You Were Not Willing To Go Up

So this morning we're going to be returning to our study of Deuteronomy chapter 1. Last time we were in this chapter was a few weeks ago, and we saw how the Lord reminded the Israelites through Moses of their wanderings in the wilderness. They had been at this mountain, at this place, on the verge of going into the promised land some 40 years before. And they've gathered back there after 40 years later, and Moses recounts to them, this is what I said to you this time, this 40 years ago. And it would have been prominent in their minds that they had not listened. And that their fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers, anyone who was over 20 years of age, standing there the first time was now not standing there the second time, save Moses, Joshua, and Caleb. In that passage, we saw that the Lord had set the land before them and told them to go in and to possess it. This morning, we're going to pick up where...

The Israelites respond to that command. Moses says, here's the land, go into it. How did they respond and what did they do? That's our text this morning. What we're going to see is Moses recounting the response. The response that the people had was to send spies into the land to scope it out. And then they brought back a report, a bad report, a report that gripped the people with fear. and led to their grumbling against the Lord, which is in turn what led to them wandering in the wilderness. My hope this morning is that God will help each one of us to see that when we grumble against God, even as he's provided all that we need, we ought to repent of our fear and of our narrow-minded perspectives that are common to us, that we repent of those things that keep us from obeying him and from going into the land or doing the next thing that he's put before us for us to do.

Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord from Deuteronomy chapter 1, verses 22 to 28. This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. Then all of you approached me and said, let us send men before us that they may search out the land for us and bring back to us word of the way by which we should go up and the cities which we shall enter. The thing pleased me and I took 12 of your men, one man for each tribe. They turned and went up into the hill country and came to the valley of Eshcol. and spied it out. Then they took some of the fruit of the land in their hands and brought it down to us, and they brought us back a report, and they said, It is a good land which the Lord our God is about to give us. Yet you were not willing to go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. And you grumbled in your tents and said, Because the Lord hates us, he has brought us out of the land of Egypt to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us. Where can we go up?

Our brethren have made our hearts melt, saying the people are bigger and taller than we. The cities are large and fortified to heaven, and besides, we saw the sons of Anakim there. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. When you read scripture, you ought to make a habit of putting yourself in the story and asking yourself, what would be going on in my heart if I was standing there with them as they were hearing this? because it gives context and understanding to what might have been going on, some of what might not have been written down as clearly. The text starts out with what seems like a reasonable request. Let us send before us men to search out the land for us and bring back a word of the way in which we should go up. It seems like a reasonable request. We want to go in. We want to know what the best plan of action would be.

Seems like they wanted to know the logistics of the invasion. But I'd ask you, if you were standing there on the border of hostile land, knowing that you're supposed to go in and take it, would you be more concerned with logistics or simply the fact that this is a war that's about to start? I think most of us, if we're honest, would say, we'd be more concerned about the fact that this is a war that's about to start, that we are about to engage in battle. They knew the land was occupied, that it wasn't an empty land. And so what would have been in their hearts as they were making this request? I'm convinced that what would have been in their hearts was fear. That fear was the thing that led them to make this request. In the verse just previous to this, in verse 21, Moses tells them, go into the land, possess it, and at the very end he says, do not fear or be dismayed. And then you came and approached me and said, can we send people into the land? There were people there.

They knew it was well populated and they knew it was going to be a fight. In Deuteronomy 1.7, as they're leaving the mountain, Mount Horeb, it says, Has anyone ever told you to go do something and you're like, that is going to be impossible? They say, I want you to go do this thing. And you go, you're crazy. Like, that's crazy. Now, you wouldn't want to admit that you would feel that way about something the Lord would tell you. But if you're honest, I think you will admit it. And say, there are times where you read in Scripture or something becomes apparent in your life that you have to do something that you think is unreasonable. That it's crazy. You're like, that can't possibly be what I'm supposed to do.

So you're scared. Do you know what one of those common things that people who are scared will ask for? It's almost a perfect indicator of whether or not they're scared. They will ask for details. They will always ask for details. They want to know, they want to answer the question, how? Because they can't see how. How are we going to do it? Which way are we going to go up? What are the cities like? How big are the people? They act as though those answers will assuage their fear. Have your fears ever been assuaged by the details of how difficult it will be? It doesn't work. We all kind of chuckle because if we talk about it in this way, we go, that's just crazy. Logistics, like if someone can lay out a plan, we look at it and we say, well, yeah, I suppose if everything went just that way, it would work, but there's no way it's going to be like that. It doesn't overcome our fear. Fear is a powerful,

thing. It's a powerful thing. It can paralyze you. It can cause you. Have you ever seen someone paralyzed with fear? I have a few times. Years ago when I worked for a tree company, I used to climb trees. And you'd get anywhere from, you know, high up would be 80 to 100 feet up in the air in a tree. For point of reference, these trees out here that are big trees, they're like 50 feet tall. So twice that high. So what happens when you get high up off the ground? Most people get scared. Some people are petrified of heights, but everyone's kind of just scared of them. You get nervous, you get up there, things start moving around. The wind's blowing, you feel like you're falling, the clouds are really disorienting. On two occasions, we had grown men freeze in the tree. They wouldn't talk, they wouldn't move, they were frozen, holding on.

And you couldn't get any interactions from them. One of the guys was only like 25, 30 feet off the ground. The other guy was about 70 feet off the ground. And he's up and in. What are you going to do? Like, hey, Mike, chill out, man. You're tied in. Don't worry about it. It'll be okay. Look, your rope's fine. Like, does any of that work? I'm showing him the details. I'm like, it'll be okay. And he's like, it's not going in. Because that's what fear does. It makes you not go in. What do you have to do with a guy who's frozen in the tree? What you have to do is you have to climb over to him.

And then you have to wrap him up like a lifeguard would wrap up somebody in the water. Put your arms around him, peel his hands off, and carry him down out of the tree, managing his rope and your rope like you're carrying a baby. And what you hope is that he doesn't freak out and start hitting you. Because that's what fear does. And that's the kind of fear that they would have had. And so when we talk about fear, it's easy to say, well, just don't be afraid. I wish. I wish it were that easy. It is true that we ought not to be afraid. And we are going to talk a lot about fear and how to avoid it, how to overcome it. But fear is not the sort of thing you just go, well, don't be afraid. That's silly. You shouldn't be afraid of that. It doesn't help. Neither do the details of how we're going to go up into the land. Maybe if we go up by this valley, we'll avoid the giants. But you can't avoid the giants because you're supposed to kill them all and take over their city. So you can't avoid them. You can't go be this little hidden group of people who are,

who possess the land. Like to possess the land is to evict all of the current residents. So how is their fear supposed to be overcome? What are they supposed to do about it? Ask these details. Maybe there's an easy way to go up. Maybe they're not as big as we've heard. Maybe they won't mind. Maybe they're pacifists and they'll just welcome us, just let us have all their stuff. We laugh at that. I mean, they're silly things to think, but when we're scared, don't you have just stupid thoughts? Just things like, it doesn't make any sense. Well, maybe. It doesn't help our fears. I'm convinced that their request of Moses was motivated by fear. And yet, the strange thing is in the passage is that the very next verse, Moses approves of their request saying, the thing pleased me. And I took 12 of your men, one man from each tribe, and he sends the men up. So you're left being like, well, was Moses afraid?

If you were Moses, would you be afraid? Would you have been afraid like the people? Maybe you would have been, but the question is, was Moses afraid? I don't think Moses was afraid like the people were. I don't think that all of the men, I'm convinced actually, and we know from Scripture that not all of the men were afraid at the report or at the prospect of going in. I don't think Moses was afraid. I think the difference between Moses and the people is that Moses sincerely wanted a game plan. But what they wanted was an excuse. He wanted to know, okay, well, how are we going to go in so that the Lord will deliver this land into our hands? And they were looking for the thing to say, see, we can't because of right there. That's dangerous. That's too hard. If you have something hard to do, something you're afraid to do, no amount of planning is going to help you overcome your fear.

And what I mean is not that you shouldn't make any plan or there should be no plan or that you should run in without having thought about anything, but rather that if you think you will wait until you've developed a plan that removes the fear, you'll never take action. You'll never take action. And in the end, that's what happens to the Israelites. We'll come to the point where we see in the next couple of weeks what the Israelites did. There was a point in the Lord's dealing with them where they said, no, no, we're going to go up. But they went without a plan. They went without ultimately the blessing of God and it didn't go well for them. The thing that we have to assess and be at work in determining in our own hearts is when we're scared, what is it that we want? Are we just searching for an excuse? Do we think that our fears are good enough reasons? Because we have real fear, does that make it acceptable?

I think the Israelites here had real fear. They had understandable fear. I think if we were standing there with them, we would have been one of them. I don't think that Moses or Caleb or Joshua looked at them and said, there's nothing to be afraid of. We don't understand why you're afraid. I think those men understood why the people were afraid, but understood that their fear was not something that was justifiable, but that their fear was wrong and that it was sin. If you have something hard to do and you're afraid of doing it, the only way to do it is to square up to the thing you're afraid of and to persevere by faith, not by your own strength. That will fail you very quickly. In fact, the reason you're scared is because your own strength has already failed you. So what are you supposed to do then? If you don't have the strength in yourself, you look to God to provide you with the strength that you need to do the thing that he's called you to do, and then you go do it.

You try. You make effort. And you don't try in a way that says, I'm going to try until it gets hard, and then I'm going to say, see, it was too hard. Of course it's going to be hard. You wouldn't be scared if it wasn't going to be hard. You wouldn't be scared if there wasn't danger. So then the spies turned, and they went up into the hill country, and they came to a valley, Eshcol, and they spied it out. They brought some fruit back, and they brought back a report, and Moses says this thing to the Israelites that I think would have Just been damning to them now as they stand there. He says, they brought back a report and said, it is a good land which the Lord is about to give us. And that's the whole report. That's the whole report as Moses records it here. It's not the whole report as it happened. That was only a part of the report as it originally happened.

In Numbers 13, we read about this sending the spies in. And actually that the Lord said, Moses, send the spies up and tell them to search out the land, to take inventory of the cities, to look and see if the land is fruitful, to do all of the stuff they did. That actually the Lord said, go do that. And have them come back and bring a report. And so they did. With the Lord's direction, go into the land, spy it out, and bring back a report. And they come back. And of the 12 men who went, two of them, Caleb and Joshua, were in the minority. The other 10 come back and they bring a report. And what they say toward the end of their reporting in Numbers 13, this is verses 31 to 33, it says, The men who had gone up with him, him is Caleb, said, We are not able to go up against the people, for they are too strong for us. So they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out.

Saying the land through which we have gone and spying it out is a land that devours its inhabitants. And all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. There also we saw the Nephilim. The sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim. And we became like grasshoppers in our own sight. And so we were in their sight. Now isn't it strange that when Moses recounts this 40 years later, he says, they brought back a good report when I just read to you the report they brought back. So was it a good report or was it a bad report? Well, that depends on who's listening and what they want to hear and whether they're fearful or not. Moses says, they brought back some fruit from the land flowing with milk and honey. They brought back a good report. What Moses was interested in was, is this land as good as the Lord said it was and will it sustain us as...

As we multiply, remember just a few verses before this, he's blessed them and said, May the Lord bless you a thousand times more. Is this land going to be able to sustain us? Is it going to be a fruitful land? Are we going to be able to live there and multiply and serve the Lord? Moses actually doesn't seem as very concerned about the inhabitants of the land. He's just not that worried about them. There's work to be done with them in putting them to death and getting rid of them. But he's much more concerned about receiving what God had promised to them, to the people. And so he says, it was a good report 40 years ago. The land is a fruitful land. But the people, the people were scared. Moses looked at those cities and said, what a blessing, there's already cities. The vineyards, there's already vineyards. Look at the grapes, look how big they are. Look what we're going to get. But the people were fearful.

The spies were fearful and they led the people to be fearful. Or maybe they sensed the fear of the people and they gave a report. They told the people what they wanted to hear. They knew they were afraid. And so 40 years later, Moses retells it and he proves that Caleb and Joshua's assessment was right. They were opposed to the fear. They said things like, we should go up. Surely the Lord will give this land into our hands. Joshua and Caleb remembered. They remembered the past. They remembered that not long before that, they were pressed up against the sea with Pharaoh's army breathing down on them and that the Lord delivered them, not just out of their hands, but he destroyed them, the Egyptians. How could the Israelites forget such a miraculous delivery? And yet they had. And so some men, Moses and Caleb and Joshua, have faith and they remember the Lord's mercies and his provisions. The others have only fear. To those who are faithful, it's hard to turn them out of their faithfulness. They're going to do what they believe God's called them to do. And you can come to them and say, but that's a scary thing and it's dangerous. And they say, it may be. This is what I always think of when I think of missionaries going to hostile countries. I just think that's scary. I didn't want to go over there. It's dangerous.

That's as far as my thinking gets about it. It's really difficult and dangerous and scary. I would not want to go do that. And I'm like, why do these people want to go do that? Have you ever wondered that? Like, why would you want to go to another culture? With another language and another customs, that's difficult enough. And then add hostility to it. What kind of person? Who in their right mind? Well, I would say that those that are more concerned about the mind of God and doing what they believe he's called them to do. are the only ones that are fit to do it. But that many people allow fear to be the thing. Like, well, if it's scary, if it's dangerous, it can't be said, it can't be done, and we really shouldn't even feel pressure to do it. When Joshua opposed them the 40 years previous and said, we need to go into the land, he was taking his life into his own hands. In the sense that the people might get angry enough at him to stone him or to kill him.

But he believed that God would deliver them. He believed that God would sustain them and that God would be faithful to what he had said. And isn't that really what a lot of our fears come down to really is simply the question of will God do what he said he was going to do for me? Maybe I believe that he'll do it for other people. But will he do it for me? Will he provide for me the things that I need to go through the thing and face up against the thing that I'm scared of? It's a very personal thing. Fear always is. Like generic fears or fears that are out there we can rationalize about, but when they're the fears that are in our hearts, it's a whole other ballgame. Moses says that it was a good land, that the report was a good report, a good land, which the Lord our God is about to give to us. And then he says, yet you were not willing to go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord.

And it's worth noting that he says it's the command of the Lord. Previous to this, it had not been stated that way, as a command that they go in. It was an encouragement to go in. It was a reminder of the promises made to Abraham. He was reasoning and pleading with them, but inside of that covenant, inside of those promises, was a command to take possession when it was time. And so now Moses is not saying we ought to go up. Look what the Lord has done. He's reasoned with them, but he's reasoning with the fearful people and their fear is getting more and more of a grip on them. And so now he says to them, our Lord has commanded us to go in, but you rebelled against the command. You've disregarded the promises. You've disregarded the blessings. You grumbled in your tents.

Not in their hearts, not silently, but out loud. You grumbled in your tents and listened to what they said. Because the Lord hates us. That had come to be their impression of the Lord. He has brought us to this place because he hates us. And that he's going to, we can read on. He said he brought us. Because the Lord hates us, he has brought us out of the land of Egypt to deliver us in the hands of the Amorites to destroy us. Have you ever felt that way? That God's just grinding you down because he doesn't like you and is just delighting in your suffering and in your destruction. What did the Israelites have to ignore to come to that opinion? They had to ignore all of God's faithfulness to them. And that's the thing about fear. Fear has to forget all that God has said and done. All fear is concerned with is what's right in front right now and its own assessment of it.

It's all fear cares about. They had just come out of Egypt with all of the wealth of Egypt. Not because they were quicker or stronger. You had an army chasing a group of women and children laden with all of their belongings. There's no way the army doesn't catch them. So how did they get away? The Lord opened up a sea, allowed them to pass through on dry land, and then destroyed their enemies to glorify himself. And now they come. To this land. And they've determined that the Lord's brought them to this point because he hates them. They've forgotten all of his provisions and all of his kindness. They forgot about having all of their children when Moses was born, you remember? Having all of their little boys killed. They forgot all of the beatings and all of the making bricks without straw. And they forgot the slavery. They look back on Egypt as having been a good place to live. A prosperous time. At least we had meat in our pots.

And they preferred that life of slavery over a life of faith and of being the recipients of God's kindness. How could they say that the Lord hated them? Do you despise them for saying it? I don't despise them for saying it. I recognize what they said is wrong, is sinful, and is wicked. But I understand how they got to that point. I trust you understand how they've gotten to that point, that you in your own life have felt at times like God has... cast you to the wind to just see you consumed. And if you haven't, I suspect that you will. This is not an uncommon thing for God's people to do. The Lord hates me and he has brought me to this point in my life simply to destroy me. And so the fear of the Israelites set in and it led to a greater sin. I want to talk about fear for a minute. If I asked you, is fear a sin? You'd all say yes. And I'd say, okay.

Right. Can you deal with fear as a sin when someone's afraid? And I think that the answer is often, how? You feel like a monster if you were to go to someone who is scared and say, this is going to cause greater destruction in your life if you give in to this fear. It's not compassionate. It's not understanding. It's not merciful. It's as though fear, there's this thing that wells up inside of us. Maybe it's just because of the day and age we live in. But it seems as though it's the sort of sin that can't be addressed. If someone's scared, it's like they're untouchable. You can't tell them that the fear is wrong or that the fear is destructive and that it's going to do harm to them and to those that they love. And yet it does produce destruction to them and to those that they love. Fear often is the result of our own weaknesses. And yet it's not justifiable.

It's not an okay thing. It's not, well, because you're scared, you don't have to do what you're afraid of now. Another way of looking at this and teasing this out in this situation was, would it have been better for the Israelites to wander in the wilderness as they did, not have food, not have drink, have war, lose all of their old men? Or would it have been better for them to have gone in? Of course we would all say, well, it would have been better for them to go in. And what we're saying is it would have been better for them to do business with their fear right then instead of enduring 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. And it was said to them as we come to this passage, they were not dealt with the way that I'm describing where their fears were justified. In just a few verses it says that the Lord's anger burned against them because of their fear.

And so my point in bringing this up to you is to say, we all get scared, and we get scared like this, and we think things like they do, and it's sinful for us to do it. And just because we're scared doesn't mean that we're justified in submitting to it. It's hard to talk about, because what are you supposed to, like, I described the guy in the tree who's afraid, and what are you supposed to say to the guy, and you can't literally, you literally can't say anything to the guy in the tree. There is no talking him through it. Like, he's not coming back to himself until he's on the ground and been there for a while. And you better not make fun of him, because if you make fun of him, he will never come back to work. And you better never put him in a tree like that again. Like, fear is a real thing. You have a real physiological response to it. So me, in saying that fear is a sin and that it needs to be fought and it needs to be dealt with, is not to make it sound like it's an easy thing to deal with. Because when people are scared, they are in some of the most vulnerable...

positions that they can get into. And yet they can do themselves harm and harm to others if they remain there. So what do you do with someone who's afraid? I think probably the best things we can do to them is do for them and with them is to acknowledge that we understand their fears. First, I understand why you're scared. I get it. I've had those same sorts of temptations. But that is where it... often wants to stop, and that's where it can't stop. That's where it can't stop. There has to be more said to them. There has to be more ministry done for them and with them. What are they to do with their fears? I think what we have to hold out to them and what we need held out to us is the faithfulness of God. Not in a way that rubs, you know, necessarily just rubs their nose in it and grinds them into it and says, how foolish and how silly and how stupid.

They may come to see it that way in the future. How foolish and how stupid and how silly was I being? Yep, you were. But in the moment, didn't feel that way, didn't seem that way. I think part of the reason we don't make as much progress in holiness and grow as much as we might like to is because we have this idea of sin. We conceive of it very superficially as though if we just had a little bit more knowledge, it wouldn't be nearly so difficult to overcome. But that's not how we end up fighting and dealing with our sins or overcoming them. And I think it's worth...

Cypress, would you stop that paper? Thank you. I think one of the things that, especially in a society where everything is visible, everything's online, everything's for public consumption, it's very easy to think that sins are easily dealt with and that we just need to get some Bible verses in your head or we just need to get some routines in your life or we just need to bring some sort of stability and all of it will be solved. But in dealing with... over years, you'll find that it's not nearly that easy to deal with. That fear doesn't just go away. That the one who is inclined to be fear, who knows they're fearful, that one of the first steps that you want to see them come to, and it may not even seem like a step to you, but I'll tell you it's a step, is that they come to see when they're being fearful. And they say, I don't like being fearful. It's so harmful to me. That it's actually helpful if they can come

To see that. Is that progress? Doesn't seem like much progress, does it? But it's hard to deal with. And so when we're dealing with fears, especially other people's fears, and I would say especially you husbands dealing with your wife's fears or with your children's fears, that you be tender with them. Not that you be dismissive of their fears, but that you be tender in understanding their fears. Because they're real. And they can be harmful. It would be easy to be short-sighted with the Israelites here and to think, well, God just judged them and just killed all of their older men and gave them all of his difficulties in the wilderness. But as you zoom out and you see God's actual disposition over a longer period of time toward the Israelites, did he just despise them and just cast them away? He didn't. He loved them. He still gave them the land. He still blessed them.

And we would do well to learn to deal with fear or any other sin with that regard, with that sort of tenderness. That while there may be discipline and consequences or repercussions from the behavior, that we would love as God has loved and be merciful as God is merciful to those who sinned against us or against the Lord. To those of you who are fearful, I want to say to you, you're going to have to, what you want to get to is the place where you can trust God with the thing you're afraid of. That's what you're aiming for. And that doesn't mean that there won't be fear associated with it. But the goal is that it wouldn't be a paralyzing fear. Maybe you've heard this old quip about courage, that all courage is, is courage is seeing your fears and going forward anyway. Something like that. I don't know exactly how it goes. But it's easy to think that those who are courageous or those who do hard things or that Caleb or Joshua or Moses just weren't afraid. I'm not persuaded to think that they weren't the sort of men who were afraid.

Of anything. But I'm persuaded to think that they were the sort of men who weren't paralyzed by their fears. And that they were men especially who trusted that God would deliver them. That they were able to look back with confidence and say, look at all that God's done for us. I don't know exactly how it's going to go in the future. But I trust that God wouldn't have brought us to this point only to pour us out on the ground to no good effect. I mean, if you think about when they go into Canaan and they actually go into the land, what sort of incredible things happen? What happens at Jericho? Like, what are they supposed to do with Jericho? What are they supposed to do at Ai? I don't know. March around the outside of the walled city, seven times yelling, and then the walls are going to fall down and all the people are going to make confusion and the Lord's going to give it to you. I don't think the spies could come back with that report. Here's what I think, guys. This is how the Lord's going to do it.

It was miraculous. It was incredible. And it was God's faithfulness to his people. And I'm afraid that we're too smart to see the kindness of God. And I don't want us to be too smart to see the mercies and the kindnesses of God. We're to come to the Lord and to enter into his kingdom like little children. And one thing that's true about little kids is they don't ask how when they're little. They don't ask how. Dad says, hey, we're going to do this and that. Or mom says, hey, this is what we're going to do today. And they're like, okay. Let's get in the car and go. They don't ask how. They just trust that mom and dad will have a plan and we'll see to it. And that's how we're to interact in our lives with the things we're afraid of. I don't know how it's going to work. But I do know. I do know that whatever happens, literally whatever happens, that God will be by my side.

And that whatever does come to pass in this life is not the result of his hatred for me, but his love for me. And his purifying of me. And his preparing of me to enter into his presence with joy and thanksgiving. So whatever comes to pass, that's going to be the end result. And I, like a little child, will take God by the hand, or he will take me by the hand, and I'll go where he leads me. That's where we want to get to with our fears. That's a faithful response. To live by faith is to not live by sight. We could have a whole sermon about the comparisons of living by faith and by sight for the Israelites. Nowhere in this does Moses say, this is exactly how we're going to do it, and this is how it's going to work. Or Joshua, when you go in, this is how it's all going to be. These are the details. Go in. The conquest of Canaan was go in, destroy everything, don't take any of the wealth, at least from the first few places, and trust that God will provide. And as they did that, it went well for them. And when they failed, it didn't go well for them.

And so our part in life is not to map out how everything's going to work, how everything's going to come together, how God's going to make it all happen. A lot of living by faith is saying, what is required of me right now, today? What am I afraid of right now and today? And what would God have me do right now, today? Well, it doesn't matter what I do today because I'm just going to be afraid tomorrow. Listen, today has enough trouble of its own. Don't worry about tomorrow. If you worry about tomorrow, you won't have faith for today. The other option is to go with the way of the Israelites. Where can we go up? Our brethren have made our hearts melt, saying the people are bigger and taller than we, and the cities are large and fortified in heaven. And besides, we saw the sons of Anakim there. There's giants. They heard what they wanted to hear, and they suffered for believing what they saw. You don't want that to be true of us, that we said, you know what?

I relied on my own sight and I got lost. That's what happens to them. May it not be what happens to us. Their hearts didn't melt because of what the spies said as much as their hearts melted because of what they were already afraid of. Joshua and Caleb's heart didn't melt. And that's worth noting because it means that fear is not the only possible response. Many times when you're scared, you feel like there's no other... there's no other response available, and that's not true. There are other responses available. So in some sense, when you're fearful, you have chosen fear. And maybe the way you chose it was just by, over the series of years, not doing business with the little things you're afraid of. And saying, I'm going to choose, I'm not paralyzed with fear, but I am scared. But I'm not going to submit to that fear.

I'm going to submit to the Lord. I'm going to submit to his word. I'm going to submit to my husband. I'm going to submit to my parents. I'm going to submit to my boss. I'm going to submit to my health official, whomever it is. Fear is something that we choose, which is to say it's something that we can choose not to give in to, though it requires practice of being faithful with small things so that we're able, when the difficult times come, to be able to build up the strength to live by faith. and to have those around us who would encourage us and lift up our arms and care for us when we're scared. Let's pray.