As Christians, most times nobody tells us what happens when you get the wrong vision down in your spirit. In this post I share what God has revealed to me about conceiving the wrong vision in the secret place and how to get back on track to see his plans for our lives with fresh eyes.
For a very long time there’s always been this one scripture that I’ve had a love/hate relationship with. Part of me loved the scripture because it spoke to my unbelief. It redeemed me from pessimism and called me to expectancy for the future. The other side of me hated it because it triggered the anxiety of being unsure of what kind of step I was taking. Was I was one step away from deeper understanding or one step away from perishing. Proverbs 29:18 reads, “Where there is no vision the people perish.” Any person who tries to go somewhere with their eyes closed will most likely hurt themselves pretty badly, I mean that’s common-sense. And it’s from wise proverbs like this that we as Christians have been reminded time and time again that having a vision is crucial. So much so, we’ll recite every pastors favorite new years eve scripture “Write the vision down plain so that all who run may read it’ (Habakkuk 2:2) as well.
Now these are all pieces of scripture and truth, so there’s nothing false about what people have been teaching us. However I’ve come to the revelation there is something incomplete about this wisdom. As I’ve breathed in this “visionary” perspective for my life, over time I harshly learned that nobody tells you what happens when you get the wrong vision down in your spirit. What does a believer do, when they’ve been praying, they’ve been seeking the face of God day in and day out but something about that vision just isn’t fitting right. And by “not fitting right” I mean, there’s delay after delay when trying to execute the vision, things fall through right when you think you’re getting close, the spiritual confirmation you get from other people doesn’t really relate to what you’re going after, and a whole list of other ill-fitting scenarios. What if the vision you’ve been conceiving in the secret place is the wrong one?
Now I know you might be thinking “Jodi girl, stop with all the deep stuff, you can’t catch the wrong vision when you’re always spending time with God”, and if you had asked me at any other point in my life, I would have agreed with you on that. But what has become painstakingly clear to me in my walk with the Lord right now is that downloading the wrong vision for your life is 100% possible. I know this because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for some years now, and I’m just now seeing that in this season. The reality is, sometimes the vision we have for ourselves might not be what God’s vision is for us.
This lapse in spiritual clarity and fantasy begins when we interpret scripture just a “little bit wrong”. You see, we are taught through verses like Matthew 7:7 that we should ask and it will be given to us. This is the truth, however if you dig a little deeper into the “protocols” of effective prayer, 1 John 5:15 reveals that there is a bit more to it than asking for what we want. If we truly want to participate in effective prayers the scripture says, “If we ask anything according to His will, He hears us, and we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we already possess what we have asked for”. The operative word in this scripture is praying according to the will of God. Now despite what your love language is, I know that being heard is one of the most powerful things that happens in relationship. The opportunity to be paid attention to and cared for through simple listening. That is what the scripture 1 John 5:15 is telling us, that when we ask like Matthew 7:7 instructs us to do, we are also heard. The next step after being heard is seeing something manifest from that conversation, seeing fruit be yielded from that one discussion. That is what we are not capable of bringing forth. We do not yield any fruit by our own power, therefore the only way accurate vision can be manifested from prayer (a conversation with God) is if the will of God abounds in the details of that vision. I’m not sure about you but a majority of my prayer time consists of a long list of personal desires. Yet now I’m learning that prayer would be so much more “promising” if I spent that time seeking for what the will of God is for my individual life.
If I asked right now, “do you know the will of God for your life?” would you be able to give an answer that’s specific to your life? Don’t worry, most people will say no and that’s okay because what I’m trying to get at is not about whether or not you’re praying correctly, the point is that without an intimate awareness of the will of God for our lives we are simply praying and “manifesting” prayers abounding in our own will and desires. Our human tendencies, make it possible to go into prayer daily, and conceive vision brought about by our own will, and asserting our own agenda.
God gave me a medical analogy to explain what this prayer struggle actually looks like in the spirit. He reminded me of this medical term called ‘pseudocyesis’ which is essentially doctor jargon for ‘false pregnancy’. The way this false pregnancy happens is not due to miscarriage or a technological errors in an ultra sound. This phenomenon happens when the mere thoughts and desires of a woman are perpetuated in her mind. According to WebMD it is described as “the belief that you are expecting a baby when you are not really carrying a child”. People with pseudocyesis (false pregnancy) have many, if not all, symptoms of pregnancy… psychological factors can trick the body into "thinking" that it's pregnant.”*
What makes this whole thing so convincing and hard to detect is that sometimes what we’ve been desiring actually appears. This is why we see so many people talking about “manifesting” these days. But God has been warning me lately that everything that glitters isn’t gold. Just because it looks like the right thing, or the true manifestation of what you’ve prayed for, it can very well be a false sign of pregnancy, or conception of a vision for your life that’s actually not God’s vision for you. I believe that many of us including myself are experiencing spiritual “false pregnancy” or are on our way there because we have been praying for our own will to come to pass.
Another aspect of pseudocyesis is that "When a woman feels an intense desire to get pregnant, which may be because of infertility, repeat miscarriages, impending menopause, or a desire to get married, their body may produce some pregnancy signs (such as a swollen belly, enlarged breasts, and even the sensation of fetal movement). The woman's brain then misinterprets those signals as pregnancy, and triggers the release of hormones (such as estrogen and prolactin) that lead to actual pregnancy symptoms.”
Have you ever had your mind and eyes dead set on something you desired so much because of all the loss, and pain, and hardship that you’ve gone through? It’s like instead of your trials killing your desire it actually amplified it? That is exactly where I’ve found myself this past month. Amid all of those amplified and intense desires, God has revealed to me that an intense desire for anything outside of Him is simply idolatry. Idolatry is like one of those sins everyone thinks they’re exempt from because they’re not bowing down to a golden calf, but idolatry can creep in through literally anything. And truth be told it often disguises itself as a virtue; things like ambition, justice, wisdom, etc. Which is easy to fall prey to, especially when those types of things are praised. But I want to challenge you to examine your ambition, your values, your need for justice and have your affections for those things superseded your desire to know what God’s will is in those areas? One way to tell whether if it’s an idol or not is by asking yourself “If God told me to walk away and stop pursuing this altogether would I do it freely.” If you struggle, then that is a sure sign that God wants to restore your vision by ridding you of images you’ve created and that you idolize.
So with all of this said, I challenge you to consider: What are you gazing upon beloved? Whatever that thing is that’s now God, shift your attention and stir your affections for the Lord once more.
The word of the Lord says that, If you are called then you are justified, if you are justified then you are also glorified (Romans 8:30). Those are the qualities of your redeemed nature, so why settle for external things that only seem like an answered prayer but don’t actually carry the top-tier fullness of God’s glory he has for your life?
*All info about pseudocyesis was sourced from this site https://www.webmd.com/baby/false-pregnancy-pseudocyesis#1
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