“Aren’t you tired, Mrs. Travers?” Walt asks Mrs. Travers of her troubled past. “We all have our tales, but don’t you want to find a way to finish the story? Let it all go and have a life that isn’t dictated by a past?”
“George Banks, and all he stands for, will be saved. Maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that’s what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.”
Photo and quote from the Disney film Saving Mr. Banks
I don’t know who the script writers were, but they hit the nail on the head! They probably don’t know that, but it happened!
There is a key principle in the Word that was dramatized in that scene.
Somehow or other we in the church have allowed the concept of imagination to be bogarted by the world and new age. If you start talking about imagination and dreaming around Christians (not all), you get that sort of “down the nose” look from the doctrine police.
I was on the “police force” for a long time.
But not because I didn’t like to dream or necessarily thought that imagining was wrong but because I didn’t know that Jesus and the Word clearly endorsed it; in fact, the Word says that we were created to operate by it. The problem was that no one I had listened to, put it in “those words”; words like imagination and dream and I didn’t know how to connect the two (faith and imagination) in a way that I thought would please God. I was taught that imagination was a new age concept... “Danger, danger, Will Robinson!”
It wasn’t until I started seeing that the concept of imagination is how hope becomes faith, that I began to question things.
“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:18c-19 | NIV
(as it is written, “I have made you a father of many nations”) in the presence of Him whom he believed—God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did;
Romans 4:17 | NKJV
The Word is Full!
There are so many scriptures that tell us that we have been created in God’s image and if we have accepted Jesus into our lives and become born again, we are now full of God Himself. Our spirits have been transformed and we are “in Him” and He is “in us”. Jesus said that we will do the things that He did and more. That’s where the legalistic camp drops the ball.
They rely on the flesh to accomplish things that can be done but when it comes to doing the miracles of Jesus, they back off and drop to a “sovereignty” position to, in essence, say that Jesus didn’t really mean what he said.
Which moves us to the place of realizing that if we can’t “see” it in our heart first, we won’t “see” it come to pass.
I don’t know whether Walt Disney was saved or knew Jesus, but just like God used a donkey to speak at one time, he will get the truth out even if it comes through a non believer; sad to say that He’s been having to use them a lot because the church has been deceived into places of hanging onto one truth to the exclusion of another. But we won’t get into that discussion right now.
The line where Walt talks about imagination, lines up with scripture and it’s values:
“George Banks, and all he stands for, will be saved. Maybe not in life, but in imagination. Because that’s what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.”
Mary Poppins is really a “type” of Jesus. She’s supernatural and comes to restore order and save the family.
Thank God!
I thank God for a restored, righteous imagination. God has given us all a brand new heart. In Christ, we have the choice to believe the truth and imagine what it would look like walked out in our lives, the lives of our families and friends and in the whole world. He doesn’t force us to believe anything; it’s always our choice but when we get a picture of what restoration looks like... (we imagine it based upon what God has said and what He has for us in Jesus), everything changes!
So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.
Mark 11:22-24 | NKJV
The Real Reason
If you don’t believe that what He said right there is true, you will write it off.
Believing is being convinced that what God/Jesus/Holy Spirit says is the truth and living in complete and total expectation that it will happen just as He says.
Imagining His word is true for you, is the way that it moves from the page of an ancient, historical text into reality.
Let’s stop focusing on what we see and limiting what God can do because we’re looking at “all the reasons it won’t work.” Let’s take scripture and imagine what it would be like to see God do the things He says can happen; blind eyes seeing, deaf ears hearing, captives set free!
And just to make sure we’re not limiting Him, He means in more ways than just the literal sense in that scripture but the literal as well!
That can happen.
It happens, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:18 | NKJV
Start dreaming and imagining the things God has said He wants to bring to pass in your life, the lives of those around you and the world, and we will see the imaginary become reality!