I stand before you today a hair under 6 feet 1 inch. Among the men, I am the shortest in my family. My father stands 6 feet 2 inches, my grandfather 6 feet 4 inches (before he started shrinking). My brothers stand 6 feet 3 inches and 6 feet 7 ½ inches. My oldest brother Jay is the tallest. Jay was predicted to be 6 feet 4 inches and Matt and I were predicted to both be 6 feet 2 inches. Matt apparently stole an inch from me and reached 6 feet 3 inches. But Jay has always been the tallest in our family.
At 6 feet 7 ½ inches Jay draws a lot of attention. My father in law was so amazed the first time he saw Jay he requested a picture. (Powerpoint) My father in law stands about 5 feet 4 inches. When Jay was in college, he went on a work and witness trip to Mexico. At that time he only stood 6 feet 5 inches. But he returned with stories of the amazement of the children at the worksite. Obviously Jay was their favorite person to spend time with. He was gigantic and probably the biggest person any of them had ever seen. He said they would climb onto a ledge that put them close to his height, and then they would jump onto his back, grab hold of his hair and yell CABALLO! Caballo means horse and he would run around with them holding onto his shoulders and head.
Time magazine wrote an article on a man from the Ukraine named Leonid Stadnik. (Put up pictures on PowerPoint. Stop at third picture and leave up until I stop talking about him.) He currently stands 8 feet, 4 inches tall, seven inches taller than a man from Tunisia listed by the Guinness Book of World records as the tallest living man. Stadniks unusual growth began after a brain operation at age 14. Although he was once able to work as a veterinarian at a cattle farm, he had to quit three years ago after his feet were frostbitten because he couldn’t afford proper shoes for his 17-inch feet. He sleeps on two beds joined together lengthwise and moves in a crouch through the small one-story house he shares with his mother. He weighs 440 pounds and suffers from constant knee pain. His friends are trying to organize a trip to the Carpathian Mountains to show him that there is something in the world taller than he is.
I’m sure each of you knows someone who is head and shoulders above the rest. We have several very tall people in our own church. What is it about tall people that grab our attention? We are fascinated with them. I find it interesting that we have several stories in the bible that speak specifically about tall people. So it would seem to me that humanity has always been fascinated by those with extra height.
I want us to look at a story today in the book of Numbers, chapter 13. Numbers 13: 1-2, 26-33. While you find Numbers let me give you some background on the story before we begin. Moses has brought the people out of Egypt and towards the Promised Land. They have already seen many miracles; they crossed the red sea on dry land. They received food from the sky and water from a rock. They have seen the presence of God with them each day and night, a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Moses even had a tent outside of the camp where he went to meet with God and when he returned his face was radiant as a result of meeting with God.
Numbers chapter 13, let’s first read verses 1-2. The people are now close enough to the Promised Land to send men to explore the land. God instructs Moses to send one leader from each tribe. And so Moses does just that. He selects one leader from each of the twelve tribes and sends them on their way to explore the land. After forty days they returned from exploring the land. Let’s pick the story up in verse 26-33.
Interestingly only verse 27 talks about the land, which is what God asked them to go and look at. These leaders of the tribes come back and they say Moses, listen man that land there is great. It is just like you said, it is a land of plenty, look we even brought back a sample of the grapes, but…..Now to be fair to these explorers, Moses had indeed asked them to report on the people who lived there and the types of cities they lived in. But interestingly enough I don’t see those instructions in the message God delivered to Moses. The message God delivered to Moses in the 2nd verse was to go explore the land, which God was giving to them. He didn’t say go and check out the enemy and see if you can beat them. He said go check out the land I am giving you.
Could you imagine a 16 year old on their birthday? The parents decide to surprise them with a car. So during the middle of the party they gather everyone together and tell their child to go outside and check out the car they are giving to them. Everyone else stays inside and their child returns and says to the parents, wow, that is a great car. I mean that is the best car I could have hoped for, but I just don’t see how I can afford it. I mean I have a part time job, but I can’t make the monthly payments on a car like that.
That is what the Israelites are doing. They return from the land the Lord is giving them and say wow it is great, but the people who live there are powerful. In fact, we look like grasshoppers compared to them. They were so negative that they gave up on even trying to take possession of the land. Their attention was grabbed by the size of the people who lived there. Just like each of us they were fascinated and in this case fearful of these giants. I suppose we can’t fault them too much. I would focus on the people too if I went some place and everyone was as big as my brother, or this guy from the Ukraine.
So what was their problem? They were looking through human eyes. They were perceiving the situation from a human perspective. They had received a mandate from God but they allowed their circumstances to distract them. When we receive a mandate from God, we cannot allow circumstances to distract us. When we know God wants us to go in a certain direction, we cannot allow circumstances to distract or discourage us.
The second thing I want to emphasize from this passage is that God desired to take the Israelites to a place they could not reach without Him. Has anyone here seen the movie Charlie and the Chocolate factory? Not the new one, but the old movie? That was a favorite movie of mine. But could you imagine if the Promised Land was full of umpalumpas? You know what an umpalumpa is? Those short little orange men who worked in the factory. The explorers surely would have returned with much more excitement. Moses, you gotta check this out. This is going to be so easy. The land is awesome; the grapes are so big that two of our guys had to carry them together. And this is the best part, the people who live there are all little people. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it myself. Let’s pack up and just go over their right now; it won’t even be a fight.
What need would the Israelite people have for God? None. Oh yeah, thanks God for freeing us from slavery and for working that miracle there at the Red Sea, you really bailed us out of that jam. But now I think we have got things under control. God intentionally put the Israelites in another situation where they had to trust in Him. The only way the Israelites were going to take possession of the land was for God to truly deliver them into it. And then everyone would hear about how great and how powerful the God of Israel was.
When the explorers went into they land, the people there looked like giants. Is there a giant that you are facing today? Giants teach us to trust in God, giants when defeated glorify God because he receives the credit. The Lord wants to take you places that you have never imagined. Maybe God is calling you to work with Him in a way that you cannot do on your own. You want to say yes, but you’re distracted by the potential difficulties. I want you to recognize today that God wants to take you where you can’t go on your own. As an 18 year old, I had the opportunity to go live in another country for a year. I wanted to go. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I could learn the Spanish language, but there was no way that I could go. Two weeks before I left I came up to the altar on a Sunday morning and I prayed Lord, I need you to move my feet onto the plane and keep them moving until I come back home. And he did. God is waiting for you to step out and trust in him to help you do something or go somewhere that you could not do without his help.
I certainly can’t ignore the role of Caleb in this story. The report that Caleb brought was different from the rest. Caleb silenced the people and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.” Caleb didn’t say anything about the people in the land, nor did he speak of how difficult the task at hand could be. His report was full of faith and not only a belief but a demonstration through action. He didn’t only say, we can do it, he said let’s go, I am sure we can do it.
The fact that Caleb was ready to go showed the veracity of his faith. Faith and action go hand in hand. James 2:14-17 “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
Santiago 2:14-17 dice: Hermanos míos, de que le sirve a uno alegar que tiene fe, ¿si no tiene obras? ¿Acaso podrá salvarlo esa fe? Supongamos que un hermano o una hermana no tienen con que vestirse y carecen del alimento diario, y uno de ustedes les dice, “Que les vaya bien; abríguense y coman hasta saciarse” pero no les da lo necesario para el cuerpo. ¿De que servirá eso? Así también la fe por si sola, si no tiene obras, esta muerta.
Caleb’s faith was proven when his actions matched up with his words. Last week I emphasized that God wants us to act like God acts. God puts actions behind his words and we should be a people of action as well. Action is living out and demonstrating our faith.
When God gives you a mandate, don’t allow yourself to be distracted by the circumstances. For the Israelites it was the people who lived in the land that distracted them from their mandate. You can fill in the blank for what distracts you from doing what God has asked of you.
When you come up against a giant, remember that God desires to take you someplace where you can’t go on your own. And our faith if only expressed in words and never in action is not really faith at all. Our God is a God of action, and so we must also be a people of action as an expression of our faith.
