athlete lives this in a bigger and more public way than most. While the public sees the celebrity, the statistical reality is far more fleeting;  the average NFL career lasts just 3.3 years. Across other major leagues the window is similarly narrow—from five years in Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) to six years for the National Hockey League (NHL). The professional athlete reaches his senior years before most peers have reached their professional stride. Financial fragility often follows. But the deeper collapse is not financial. It is personal. It is a collapse of identity and purpose. 

Psychologists call it “identity foreclosure” — where an individual commits to the role of athlete so early and so deeply that they fail to develop any other sense of self. As Brewer, Van Raalte, and Linder described it, athletic identity is both Hercules’ muscles and Achilles’ heel—the very thing that drives elite performance becomes the precise point of emotional undoing when the game ends.

I experienced a version of this at the intramural level. Even with other visions available—I had genuine political interests and eventually became student council president—I was still interacting with the world as an athlete. Basketball was how I knew who I was. When it ended, I did not know how to be someone else.

“No one talks enough about what happens to a person when their vision expires.”

The wise and resilient athletes are the ones who are adaptable and far-sighted. They understand their greater identity before the game ends. Former basketball player Bill Bradley understood this perhaps better than anyone. I watched him play for the New York Knicks as a young kid, long before I ever picked up a basketball myself. What drew me to him was not just his game, but what I later read about him—that he had played at Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and only came back to professional basketball because he missed it, not because he needed it for his identity. He had built something more durable than the game long before the game ended. He later wrote about it in Life on the Run — a book I remember as a young person, a book about a basketball player thinking clearly about what his life actually meant beyond the court. He went on to serve in the United States Senate. The game was one chapter. The whole life was the point.

I have seen this same choice made by friends I know—men who played at levels most athletes never reach and who chose to look ahead to something more lasting than the fleeting pleasures of athletic identity.

Sam Manuel and his brother Sean were drafted by the San Francisco 49ers. I remember sitting in a coffee shop reading about it, not knowing at the time that God was working in ways that would eventually make my own life and ministry richer. Sam now serves alongside Ray Kim as one of the lead ministers who run the day-to-day operations of the Bay Area Christian Church. His athletic formation did not define him. It prepared him.

Other members of our ministry staff have also had rich athletic careers. Scott Moala was drafted as a professional football player. Scott Colvin ran track at the University of North Carolina. Brian Nitta trained and competed in Judo in pursuit of representing the United States in the Olympics. Stone Eleazer wrestled for the University of Florida. These are not men who walked away from athletic excellence; they achieved it at levels most people never will. But like Bill Bradley, they saw beyond it. They understood that what they did on the field, track, or mat was not the whole of who they were. Today they serve as campus leaders and elders at the Bay Area Christian Church, helping to lead a spiritual community that is changing lives across nine campuses.

These men did not get fooled by the mist. They leveraged the temporal to get to the eternal. And their lives are a living answer to the question this section is asking—not what vision can you build for yourself, but whose vision are you willing to live?

By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.

Hebrews 11:24–26 NIV

Moses recognized the fleeting nature of “the mist”—living for himself— and chose to live for something more. He saw through the temporal to the eternal. That is not the choice of a man who has abandoned ambition. It is the choice of a man with a longer and larger vision than the mist can contain.

“It is the choice of a man with a longer and larger vision than the mist can contain.”

This is the choice every human being faces. Not just athletes. Every person. Those of us who chase the temporal vision live for an earthly reality. Those who seek spiritual vision live for an eternal one. And when we choose the eternal we do not become mediocre in this life; we become aligned with the transformative purposes of God.

Don’t you know that He who pursues and explores the human heart intimately knows the Spirit’s mind because He pleads to God for His saints to align their lives with the will of God? We are confident that God is able to orchestrate everything to work toward something good and beautiful when we love Him and accept His invitation to live according to His plan.

Romans 8:27–28 The Voice

The eternally-minded person does three things. They align their lives with God’s will rather than the mist and vapor of temporal pursuits. They love him. And they accept his invitation to live according to his plan. These are not religious obligations. They are the conditions under which the transformative purposes of God are released into an ordinary human life.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.

Ephesians 1:18–20 NIV

Though I may have had a spiritual vision as a child, by the end of high school I had drifted into agnosticism. The vision of God as a big brother had faded with the basketball years. I was not hostile to God. I simply had stopped thinking he was relevant to the life I was trying to build. 

In my senior year of high school, I was invited to a church event. It did not change my life. But it made me think. Something was stirred that I could not quite name. Then in my sophomore year of college, I was invited to a Bible study. It was the beginning of a two-year journey that ended with me becoming a Christian. And what I discovered in those years was that the God I had glimpsed at the bus stop as a big brother in a striped shirt was something infinitely greater. He was a Father. And Jesus was not a distant historical figure—he was someone with a purpose for my life that the mist could never have given me. A purpose greater than basketball. Greater than politics. Greater than anything I had imagined standing at that bus stop.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Ephesians 3:20–21 NIV

A.W. Tozer wrote that the most important thing about a person is their view of God:

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” 

A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

I have found this to be true in ways I could not have articulated at nineteen. I like to refer to the way we think about God as our “vision of God”—something I grasped from the life and walk with God of the prophet Ezekiel. All vision from God begins with a vision of God. Spiritual vision starts with a clear and correct view of God.

What we should learn from the athlete who loses everything when the career ends is that we can be that athlete in life—never discovering a vision of God to anchor our vision for ourselves. The athlete does not have a unique problem, but a human one. Their struggle reflects a condition every person faces—the choice between a life built on something temporary and a life anchored in the eternal.

The boy at the bus stop had an incomplete but genuine view and vision of a God who was on his side—and that kept something alive. But it was not until I encountered God as the Father and Jesus as the one who took hold of my life for a purpose—as Paul describes in Philippians 3:12—that temporal vision gave way to eternal vision.

Ezekiel manifests this idea. We see in his life that every major moment of his calling begins the same way—with a vision of God:

In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.

Ezekiel 1:1 NIV

He stretched out what looked like a hand and took me by the hair of my head. The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and in visions of God he took me to Jerusalem, to the entrance of the north gate of the inner court, where the idol that provokes to jealousy stood.

Ezekiel 8:3 NIV

In visions of God he took me to the land of Israel and set me on a very high mountain, on whose south side were some buildings that looked like a city.

Ezekiel 40:2 NIV

Ezekiel was not given a vision of what to do. He was not given a strategy or a plan. He was given a vision of God. The vision of what to do will always flow from the vision of who God is. The person who searches for vision and purpose independent of God will find the mist. The person who first seeks a right and accurate vision of God will find, as Ezekiel did, that the vision for their life arrives in the wake of that encounter. 

God himself made clear how much this matters to him in another book of the Bible, when he rebuked Job’s friends for misrepresenting him:

After the LORD had finished speaking to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “I am angry with you and your two friends, for you have not spoken accurately about me, as my servant Job has.”

Job 42:7 NLT

An inaccurate vision of God does not just limit us; it misrepresents the one who holds our destiny. Getting God right is not a theological exercise. It is the foundation on which every other vision rests.

“Getting God right is not a theological exercise. It is the foundation on which every other vision rests.”

This is the choice the New Frontier calls every person to make. Not the “what, where, when, or how” of life—these are the questions the mist answers. But the “who” and the “why.” It’s not thoughtless living, drifting through a vanishing life. It’s the durable and indestructible life that Jesus himself lived (Hebrews 7:16), and that he made available to every person who chooses him.

When you choose that life—when you choose the eternal over the temporal, the who and the why over the what and the how—something happens within us that the world cannot explain.

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.

Acts 4:13 NIV

What the eternal vision produces is not status, credentials, or recognition. It produces the astonishment that comes when an ordinary life is made extraordinary by proximity to Jesus. This closeness to Jesus is what 2 Corinthians 3 describes as transformation from glory to glory—the “metamorphoó” we explored in the Frontier of the Heart. The connection between the Frontier of the Heart and the Frontier of Vision is not coincidental. Spiritual vision and spiritual transformation are not two different things. They are two descriptions of the same reality. When we see God clearly, we are changed. And when we are changed, we begin to see ourselves and others with eternal vision.

The temporal vision produces a life that vanishes like the mist. The eternal vision produces a life that echoes.

Remember, dear brothers and sisters, that few of you were wise in the world’s eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you. Instead, God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all, and used them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God.

1 Corinthians 1:26–29 NLT

God’s vision for us has never been limited by our temporal status. He chose the unschooled fishermen. He chose the boy at the bus stop dreaming of being First Officer Spock. He chose the men who had accolades that are considered important in the world but are ultimately temporary—the professional football player, the Division I collegiate athlete, and the Olympic hopeful—who now lead a spiritual community changing lives across nine campuses in the Bay Area. He chose you. Not because of what you have accomplished. Not because of the vision you had for yourself. Because of the vision he had for you before you were born—a vision more durable, more expansive, and more lasting than anything the mist could ever contain:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

Jeremiah 1:5 NIV

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The frontier of vision for the church

The individual is not the only one who faces the choice between temporal and eternal vision. The church faces it too. And churches, like athletes, have expiration dates—something proven not just by declining attendance and closing buildings but by something far more sobering: the word of the Lord becoming rare within them.

The boy Samuel ministered before the LORD under Eli. In those days the word of the LORD was rare; there were not many visions.

1 Samuel 3:1 NIV

A church without eternal vision does not always look like it is dying. It can be busy. It can have programs and plans and full calendars. But busyness is not the same as hearing. Activity is not the same as spiritual perception. The word of the Lord becomes rare not because God stops speaking but because a walk that produces the hearing of his word has been replaced by the management of religious activity. 

“The word of the Lord becomes rare not because God stops speaking but because a walk that produces the hearing of his word has been replaced by the management of religious activity.”

The church that chooses temporal vision—measuring itself by attendance, visibility, and institutional momentum—will eventually discover what the athlete discovers. The game ends. The mist clears. And what remains is the question of whether anything eternal was built.

Eternal vision is not ambition dressed in spiritual language. It is not the ability to cast compelling pictures of a preferred future. It is the God-given capacity available to every Christian to perceive the invisible spiritual dimension of our present reality and live from that perception. In the Bible, Abraham saw what did not yet exist and trusted the one who had promised it—facing his own old age and his wife Sarah’s barrenness without weakening in faith, fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised (Romans 4:19-21). That is vision. Not ignoring reality but seeing more of it than the physical senses can report.

Many of the obstacles we face, the difficulties and delays we experience in building our lives, are not random. The evil one is specifically targeting our vision and our hope. What feels like circumstance is often spiritual opposition aimed at the most valuable thing we carry: our sense of what God has planned for us.

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

John 10:10 NIV

The thief does not come for our possessions. He comes for our vision. He comes for our hope. He comes to convince us that the mist is all there is—that the temporal is the only reality and the eternal is a fantasy. The person without spiritual vision will interpret every attack as a physical problem requiring a physical solution. Paul names what is actually happening:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood [contending only with physical opponents], but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this [present] darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly (supernatural) places.

Ephesians 6:12 AMP

The person without spiritual vision will exhaust themselves fighting the wrong battle. Knowing this shouldn’t produce fear, but turn us to the one who can help us win:

When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities [those supernatural forces of evil operating against us], He made a public example of them [exhibiting them as captives in His triumphal procession], having triumphed over them through the cross.

Colossians 2:15 AMP

When a Roman general won a great victory, the defeated enemy commanders were stripped of their weapons, chained, and marched through the streets of Rome in public view. The message was unmistakable: these enemies are real, they were powerful, and they have been completely defeated. That is the image Paul uses. Jesus dying on the cross for our sins was a public triumph. Christ disarmed the spiritual forces operating against us and paraded them as captives. The war is over. The victory is declared. Every person who follows Jesus stands on the ground of that declared victory.

But the victory does not mean the opposition is gone. Imagine a criminal who has just been arrested and handcuffed, sitting on the curb waiting for the police van to arrive. He has no weapons. He is not going anywhere. The arrest is complete. But while he waits, he is shouting — threatening, intimidating, trying to convince everyone that the arrest did not happen. A handcuffed criminal can still kick; he can still cause real harm while the van is on its way. 

This criminal—this spiritual enemy—cannot separate us from God. He cannot reverse the impact of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. He cannot prevent the resurrection. But he can afflict, oppress, deceive, and wear us down in the present. He uses the one weapon he still has: his voice. He wants us so focused on the noise that we forget about the handcuffs.

When he becomes unruly, the answer is to call the guard. The reinforcement is Jesus. The warden is God. We were never meant to handle this battle alone (Matthew 11:28-30)—especially because there is more than one prisoner. The spiritual forces Paul names in Colossians 2 are plural, structured, and persistent. Which means calling on God is not a crisis response. It is a daily practice—a walk with God that keeps every Christian covered in a spiritual environment that never fully quiets down.

When the servant of the man of God got up early the next morning and went outside, there were troops, horses, and chariots everywhere. “Oh, sir, what will we do now?” the young man cried to Elisha. [16] “Don’t be afraid!” Elisha told him. “For there are more on our side than on theirs!” [17] Then Elisha prayed, “O LORD, open his eyes and let him see!” The LORD opened the young man’s eyes, and when he looked up, he saw that the hillside around Elisha was filled with horses and chariots of fire.

2 Kings 6:15–17 NIV

“Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.” This is the prayer of the New Frontier for every Christian, not just the spiritually mature. Not a prayer for more resources or more people. A prayer for sight. Spiritual vision is what allows a person to see the handcuffs instead of hearing only the threats. It is what gave Paul the cultural intelligence to become all things to all people (1 Corinthians 9:19-23)—not compromising the message but understanding the world well enough to enter it lovingly.

“Spiritual vision is what allows a person to see the handcuffs instead of hearing only the threats.”

It is the quality described in 1 Chronicles 12:32:

… from Issachar, men who understood the times and knew what Israel should do …

1 Chronicles 12:32 NIV

The men of the tribe of Issachar possessed spiritual vision. They understood the times. They could see what was happening spiritually, and therefore they knew what they and their fellow Israelites should do. 

When we walk with God and see spiritually, we will no longer be deceived by the darkness, intimidated by our fears, or robbed of our dreams. We will not be overwhelmed by the age of AI or succumb to the enmity of polarization. We will not despair in the loneliness of our time or become consumed by the hopelessness so pervasive in our times of great conflict—both military and social. We will instead choose to conquer these battles with the faith that we worship the God who keeps our times in his hands:

But I am trusting you, O Lord. I said, “You alone are my God; my times are in your hands. Rescue me from those who hunt me down relentlessly. Let your favor shine again upon your servant; save me just because you are so kind!”

Psalm 31:14–16 TLB

When we walk with God and see spiritually, we will gain the confidence to act physically. What eternal vision does God have for your life? Are you ready to walk with him in a way that transforms your life from ordinary to extraordinary?