Failure To Launch Series

How many of you suffer from “atychiphobia” [a-ticky-phobia]? [Raise my hand.] Aw, common on … really? I’m the only one? It might help you if I tell you what it means, amen? “Atychiphobia” [a-ticky-phobia] is the “fear of failure” and, trust me, it’s a very, very common phobia. I have it every week when I sit down and write my sermons. I pray. I ask God to give me the words, to guide me in my writing but the “atychiphobia” [a-ticky-phobia] … the fear of failure … likes to hang around my desk as I write. Will my words inspire? Educate? Or will they just bounce off the walls and fall dead on the floor?

But …

I also know that God is with me … giving me the words, guiding my writing and on Sunday morning, as I deliver these words to you, I know that God will send them right where they need to go. For some of you this morning, my words may be a pleasant experience. For others, just so much noise that you hope will end soon. But for some, these words may be the exact words that you need to hear right now and God gave me these words just for you. You see, once these words leave my lips, I no longer have control over them … God does. My only part in this is that I am obedient to the words that He has given me and I deliver them from up here so that God can do with them what needs to be done … and I don’t even need to know what that is. Again, I just need to be obedient and trust God.

Atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] doesn’t just affect individuals, it can affect whole groups of people … like it did the day that the Israelites stood on the banks of the Jordan River and stared at the land on the other side and debated whether it was safe to cross over and begin settling down in the land that God had promised them … a land flowing with milk and honey. From their side of the river, it looked promising but they couldn’t see very much of it … obviously … and so, their joy and their excitement as they stood on the banks of the Jordan began to give way to atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] as their imaginations began conjuring all kinds of doubts and fears and reasons to fail. Rather than just cross over and begin settling down in their new home … their first permanent home … they decided to send over a group of spies but when the spies came back they only made the Israelites’ atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] much, much worse.

The spies were gone for 40 days. I can imagine that the people were anxious to hear their report. Forty days was long enough for them to begin to wonder if the spies had been discovered and taken prisoner … or worse. It must have been a tense 40 days, vacillating between excitement and hope, anticipation and fear … their imaginations running wild with thoughts of owning this beautiful land on the one hand and the high cost of failure if the people there overpowered them on the other … going from trusting God one moment to wondering if God was out of His mind bringing them there or if Moses was out of his mind and just imagined that God wanted to give him a land that was inhabited by strong, well-armed warrior tribes who a reputation for winning battles and repelling invaders.

When the spies returned, they only made the people’s fears worse. Sure, they brought back evidence that land was indeed fertile but the people who lived there ... the Amalekites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites … were strong, and the towns were well fortified and very large. “We are not able to go up against this people, for they are stronger than we. The land that we have gone through,” reported the spies, “ is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people that we saw in it are of great size … and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them” (Numbers 13:28, 31-33).

And so, fear swept over the people and crushed their hope. They began to weep and wail and complain to Moses and Aaron. “Would we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! Why is the LORD bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become booty; would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?” And so, the Bible reports, they resolved to pick a new leader and head back to Egypt … you know, the place where they were forced to make bricks without straw and to build magnificent palaces and government buildings and temples to the gods of their oppressor.