Are You One of the Ten, or One of the Two?

Numbers 13 tells the (perhaps familiar) story of the twelve spies going to check out the Promised Land. Very Mission Impossible-esque. Uh, minus the technology. They went for forty days, north, south, east and west, and checked out the land that God had promised to give them. They discovered God had promised them very good land! They also got a good look at the people living there.

Ten of them came back with a report of fear, and expressed a desire to back down from taking the land. “We’re like grasshoppers, and the people living there are like giants! eeeee!” Two of them came back with a word of faith. Caleb said:

“Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it!”

Are your circumstances making you feel this big?

Isn’t it remarkable that all twelve of them saw the same land, the same people, the same fruit, the same good stuff promised by God, and yet they came away from seeing the exact same thing with different perspectives? Out of the twelve, only Joshua and Caleb expressed a desire to trust God in His ability to deliver the land He’d promised His people.

The truth is, we have the same opportunity every day, with every situation we face. Fear and faith are attitudes we choose between when we view our circumstances. How we perceive each situation we find ourselves in will determine our action, our reaction, or our inaction. We can choose to see a struggle ahead of us, a dead end/no-thru zone, or we can look with eyes of faith and see an opportunity for our God, the God who is very able, to come through on our behalf.

Are you in a situation right now where you have to look with eyes of faith in the face of something that would instead cause fear? Are you hard-pressed and uncertain of how you’re going to make it through? Look to the Creator who loves you and wants a relationship with you. Bring your concerns to Him. Pray for Him to deliver you, then trust Him and wait for Him to move, or to tell you how to move. God is most certainly bigger than any situation we ever face. He is always able to deliver us. We have to choose to move forward in faith, and to put our trust in Him.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: Every day you have the choice to be one of the ten, or one of the two. You can choose to have faith in God when your circumstances don’t look so good, or you can choose to fear and back down, and not receive what God has promised you. Choose to believe!!