Grasshoppers Or Overcomers?

I remember one time walking into a Cracker Barrel restaurant and seeing on a shelf in their Country Store a book called Worst-Case Scenarios. When I first saw this book I thought it was sad that someone could make money by selling a book that contained people’s worst nightmares. I wondered who would even want to buy such a thing, and then it hit me that lots of people would buy it; because there are individuals who love talking about their problems, who love to gossip, and who like to hear of doom and gloom.

There’s one song on the TV show “Hee Haw” that demonstrates this, when they start singing, “Gloom, despair, and agony on me. If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” I think many people are addicted to watching the News, because it’s always bad news! People love to dwell on negative things. However, if we are exposed to seeing the worst side of every situation then how can we ever focus on the promises of God? Negativity is catching, as we learn from the story of a hot dog salesman who was both hard of hearing and had bad eyesight:

A man who lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs was hard of hearing, so he had no radio. He had trouble with his eyes, so he read no newspapers. But he sold good hot dogs. He put up sign on the highway advertising them. He stood on the side of the road and cried, “Buy a hot dog, mister!” And people bought his hot dogs. He increased his meat and bun orders and he bought a bigger stove to take care of his trade.

He finally got his son to come home from college to help out. But then something happened. “Father, haven’t you been listening to the radio?” his son said. “Haven’t you been reading the newspaper? There’s a big recession on. The European situation is terrible. The domestic situation is worse.” Whereupon the father thought, “Well, my son’s been to college, he reads the papers and he listens to the radio, and he ought to know.”

So the father cut down his meat and bun orders, took down his signs and no longer bothered to stand out on the highway to sell his hot dogs. His sales fell overnight. “You’re right, son,” the father said to the boy. “We certainly are in the middle of a big recession.”(1)

Many of us have been around negative thinking our entire lives and our minds have been saturated with it. We have been conditioned to think negatively and we have been trained to have a bad attitude and a bad outlook on life, and this is the reason why some of us live in anxiety and have no peace.

John C. Maxwell tells us that negative thinking blows everything out of proportion: “Some people treat a drip from a leaky roof like a hurricane. Everything is a major project. They find a problem in every solution.” If this sounds like you then you are probably a subscriber to Murphy's Law which states, “Nothing is as easy as it looks; everything takes longer than you expect; and if anything can go wrong, it will and at the worst possible moment.”(2)

God’s Word is going to challenge us this morning to have a more positive outlook on life and to rely on God in faith a whole lot more. We will be looking at the mistakes made by some people in the Bible who had a negative outlook, namely the Israelites; and we will learn from their mistakes. We will come to realize that a positive attitude, which is ultimately called “faith,” is the very thing that will carry us into receiving what God intends for our life. We will learn that, perhaps, we need to heed Maxwell’s Law, made up by John Maxwell, which says that nothing is as hard as it looks; everything is more rewarding than you expect; and if anything can go right, it will and at the best possible moment.(3)

Our Inheritance Is a Promised Land (vv. 25-27)

25 And they returned from spying out the land after forty days. 26 Now they departed and came back to Moses and Aaron and all the congregation of the children of Israel in the Wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh; they brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land. 27 Then they told him, and said: “We went to the land where you sent us. It truly flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.”

We read in verse 25 that “they” returned from spying out the land after forty days. Who were “they?” In verses 1-16, we read that God commanded Moses to select able men to go spy out the land of Canaan in order to report back on the inhabitants and the resources of the land before the Israelites entered the country. So, Moses chose Caleb from the tribe of Judah, Joshua from the tribe of Ephraim, and ten more men from the remaining tribes to bring back report.