THOUGHTS ON CALEB 3

Part 3: Say it isn’t so!



Please Note: If you have not yet read the previous posts of “Thoughts on Caleb,” doing so will help you understand this installment better.


Imagine yourself in Caleb’s sandals for a minute. Ever since you first heard Moses talk about the Promised Land, it’s all you can think about. You feel like you can finally begin to imagine yourself actually free from slavery and with land of your own where you can raise your family, raise crops, raise sheep; whatever you want, because it will be yours! Then, to top everything off, you are chosen as one of twelve to go in and spy out the very land that you have been dreaming of!


Everywhere you go, your excitement builds! The land truly is “flowing with milk and honey;” Sure, there are giants and walled cities there, but you have no doubt that God will deliver it into your hand because He promised the land to Israel, and He has already demonstrated just how powerful He is! You have even picked out the portion that you want for your inheritance, and you have begun planning where you’ll build your house, where you’ll plant your garden, where you’ll dig the well, and on and on. Your mind is overflowing with ideas, and your excitement is building by the minute!


Then suddenly everything comes crashing down around you. The people have rebelled, and God has declared a forty year delay while the generation that refused to go in dies off in the wilderness. True, you have been told that you will not die and that you will still get to go in and receive your portion of the land, but not for forty more years! All of your dreams and expectations that have been building for the past days, weeks, and even months have suddenly been shattered! …


This was the second installment on the price that Caleb would have to pay before he could have his portion: he had to die to his own personal dreams and expectations. It was still going to happen, but not how he imagined it would.


In reality, most of us are a lot like Caleb. God promises us something, it comes alive within us, and we immediately start imagining what it will look like! Not only that, but we start expecting it to happen “yesterday!” Then, when it doesn’t happen when we thought it should, we become disappointed and start thinking that maybe God let us down or that maybe we missed God altogether. And if we manage to avoid that trap, when the promise does manifest, it seldom looks exactly like we thought it would! Knowing us as well as He does, God nearly always gives us our promises far enough in advance to allow us plenty of time to die to our own dreams and expectations (which we usually build up around those promises), then He fulfills them in His time and in the way that He intended from the beginning!


But why does it usually play out like that? Well, let me share a couple of things that will help us understand it a little bit better.


First, we need to understand that almost every promise God gives us is conditional. The conditions may or may not be spelled out, but they are nearly always there. If you look at all the promises in the Bible, very few are unconditional. For example, the promises concerning the coming Savior were all unconditional. Another example is the promise God made to Noah that He would never again destroy the world by a universal flood. Most, however, are conditional; some in the if/then format, others with the conditions implied rather than expressed. For example, the context of “God will supply all your needs” tells us that the promise is to those who are faithful to give.


The promises He gives us nearly always require some kind of obedience, thus they are conditional. The delay in seeing them fulfilled gives us time to walk out that obedience. He is getting us ready for the promises while at the same time getting the promises ready for us!


Second, whenever God gives us a promise, we always hear and interpret it according to our own personal paradigm. For example, God may say, “During this next year you will be busier than you ever have been before.” We may interpret that to mean that we will see a greater demand for our ministry, when God is really trying to tell us to get ready for the triplets that are going to be born!


Or maybe He is promising that a lot of new people will be coming to our church, and we immediately start imagining lots of new young families with children. When a bunch of tattooed and pierced young people start showing up, what do we do? Do we lay down our personal dreams and expectations and embrace them, or do we turn them away and keep hoping for the families?


I have heard tell of people who prayed for years for God to send the revival He promised, but then rejected it when it came because it didn’t look like they expected it to look! How many churches (who had been praying for revival) rejected the “Jesus People” in the ‘70’s because of the way they dressed and wore their hair?


If we don’t want to “miss it” when God fulfills His promises to us, we must be willing to lay down our own dreams and expectations regarding those promises! What He has in mind for us, and the timing in which He will do it, will both be far better than anything we could imagine anyway!


NEXT: THOUGHTS ON CALEB, PART 4