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.
When the men returned and gave their report to Moses, it was noted that the land was all that God promised it to be. In Exodus 3:8, God made a promise to Moses. He said, “I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey.” I believe God’s desire is to bring us into a land flowing with milk and honey; that is, in a spiritual sense. He wants us to walk in spiritual abundance.
Too many of us, however, are afraid to spy out the land for fear that we will be killed. We have been living in the wilderness for so long that we have grown accustomed to this lifestyle. In the wilderness all we have to do is sit back and wait for the manna to fall; but in order to lay hold of something much more appetizing than just bread, we will have to work and we will have to fight just like the Israelites who had to fight the present occupants of Canaan.
Many of us are afraid of taking on more spiritual responsibility so we stay right where we are; saying we want our lives to change, or we want our church to do better, and complaining that we aren’t seeing God’s blessings; but never willing to do what it takes to improve our situation. The way to improve our situation is to take a step of faith in obedience, and follow God wherever He ask us to go, or do whatever He asks us to do, no matter how hard it might seem and no matter what the initial cost may “appear” to be.
Finding a Problem in Every Solution (vv. 28-30)
28 “Nevertheless the people who dwell in the land are strong; the cities are fortified and very large; moreover we saw the descendants of Anak there. 29 The Amalekites dwell in the land of the South; the Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the mountains; and the Canaanites dwell by the sea and along the banks of the Jordan.” 30 Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses, and said, “Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it.”
Joshua, Caleb, and the other spies had just reported how the land was flowing with milk and honey just as God had promised; however, some of them were not able to focus on the goodness of the land. The obstacles loomed larger in their minds than the blessings that God intended, and they saw only the problems at hand.
Too many of us are able to find a problem in every solution. This is usually signified in our lives by an excessive use of the word “but.” The spies reported that the land was flowing with milk and honey; however, they said “nevertheless” there are really strong cities and numerous inhabitants. That word “nevertheless” is similar to the word “but,” and it negates everything a person says in the first part of the statement. It causes us to lose focus on the goodness of God.
A number of years ago God revealed to me that I had a negative outlook on life, and this revelation came from the mouth of a child. One of my pastor friends had a son about five or six-years-old, and he kept calling me a name that I initially thought was something crude. Every time he saw me he said, “Hey but!” Well, I had a talk with his father and asked him if he were calling me a bad name, and the father said, “I wondered about that myself; however, I got to thinking, and he probably calls you that because you use the word ‘but’ a lot.” After I heard that, I was overwhelmed with remorse to think that I had been such a negative person that even a child would pick up on it.
Why do we say “but” so many times? Why can’t we lay hold of God’s blessings when they are within reach? It’s called “FOF” or the “Fear of Failure.” We are afraid to venture and check out the Promised Land for fear that we’ll be let down. In response to the fear of failure, some of us reason, “If you don’t try then no one can ever say you failed.” This might be true, but if we don’t try to follow where God leads us, then we will never succeed in seeing His promised blessings. We will remain right where we are, frustrated; and perhaps experiencing a deafening silence from God.
If we have wound up where we are in life because of our own choices, then we cannot blame God. If, however, we decide that we want our life to change, John Maxwell says we need to: “Take a risk. Climb out on a limb where the fruit is. Too many people are still hugging the tree trunk, wondering why they are not receiving the fruit of life.”(4)
If we look to verse 30, we can see the kind of attitude we need to have in order to enter the Promised Land. Caleb said, “Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it!” This is what you call an attitude of faith. It’s the same attitude that David had when he encountered Goliath. I know you’ve heard this before, but it’s a good illustration: “When Goliath came up against the Israelites, the soldiers thought, ‘He’s so big we can never kill him.’ David looked at the same giant and thought, ‘He’s so big I can’t miss’.”(5) Caleb was faith-filled about his circumstances and he focused on the bounty of the land instead of the difficulty of the obstacles. If we are ever going to reach the place that God has called us, then we need to keep focused on the promises instead of allowing ourselves to become distracted by the difficulties that lie at hand.
Many People Have a Grasshopper Attitude (vv. 31-33)
31 But the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we.” 32 And they gave the children of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, “The land through which we have gone as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great stature. 33 There we saw the giants ( the descendants of Anak came from the giants); and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.”
We see in verse 33, that after hearing the negative report that some of the spies gave, that the Israelites felt inferior and incapable of possessing the land. We read here that they were as “grasshoppers in their own eyes.” If we are exposed to negative thinking, or even criticism, for too long then we begin to think that way ourselves and we become like grasshoppers in our own sight. We feel like tiny insects that are helpless to do anything.
We read in Proverbs 23:7, “For as [a man] thinks in his heart, so is he.” Whatever way we think in our heart is pretty much what we will become. If we lack the confidence to believe that God wants to use us in His kingdom, then we may never be of service. If we think that we are insignificant and as helpless as a bug then that’s what we are, and that’s also who we will be in the eyes of other people too, for we read in verse 33, “We were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight [as well].”
I want to illustrate for you the difference between a “faith-filled attitude” and a “grasshopper attitude.” “There’s the story of two shoe salesmen who were sent to an island to sell shoes. The first salesman, upon arrival, was shocked to realize that no one wore shoes. Immediately he sent a telegram to his home office in Chicago saying, ‘Will return home tomorrow. No one wears shoes.’ The second salesman was thrilled by the same realization. Immediately he wired the home office in Chicago saying, ‘Please send me 10,000 shoes. Everyone here needs them’.”(6)
The first shoe salesman had a “grasshopper attitude” in which he saw only obstacles in his path. The second salesman had a “faith-filled attitude” in which he saw only great potential. You might even call this the difference between a pessimist and an optimist. As Christians, we need to learn to become optimists, or develop a “faith-filled attitude,” because the Lord promises to work all things together for our good (Romans 8:28).
If we had a “bumblebee attitude” instead of a “grasshopper attitude” we’d “bee” a lot better off! “According to a theory of aerodynamics, as demonstrated through wind tunnel tests, the bumblebee should be unable to fly. Because of the size, weight and shape of his body in relationship to the total wing spread, flying is scientifically impossible. The bumblebee, however, being ignorant of scientific theory goes right ahead and flies anyway and makes honey every day,”(7) making the world a sweeter place.
If people never told us that certain things were impossible we would probably go right ahead and do them. If someone ever comes to you and tells you that you will never get anywhere in life; or if a family member tells you that your family has really bad luck and nothing good can ever happen to you; then act like a bumblebee and pretend that you never heard a word they said. Ignore what people tell you, and listen to what God tells you, and be obedient to the Lord and lay hold of His promises!
Time of Reflection
When we read the rest of the account found in Numbers 14:39-45, we see that because the Israelites didn’t possess the land at exactly the moment when God told them to, that they wound up losing it. They tried to take the land at a later time and many of them were killed in battle, never to enter the Promised Land, and the entire army was defeated and driven back. If God tells us to do something for Him, and promises that it will lead to great things, then let’s not focus on the obstacles and continue doubting Him. If we delay for too long we will lose many good things that lie in store. Forget all the negative things you’ve been thinking or been told, get rid of that grasshopper attitude, and step out in faith; and you will enter a life of spiritual abundance!
If you are not a Christian and God is calling you into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, then He’s inviting you to enter the Promised Land of His kingdom. Do not delay for too long or you will miss a great blessing; the blessing of eternal life. We do not know what tomorrow holds, or whether we will live long enough to have another chance at accepting Jesus into our heart; so please do not hesitate to receive the forgiveness of your sins and eternal life that is found in Jesus Christ.
NOTES
(1) John Maxwell, The Winning Attitude (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1993), p. 129.
(2) Ibid., p. 129.
(3) Ibid., pp. 129-130.
(4) Ibid., p. 102.
(5) Ibid., p. 41.
(6) Ibid., p. 38.
(7) Ibid., p. 42.
