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.
But that what atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] … the fear of failure … does. First, it paralyzes you. You assume that you’re going to fail, so you don’t move, you don’t try. “It’s a harsh task master, leading its victims to a life of restraint and retreat. The worst of its side effects is that it results in a persistent refusal to try anything new” (Jeremiah, D. What are You Afraid of? Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Pub.; 2013; p. 90).
It can also become a self-fulfilling prophesy. They were afraid to enter the Promised Land because, in their minds, the cost of failure was too high. They convinced themselves that the people who lived there were too powerful, that they would be slaughtered by them if they had to face them in battle, and that their women and children would be taken captive and forced to serve as slaves … which is sadly ironic because their solution was to return to Egypt where they had been slaves and where the Pharaoh and the people of Egypt were sure to severely punish them and enslave them once again.
You see, the Israelites forgot one important thing … God. They looked at their situation through human eyes. They measured their human strength against what was needed to accomplish their task, and they saw that it was lacking, that failure was not only sure but that it would have brutal consequences. That’s understandable. We all do it all the time. Their “sin,” if you will, is that they didn’t count on God. They didn’t count on the fact that God had promised them this land and if He promised it to them that He would make it happen … something that Joshua and Caleb tried to point out to them. “If the LORD is pleased with us,” they pleaded, “He will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land that flows with milk and honey. Only, do not rebel against the LORD; and do not fear the people of the land, for they are no more than bread for us; their protection is removed from them, and the LORD is with us; do not fear them” (Numbers 14:8-9). The people’s response was to threaten to stone Joshua and Caleb.
Here’s the thing about atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia]. Sometimes the consequences of not trying can produce results that are far worse than if you tried and failed. God’s anger burns against the Israelites. “How long will this people despise me? And how long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of the signs that I have done among them? I will strike them with pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you” … meaning Moses and Aaron … “a nation greater and mightier than they” (Numbers 14:11-12).
Moses pleads with God. He calls upon God to show mercy … and God does but the consequences for giving in to their atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] is still pretty steep.
“As I live,” says the LORD, “I will do to you the very things I heard you say: your dead bodies shall fall in this very wilderness; and of all your number … from twenty years old and upward, who have complained against me, not one of you, except Caleb son of Jephuneh [Jeff-fawn-nah], and Joshua son of Nun. But your little ones, who you said would become booty, I will bring in, and they shall know the land that you have despised. But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall be shepherds in this wilderness for forty years, and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness” (Numbers 14:28-33).
Here’s the other thing about atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] … the fear of failing. Because they listened to their fear and refused to trust God, they didn’t get to taste the sweet fruit of victory either. When we let our fear get the best of us, when we are so certain that we will fail that we don’t even try, then we don’t get to experience the rewards that come from trying. Our fear tells us that we will fail but our faith should tell us that we should trust God and at least step forward into the river of doubt to see what success, what rewards lie on the other side of our fear, amen?
Because they listened to their doubts … because they gave into their fears … because they lacked faith in God and didn’t trust in His promise, they were not allowed to enter the Promised Land but their little ones, their children and grandchildren God promised to bring into His Promised Land … but only if they wouldn’t do what their parents and grandparent did and give in to their doubts and fears.
God once again brings His people to the Jordan River. On the other side lies the Promised Land … a land flowing with milk and honey. A land that is still filled with strong people and fortified towns. The powerful tribes of the Amalekites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, and Amorites still live there. The children of the freed slaves face the same obstacles, the same challenges, the same fears and doubts that their parents and grandparents did. The question is, do they cross the river or not?
They face the same challenges, they face the same fears, the same doubts … with one very major exception. Moses, the servant of the LORD, is dead. The impact of this is hard for us to imagine. Moses was the one who started all this. Called by God to lead the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, they had seen the relationship that Moses had with God and the incredible, amazing, miraculous things that He had done through Moses. That generation, however, was gone. For 40 years, God used Moses to lead and sustain the children of the Hebrew slaves in the wilderness … but they weren’t there when God used plagues to convince the Pharaoh and the Egyptian people to let His people go. They weren’t there when God parted the Red Sea and then drowned the greatest army in the Middle East in it. They weren’t there when God descended upon Mount Sinai and Moses and the people entered into a covenant with Yahweh. They weren’t there when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the 10 Commandments.
Once again God had led the people, the descendants of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, to the edge of the Jordan River. “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants,’” God reminds Moses, “I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Still, Moses was … and still is … considered a great man, a great leader, and a great and faithful prophet. “Never since has there arisen a prophet like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face. He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the LORD sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servant and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel” (Deuteronomy 34:10-12).
And now that responsibility had fallen on Joshua’s shoulders as he, along with the children and grandchildren of his now deceased friends and fellow tribesmen, looked across the river and struggled with the decision to cross or not. They, along with Joshua, stand at a point of great transition … a place where atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] likes to hang out because the future at this point is so uncertain and the “fear of failure” can use our imagination to stir up all kinds of fear and doubt, amen?
Actually, they face a number of transitions at this point. The first involves actually crossing the Jordan River … physically going from one region … the wilderness … to another … the Promised Land. They stand on the brink of going from being a band of wandering ex-slaves to becoming a nation and a people in their own right. But there is one transition that Joshua must face alone … the transition from being a useful servant of Moses and the people to being their leader at this momentous moment in the history of Israel. “Joshua son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands on him” (Deuteronomy 33:9).
God takes it upon Himself to give Joshua a pep talk before He sends him across the river and into the unknown challenges that face him and his people. It doesn’t start out very, well … encouraging. “My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites” (Joshua 1:2). Nothing like starting out being reminded that you are filling some very, very big shoes … the shoes of a leader and prophet like Moses. But we have to remember that this is a time of transition. In the last chapter of Deuteronomy … the one right before Joshua 1 … it said Moses “was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Bethpeor, but no one knows his burial place to this day” (Deuteronomy 34:6). At the time of his burial, says the Bible, Moses was 120 years old but his “sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated” (Deuteronomy 34:7). When God says that Moses is dead, He is letting Joshua know that he is absolutely and unequivocally in charge. Moses isn’t going to mysteriously show up out of nowhere like he did in Egypt.
From this point one, the people of Israel are going to have to look to and rely on Joshua’s leadership as the Israelites move forward to fulfill and receive the promise of God to their ancestors. While the mantel of authority and leadership have been passed from Moses to Joshua, the authority and leadership that Moses had and passed on to Joshua didn’t come from Moses but from God. While the Israelites’ human leadership had changed, their true leader, God Himself, had not … so the Israelites need not fear as they go forward and face the unknown.
“Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, as I promised Moses,” says God (Joshua 1:3). Think about what we’ve been talking about and what God has just said here. The reason that the Israelites didn’t cross the Jordan the first time was because they gave into their atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] … their fear of failure, right? They were frozen with fear. Have you ever have had one of those dreams where a monster is chasing you or some great danger is bearing down on you and you can’t move? Fear paralyzed the Israelites and they were forced to stay on the wilderness-side of the Jordan. Again, God reminds them of His promise … the promise that He made to Moses … to give them the land that He had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God promised them the land but they had to demonstrate their faith in God and His promise by taking action … by literally stepping out in faith. Listen carefully. God didn’t say that as soon as they crossed the Jordan and set foot in Canaan that the land would automatically be theirs. He said that every place that they touched with the souls of their feet would be theirs. Think about it. When you’re overcome with fear, every step can require a huge effort, amen? And with every step you’re tempted to stop or to turn and run … as the Israelites wanted to do when they first came to the Jordan River. God will give them every piece of land that they step on but they have to dig deep, they have to call upon their faith and trust in God, and then take a step … and another step … and another step. If they only take 10 steps, then they will only receive 10 steps of the Promised Land. If they walk over half of the region, they will only get half of the promise. If we only trust God for five seconds … if we only take one step and expect God to do the rest … guess what? If we take two or three steps or a dozen, freak out and run back to Egypt, so to speak, guess what? God tells Joshua that if the people trust Him, they could inherit all the land from Lebanon to Egypt, from the Euphrates all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. If they allow their fear and their doubt to override their faith and trust in God, then they may inherit a great deal less or, worse case scenario, end up with nothing like their ancestors did. Remember, sometimes the consequences of not trying can produce results that are far worse than if you had tried and failed. The other thing to remember about atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] is that when we let our fear get the best of us, when we are so certain that we will fail that we don’t even try, then we don’t get to experience the rewards that come from trying, amen?
If God has called you, do you think that God is not going to equip you for that mission or give you what you need to accomplish the purposes to which He has called you? The obvious answer is “of course not,” right? I mean, if God calls you to perform certain tasks but doesn’t give you what you need to accomplish His purpose or just stands by and watches you struggle, well … our faith in God is misplaced, isn’t it? Sometimes He calls us and helps us, sometimes He doesn’t and you can never know or trust which one it is, amen?
Of course, God will never call us to do something and not give us the means to accomplish His purposes. As He promised Joshua, God will not only give us what we need … such as wisdom or power or strength or whatever we need … but He will be with us and go through it with us. “No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life,” God promised Joshua. “As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you” (Joshua 1:5). How can you or I stand on the promises if we don’t know the promises of God, amen? Joshua … and the people of Israel … not only heard the promises of God through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses but they were now standing on the very brink of one of God’s greatest promises … a land that they could call their own … and land where they could put down roots … a land where they could raise a family and their descendants become as numerous as the stars or the grains of sand on a beach … but in order for that to happen, Joshua and the people must first step into the water and cross the River Jordan … as we must not only know the promises of God for our lives but look to people like the prophets and the saints to remember that the God who keep His promises to them will keep His promises to us and then take that first giant step of faith.
To make His point, God tells the Israelites to carry the ark … His house … before them as they start to cross the river … and the second that the priests’ toes touch the water … bam! The waters part for the Israelites as they did for their ancestors at the Red Sea. Then God has them march up to the biggest, most fortified city in Canaan … Jericho … and again makes them a promise … one that they will have to accept and act upon in faith.
“You shall march around the city, all the warriors circling the city once. Thus you shall do for six days, with seven horns before the ark. On the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, the priests blowing the trumpets. When they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, as soon as you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat, and all the people shall charge straight ahead” (Joshua 6:3-5).
Again, what if the people listened to their “atychiphobia” [a-ticky-phobia] … their fear of failure … and decided that it was too risky to march around the strongest and most fortified city in the region? I mean, what is a bunch of marching and trumpets and blowing a ram’s horn and shouting going to do against walls that were 13 feet high and four feet thick and protected by watchtowers that were over 28 feet tall (readscripture.net) … not very tall or impressive to us but very formidable in Joshua’s day. The guards would laugh … the soldiers would come streaming out … and the Israelites would be slaughtered and most probably forgotten.
What if they only circled the city for one day and gave up because nothing happened? What if they marched around the city for days before their fear got the best of them and they gave up? What if they gave up marching on the sixth day, complaining that nothing was happening and nothing was going to happen even if they marched around it seven times blowing trumpets? But, just as God was with Moses and their parents and grandparents in the wilderness, God would be with Joshua and His people. He went with them in the wilderness. He went before them as they crossed through the Jordan River, and He was with them as they marched around the walls of Jericho shouting and blowing trumpets and rams’ horns … and they received the fruit of their faith and the waters of the Jordan parted and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. Each step in the wilderness, each step into the Jordan River, each step around the city of Jericho was a step of faith and an anecdote to their atychiphobia[a-ticky-phobia] and … even if God doesn’t’ go before us in a mobile tabernacle … our success as the result of our acting in faith is proof that God was with us … which, as I’ve already pointed out, would never have happened if we had listened to our atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] and never taken that first or last step of faith, amen?
Three times God tells Joshua to “be strong and courageous.” Be strong and courageous and God will give them possession of the land (Joshua 1:6). Be strong and courageous so that they may be successful (v. 7). Be strong and courageous “for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go” (v. 9) … just as He has always been with them wherever they have been, amen?
God commands us to be strong and to be courageous and then He tells us how. Remember, God doesn’t command us to do something unless He gives us the means to do what He asks, amen? He not only tells us to be strong and courageous, He not only tells us how to be strong and courageous, but He gives us the means to be strong and courageous.
“Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful” (Joshua 1:7-8).
God doesn’t just command us to go forth and then let us grope around blindly. He has given us a map … a clear-cut set of rules and laws … to follow. And when we follow them, we prosper, we succeed. I have tried to set my own objectives. I have struck out on my own, and it has always been hit-or-miss … which then opens the door for my atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] to come in and wreak havoc with my soul and play games with my heart and mind. But when I listen for God’s Word, if I follow God’s Word, well … God’s voice drowns out the voice of my atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] and I find my strength and courage in His Word. I find my strength and courage in the promises that have come true over and over again in my life, the promises that have come true in the life of His people both past and present, when we follow God’s voice and we stick to the path that He has laid out for us despite what our fears are telling us, amen?
God tells us to memorize His law … to talk about it constantly … to meditate on it day and night … and that, my brothers and sisters, is how God can be with us as He was with Moses and with Joshua. If I have God’s word in my mouth, in my mind, and in my heart continually … then God’s thoughts, God’s laws, God’s promises also go with me, as He says, wherever I go. But we have to do more than just read the Bible or memorize the Bible or meditate on God’s Word … all good things, don’t get me wrong … but we have to do something more. We have to “act” on them. God tells us to be careful to ACT in “accordance with all that the law that my servant Moses commanded you” (Joshua 1:7) … to be careful to ACT in “accordance with all that is written in it” (v. 8). You can read about God’s promises, you can talk about God’s promises, you can meditate on God’s promises, you can even pray for and about God’s promises but guess what? Nothing … absolutely nothing … will happen if that is all that you do, understand? Joshua and the people of Israel could not prosper or be successful in conquering and developing a home and a nation for themselves if they just sat on the wilderness side of the Jordan. The actions … or inaction … of their predecessors proved that, amen? Their success began with the first step and continues on today as their ancestors continue to listen and to act upon God’s calling, God’s direction … and the same is just as true for us as well. We need to pray, to listen, to read, to study, to meditate … but most of all we need to act on God’s Word, amen?
At the end of his life, Joshua reminded the people that God had in fact kept His word to him and to His people:
“Behold, this day I am going the way of the earth. And you know in all your hearts and in all your souls that not one thing has failed of all the good things which the LORD your God spoke concerning you. All have come to pass for you; not one word of them has failed” (Joshua 23:14).
And I am willing to bet that if you look back over your life … if you look back over the history of this church … you’ll find that that is also true for us, amen?
God’s commandments are God’s enablements. God doesn’t tell us to do something and not enable us to accomplish it. “Just as I was with Joshua and my people in the past,” says God, “so I will be faithful to you today.” As one author put it: “[God] has put no limits on what He is willing to do for you and me. His actions might even exceed what He has done in the past” (Jeremiah, Ibid., p. 94). He is able, as Paul told the congregation in Ephesus, “to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20).
Joshua didn’t go out on a wing and a prayer or a gut feeling or trust in his own instincts. He went with God’s promises and He had God with him. As author J. Oswald Sanders puts it:
“The land belonged to Israel by direct gift from God, Possessor of Heaven and earth. The land became theirs experientially ONLY when they walked around it and actually took possession. This fundamental spiritual principle carries over into the experience of the New Testament Christian. ‘According to Your faith let it be to you” (Matthew 9:29)’” (Sanders, J.O. Robust in Faith. Chicago: Moody Press; 1965; p. 72; emphasis mine).
Having the promises of God is no guarantee of success if we listen to our atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia], our fear of failure, and do nothing. God’s responsibility is to make the promises and give us the means to accomplish His purposes but it is our responsibility to heed His call and to act upon His wishes by stepping out in faith. Are you standing on the brink of your spiritual Jordan? Are we, as a church, being called to step into the river of our doubt? Do not listen to your atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] … listen to God and then put one foot in front of the other and watch as your atychiphobia [a-ticky-phobia] begins to disappear and continues to disappear with each and every step of faith that you take, amen?
