Proverbs 29:18 for Men: The Hidden Cost of Living Without a Plan

You think your problem is discipline. It might be that you cannot picture your life in thirty years.

Proverbs puts it plainly. Where there is no vision, people cast off restraint. When you cannot picture who you are becoming, the future cost of today's choices stops registering, and you default to whatever feels good right now.

What's easy to miss is this: vision isn't manufactured from nothing. Like a dream at night, it's compiled from images you've actually seen, a marriage that held steady, a grandfather who stayed present, a man who finished well. If you never had those models, you're not just unmotivated. You're missing raw material.

This conversation names what it actually takes to build that kind of vision, and why the older men you choose to be around matter more than any goal-setting exercise.

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Transcript

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You have to have the capacity to imagine your future, not just in terms of your dreams, but in terms of specific vision for what your life could look like as you age, 10 years from now, 30 years from now, 50 years from now. You want to have concrete images in your mind about where you're going and how you're going to get there. I have a couple of key friends that I'm I'm close with who have pretty rocky relationships with their parents or who have no relationship with their grandparents. And when they think about their marriage, one of the things that's been healing and helpful to them is actually to interact with people in their 70s who have warm and healthy marriages, to interact with people in their 60s who are the grandparents that they would like to be, to interact with people in their 50s who are stewarding the end of their career in a really powerful and compelling way. That you can't imagine or dream with ingredients that you haven't personally seen or been exposed to. Just like when you dream at night, you're always compiling random bits of what you've seen throughout the day, and your mind is bringing those to the front of your dreams. Likewise, when we daydream, we need to be able to compile different pictures pieces, different pictures of who we are and what we've seen to help us imagine ourselves in the future. And that vision that we have for the future is actually, I think, the most energizing way that we're motivated to do the work we need to do, both internally, emotionally, intellectually, mentally, spiritually, physically, financially, vocationally, that that vision is what drives and rightly propels us to work hard. There's a proverb I want to share with you. This is Proverbs 29, 18. Where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law. Where there's no vision, the people are discouraged, isn't the way you could translate that. Or where there's no vision, the people shrink or they cast off restraint. And what that means for us is that when I don't have a vision for my life or an imagination for my future, it's easy for me to cast off restraint, either to spend money I shouldn't, to do things physically I shouldn't, to interact with people the ways I shouldn't. That when you don't have a goal or a motivator driving you, you kind of go, well, who cares? I'll just maximize my pleasure in the short term. And so developing a clear picture of who you want to be 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 40 years from now is important work, not just for setting a goal or a vision for your future, but also for energizing your work in the day-to-day. And that vision needs to be developed through a few ways. Number one is by exposing yourself and your life to key, wise, mature, older people that you go, what they're doing in their 70s is what I want to be doing in their 70s. And you imagine yourself like them, but you. You want to be around wise, healthy people that you go, what they're doing as grandparents in their 60s, that's what I want to be doing as grandparents in my 60s. One of my resolutions that I have that motivates my day-to-day work is resolved to never have my grandchildren spend need to spend an hour in daycare. Now, here's why that I like that visionary picture is one, that means that's financially motivating for me. I want to make and spend money such that my wife andor I are freed up to be really present grandparents. It's financially motivating. Number two, it's relationally motivating. I want to have the relationship with my kids such that when they are in their 30s, they are going, I would love for dad and mom to be around. I would love for them to spend time with my kids. Those are part of so it's both financial and relational. But the vision I have for that is actually comes from what I've seen in my mother and father and the way that they're living their lives. And I kind of compare them to other grandparents and I go, I want to be like grandparents like these, not grandparents like those. And so this vision for how I want to live my life propels or propels my day-to-day. And so having that 30-year vision helps me be energized in the moment. And so when I'm tempted to cast off restraint, to give in a distraction, to mail it in either relationally or emotionally or financially, part of what I remind myself of is this vision of who and how I want to be 30 years from now. What do I want my life to look like and feel like? And so if you don't have a picture of what you want to feel like and do and what you want your weeks to be like in 30 years, you have to do the work to specifically clarify that vision because it'll be highly motivating for you. It'll help you resist the temptation to cast off restraint and will energize you to be the man that God is calling you to be this week and this month because you know the life you want to live 20, 30 years from now. And so for those of you who don't have healthy parents or don't have healthy grandparents, one of the most important things you can do is get around mature, healthy, God-honoring, God-fearing people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, because actually being around those people, especially through the church, is going to be really formative and help you imagine your marriage, help you imagine your parenting, help you imagine your financial life such that it gives clarity to what really matters for you to do this week, next week, next month, next semester. So develop a clear vision for your future. Develop a clear vision for what you want your life to look like and make steps today and next week that'll help you get there.