Envision with God: Believe and See

By Francis S. Oda

As a pastor and leaders, I have seen that most people are walking backwards into their futures! All their reference points about the future are usually drawn from the past. Envision with God turns you around to face what is ahead with God’s guidance. After all, aren’t all God’s promises in the future?

The practice of “envisioning with God” will not only turn you to your future in God but give you something many Christians lack: an absolute certainty in recognizing the voice of God. A common practice, even among mature Christians, is seeking confirmation for something their Father God has told them. It is strange, to say the least, that a child would not recognize his or her father’s voice. This will no longer be a problem as one faithfully envisions with Father God.

Envisioning with God erases the division between the marketplace and pulpit. You will discover that God doesn’t recognize this division. His desire is for unity. Too many Christians are schizophrenic in terms of their spiritual identities. This has weakened families, churches, businesses, communities, and nations. No such division should exist as the many of the powerful examples in the books testify.

Envisioning with God in a simple and systematic way will change your life, causing you to face your future and recognize the voice of God. Envisioning will engage you in a day-to-day dialog with your Father, and unify the roles of your spiritual identity, propelling you to your destiny, facing forward into God’s promises.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781098015671

Book preview

Chapter 1

God’s Vision

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

—Proverbs 29:18 (KJV)

All In

Crawling in traffic along the freeway to downtown Honolulu, I grappled with a dilemma. About three months earlier, my wife Caroline and I had become Christians. We had spent our first seven years of marriage in the Bay Area with Caroline going to graduate school, and then both of us working.

We lived in San Francisco during the summer of love, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and in Berkeley during the riots! We loved it!

Returning to Hawaii to have a family, we were seekers but not finders. We were raised in a traditional Christian denomination but had renounced it when it was discovered ministers of our small San Francisco church were having extramarital relationships with members. After all, this was San Francisco during the heyday of hippiedom, but this was too much for us. We dismissed the Christians as hypocrites and then sought enlightenment in Zen meditation, encounter, human potential movements, but nothing stuck.

In our early thirties, we happened into a movement called EST. We thought this was it! Caroline’s good friend Virgie, and her husband Mark, were also in the movement. This led to our having dinner with Virgie’s brother Roy and his wife Joan, who had just returned from Cincinnati. We were going to talk them into joining EST.

As the evening progressed, a strange thing happened. The very attributes we were trying to gain from EST, we saw in Roy and Joan. We asked Roy what had changed them in Cincinnati. He told us about their son, Robert, who was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. As a result, Robert was severely challenged physically, mentally, and developmentally.

For three years, our friends went to every medical center that might be able to help Robert. Roy was a chemical engineer with a good job and the means to afford the best care for Robert, but no one could help him. Then one day, a business friend told him to go to a certain church in Cincinnati where they prayed for healing. Roy asked him how he knew since he was Jewish. The friend said that he didn’t go to the church but donated to it because it helped his business! This struck Roy, who was from a Buddhist family, as being very strange, but as a father he was willing to do anything to help Robert. He and Joan went to the service of this large church and went forward with Robert for prayer. By their account, Robert immediately began to heal!

They went home rejoicing for the healing but totally bewildered. With the logic of an engineer, Roy said that there were two options. One was that there was no relationship between the prayer and Robert’s healing; it was just a coincidence. The other was that there was a connection that they didn’t understand and should investigate.

They felt that the second option was the only intellectually honest choice, so they began to attend services. Not only did they give their lives to Jesus, but within a few years Roy became a leader in the church. Then God told them to return to Hawaii. Roy didn’t want to return because he knew his father would disown him for becoming a Christian, which His father did! (Ultimately, Roy’s whole family, including his mother and father, came to the