In the last blog post, we saw how the people were seeking to find a different leader.  Though the people had been looking forward to entering the promised land, some apparently bad news dashed their expectations.  They no longer expected to succeed or to win.  They did not give themselves a chance to explore success.  It seemed like their expectations to succeed was not based on God’s intervention, but their expectation to succeed was based on favorable looking circumstances.

And because the steps to the anticipated success was not in line with how they expected things to unfold, they declared defeat even before they tried.  Their expectations were also affected by their attitude, as was explained under ‘Pessimism and Weeping’. 

In their assessment, since all the odds were against them, their next response was, why bother?

One of the lessons that we can learn here is – don’t decide and declare defeat before even trying.  In Romans 8:31 we are told, ‘..If God be for us, who can be against us?’ (KJV).  So we can also learn that when God has given us a promise, we need to guard against letting challenges along the way cause us to lower our expectations of what the outcome will be.

Let us remember that with God we should expect to overcome and to win.  God is happy when we trust Him to work things out for us.  When hope is waning, a person may not feel motivated to fight for anything.  So maintaining confidence in God is important. 

And though things don’t work out along the way as we expect, that is not an indication that God has forgotten us. Looking back on the mistakes of the people, if we were to put ourselves in their shoes, it is evident that to be able to stand like Joshua and Caleb we need to fully depend on God’s strength. So as we go forward, we can:

• confront our fears in God’s power,
• have a correct view of the external,
• have a correct view of ourselves,
• embrace an optimistic and a joyful attitude,
• take responsibility for our actions,
• let God be the leader of our lives, and 
• expect God to do in our lives what He has said that He would do.

Next blog post will be focused on Anger.