A Dream Or A Vision

A Dream Or A Vision

Nehemiah 1:1-11

I want you to meet Jay. From the time he was 9, Jay wanted to be a record producer. He even had the other kids start calling him Jay X. Jay X did not see much of a reason to pay attention in school, because one day his big break was going to come. He’d start out as a rapper.

By age 16 he decided to drop out of school to help devote himself to his upcoming career. He didn’t need teachers getting on his case. He laughed at them for the salary they were making. He was going to make money big time. He’d meet the right person and be discovered. He also got tired of his mother telling him he needed to get a job if he was not going to go to school. He grabbed some things and said when he made it big, hed’ be back. He got him a one way ticket to LA to be discovered.

That’s when it happened. He met one of the top video guys from BET. The guy asked him to do his thing on the microphone. Jay X was good, real good. Without even talking to an agent he was able to secure a half million dollar contract. His first recording was the bomb, shooting to the top of the charts. His first video was really great. He had money pouring out his pockets and women sreaming at him left and right. That’s when he saw the girl of his dreams. She was pulling at his arm, and trying to shake him a little bit. She kept yelling hey, hey hey. He said, no baby it’s Jay, Jay, Jay, Jay X.

Her voice went from soft and sexy to deep and angry. Finally he heard, the bus driver saying, hey, this is the last stop, you have got to get off this bus. All his success had merely been a dream. There was no big contract in the music industry waiting on him in Los Angelos. Some three years later, Jay still has no diploma, no job, and he calls an abandoned house home. Jay X had a dream, but he didn’t have a vision.

Have you ever had a dream about something in life only to have life give you a wake up call and you discover, this is not what you had intended to happen. In our dreams, everything work perfectly. We make the first string the first year we go out. We get the honor roll without trying. Our parents never get on our case. We score the winning shot with 2 seconds left. Or The job is perfect, the kids always behave, we can do everything we could do 20 years ago , and our husband or wife is always happy with us. Everybody takes our advice and life is easy. Dreams are a dime a dozen and when the pressures of life hit they fade away like the morning mist.

Today we take time to recognize those of you who had more than simply a dream to make it from one grade to the next. You put some hard work behind that dream, and changed that dream into a vision. A dream is nothing more than a simple hope for something to happen. I hope to be this or to do that. In order for our lives and for the church to be renewed, we need more than a dream. We need vision for our lives. Vision involves seeing things that are not yet in sight, but knowing that God can make it a reality. As a fifth grader, you can see yourself as a pediatrician saving a baby’s life or as a lawyer defending the cause of the poor. Vision involves a goal that we are working toward the getting involved in the process.

We know we can’t get that medical degree without first getting past the proficiency exams. Those exams are just stepping stones God has before us to get us where we want to go. We have definite steps to follow to make things happen. We expect some setbacks, some disappointments, and some heartache, but we never lose sight of the ultimate goal. You invest yourself in a vision today, because you know it’s going to be worth it.

Let’s look this morning into the book of Nehemiah and begin to discover discover the difference of a how a dream and vision affects the course of our lives. For our lives and for our a church to be renewed it must be willing to move beyond dreams into the area of vision. Sometimes holding on to dreams can cause us to miss out on what God is requiring of us. We think the dream is just going to happen the some kind of luck. Jay X, knew what he wanted to be be, but he wasn’t willing to pay the price to make it happen. God may need to shatter the dream in order to give us a vision.