Tonight we are going to be talking about Noah. I know you all know about Noah…he built a big boat and it rained for 40 days, and after a few hundred days, they got off the boat…everyone knows that part…however, do you know Noah’s last name?

Noah’s last name is Z-A-R-K, Zark…even Sunday school kids know about Noah Zark (Noah’s Ark).

Well tonight we are going to be talking about Noah, and his vision. My wife and I recently got back from Moberly, Missouri. What is in Moberly, Missouri you might ask…Well nothing to be exact.

Well there is this one thing. There is Central Christian College of the Bible in Moberly that I got accepted to with a full tuition scholarship, so we had to go visit the college.

Before we left, we checked everything we could check, we looked a reviews and information, talked to everyone we could talk to, and then we bought our tickets. We got advice from people we believe are truly seeking God’s will.

Then we prayed that God would reveal His will to us in this situation.

We sought more Godly advice through our parents.

Then we prayed some more, all the time asking God to get rid of this opportunity if it was not his will for us.

A few weeks later, we were 99.9% convinced it was His will for me to attend this school, so we bought our plane tickets, reserved a car, and talked to the people we would be staying with.

Like I said, we were 99.9% sure that it was God’s will for us to go to Moberly, but we were leaving that .1% chance up to God at this point.

When we got to Moberly, we realized after day 2 of our 6 day trip that this was not God’s plan for us.

However, in my personal life, I learned a lesson that is so valuable to me that I would gladly pay all that money if I had to do it again.

The lesson I learned is this: When God calls, you listen.

It isn’t every day that we hear or feel God call, but when he does, you had better be ready to leave everything and follow him. Pretty simple, but lets look at my situation more.

My wife’s family is all local. My family is all local. Both of our jobs are here. My wife is still in school. We don’t have the money for this. There were discouragements along the way. Why should we go to this place?

We felt God leading us. Simple as that. We knew it was God’s will for us to go. When God calls, you listen.

In Genesis 6, God tells Noah to build this huge boat. This boat would fit almost perfectly in the Madera High stadium…it was gigantic.

God also tells Noah that he is going to destroy the entire earth and everything that has the breath of life.

You have to try to picture Noah here. He was about 500 years old, and God tells him to build a ship about half the size of the Titanic. And Noah listened.

If you have ever seen the Titanic movie, or watched a documentary on the Titanic, you’ll remember that there were approximately 3300 people onboard including crew and passengers and only enough lifeboats for about half of them…that is crazy!

However, do you know how many lifeboats Noah built? None. Why? Because when God called, Noah listened and trusted God.

For Noah, obedience meant a long-term commitment to a project. Many of us have trouble sticking to any project for more than a few weeks, whether or not it is directed by God.

Isn’t it interesting that the length of Noah’s obedience was greater than the lifespan of people today. For 120 years Noah worked at constructing the Ark. The only comparable long-term project is our very lives.

If a person wants to experience life as God intended, then he or she had better be seeking God’s vision for his or her life because it’s vision that give us purpose, it’s vision that drives us and it’s vision that enables us to live above mediocrity.

When we seek and embrace the vision that God has for our lives, it is then that we truly can find God’s will.