Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Faith isn't just something that we just quote in religious rhetoric all the time. If faith is in your life, it actually has the ability to cultivate hope, a opportunity for a prosperous outlook and just good outcomes overall. But if there is the absence of faith or fear, it has the inverse effect. It can paralyze you. But what can we do to get more faith in our lives? Let's talk about it.
God doesn't design us to fit. He designs us to be impactful.
Hey ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Shifts and Ladders. This is Ryan Robinson. You already know. If you haven't yet, I'm asking you if you could pretty, pretty please subscribe to this podcast, share it with someone you care about, someone you love, or if you know someone that needs it, please, please share this I believe that God's word has the ability to reach places that we may never ever go. And with technology these days, it can go further and farther than we even think. So your you sharing it could be the seed to help someone grow, make a shift, and elevate through the ladders of opportunity that God provides for them. So just want to talk about this thing. Faith.
Faith is a very mysterious thing because it doesn't have any evidence. You can't hold on to faith. We say all the time, you know, we need to keep the faith, hold on to the faith. And the problem with that statement, while having faith is important, don't get me wrong, you need to have it. The part of it that is questionable is where are you placing that hope?
Where are you placing the most important thing that we as human beings have? Where are you placing that? Are you placing that in your job? Are you placing that in your kids? Are you placing that in your money? Are you placing that in your title at work or your position at church, whatever it may be? We place our faith in things that really can't give us anything in return. In fact, what it does give us is disappointment and, and frustration and challenges because what we thought did not turn out the way we intended it to be.
And usually when we look at certain, certain outcomes, we can determine whether we're going to have hope in a situation or we're going to have doubt and fear in those kinds of situations. And there's no better example than what we find in the Bible.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: And I'm, I'm, you know, y'all know I'm a techie, but I'm using the book, a real book with pages and stuff.
But there was, I was going through the Bible and my daughter and I We do some Bible study with that during the week. And I try to make this very tangible because she's seven, right? So, you know, some of this stuff can get really, like, over your head. But there was a part in this where I was like.
And my daughter had a lot of questions about this particular scripture. And it was numbers. And I'm gonna read it here. Numbers, chapter 13.
And we're gonna start at verse 26. But let me give you some context to this verse.
Beforehand, Moses led the people out of Egypt, right? They were being enslaved by Pharaoh. God heard the cries of his people. God sends Moses, God's God, through the plagues, delivers the Israelites, and then they are now in the wilderness. There's a whole bunch of complaining in the Book of Numbers before you get to this. I mean, there's still more. And if you like a book of complaining, this is the book for it. They're what? They're. The Israelites are like God. Where's the water? We had better water back in Egypt. Oh, Lord. We had meat and all kinds of good food back in Egypt. Maybe we should turn around, because the God we serve now, he doesn't, you know, he's not providing us good food. He's just giving us manna, which is like frosted flakes, basically. And they use that to make bread.
So, God, they're like, oh, God, you're making this so hard. It was way easier way when we were in Egypt. Now, let me stop there for one second. Most of the time, many of us want to go back to Egypt, but what we forgot is that Egypt was enslaving us.
It was causing us pain, it was causing us frustration, it was causing us to lose our hope, and it caused us to cry all day long. And what happens often is many of us would rather go back to what was most comfortable in bondage, then go seek and find out what God has in store for us. We would rather go back to what's familiar, even though just a few months ago or a year ago or so, we were enslaved.
It is one of the most challenging things that in the sight of pain or uncertainty. Or we would rather go back to what was really hurting us, traumatizing us, in fact. Okay, all right, so let me move forward.
So God basically delivers them out of Egypt to send them to a land that God had promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which is the land of Canaan.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:06:15] Speaker A: So they go through a whole bunch of stuff. Read a book. Numbers. There's a whole bunch of books before this, chapters, before this so, but at 13, they get to Canaan and they think, like, oh, it'd be best if we just send scouts ahead. So there was a scout representative. Yes, scout representative. There we go. Representative. There we go for every tribe. So there was 12 scouts, okay? And they went through and went in the land. They saw all that the land had to offer. It had all of this beauty, had all of these riches, had all of these resources at its disposal. And at the point that I'm going to read, they are the 12 that return are going to give a report, okay? So they're going to say, like, this is what we saw. Now they're going to be telling Moses and Aaron, but they're also going to tell the entire nation of Israel what they actually found.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:07:11] Speaker A: So I'm a read. I'm a look down, but we'll make sure to have it in the. In the clips or in the lower third.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:07:21] Speaker A: So it is Numbers, chapter 13, verse 26.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:07:26] Speaker A: So now they had 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 all the congregation and showed them the fruit of the land. Then they had told them and said, we went to the land where you sent us. It was truly. It truly flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.
Nevertheless, the people who dwell there in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. Moreover, we saw the descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the south. The Hittites, the Jebusites, the Amorites dwell in the mountains, and the Canaanites dwell by the sea along the banks of the Jordan. Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said to them, let us go up at once and take possession, for we are able to overcome it.
There we go. 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. And they gave the children of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, the land, though sorry, gave report of the land which they had spied out, saying, the land through which we had gone as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants. And all the people whom we saw in it are men of great stature.
There we saw the giants.
The giants. The descendants of Anak came from giants. That's a long story.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: And.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: And we. Here's the key here. And we were like grasshoppers in our own sight. And so we were in their sight.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: And that is verse 33. Want to put a pin on verse 33?
[00:09:31] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: All right, so if I could name this podcast, I'm going to call it the Tale of Two Perspectives.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: The first perspective that was given was actually one that was beginning to be very favorable. Now, it doesn't call out the number of people that were in it, but whoever the 12 were that went there was a spokesperson. They were speaking up, like, oh, it is great. It has milk and honey. It has all these resources. It has these huge bunches of grapes. That's what they brought back to show how much. How much resource the land of Canaan had and all these great things. But then all of a sudden, something turned. They said, well, the cities are big and they got walls and they got all this stuff going on in there. And Caleb had to be like, hey, listen, wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't get everybody all messed up for a minute. Let's talk about this. Because there's opportunity.
There's opportunity. He says it this. He says, we are more than able to overcome it.
So while there are perspectives and realities that say this is going to be challenging, on the other hand, they forgot who was actually with them.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was with them.
So they literally forgot that they weren't operating in their own strength.
If you think for a minute before anything, at this moment in time, there was no gps. There was really no compass, no sundial situation, to be honest.
So how do they get to there? God led them there.
There was opportunities where God has just walked us through things that we did not even know we got into. We walked into blessings. We walked into opportunities. We have literally walked into things that we cannot take credit for.
And Caleb is trying to remind people, hey, you have one perspective, and it's actually starting to get negative. But let's remember whose side we're on here.
The living God himself, Yahweh, is with us.
And he is bigger than any giant. He's bigger than any wall. He's bigger than any city that we've come across or will ever come across.
Okay, so you have the perspective of faith, where it takes the evidence, puts it together, and says, no matter what the evidence says, I know that God can.
Oh, I need an organ.
He says, no matter what the evidence says, God can. Okay, so he's trying to get people to, like, change their perspective. But then whoever the second person, whoever the person is who's doing the speaking needs to, like, shut up.
But in after that, he Says now we're not able to because they are stronger.
And what else do they say? We're not like them.
And the key crux of this, of this passage is that we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so were we in their sight. And so we were in their sight. So what they actually projected, they basically projected the way they felt about themselves. Comparing the other people who had no idea, they're probably scared, to be honest with you. If I got word that these people got to where they've gotten to, gotten through dry land and destroyed the Egyptians, that the God that they served did all of that to get them to that point, I would be terrified if I didn't know God. Right. So what ends up happening is their own perspective and their own thought process of how they viewed themselves was projected to the Amalekites and all the inhabitants of that land.
Therefore, they had a perspective of doubt.
Okay, so when you are presented opportunity, are you going to choose the perspective of faith or the perspective of doubt, which is rooted in fear, but we'll just say doubt. For now, it's important to really determine that for yourselves, because what you do after that can actually keep you from everything God has promised you.
And unfortunately, as a response to their lack of faithfulness and belief in the God who delivered them, fed them, and directed them, God said, I can't do a whole lot with these people, and they can't inhabit this particular new opportunity that I'm giving them because let's get this, Egypt was still in them.
Okay, so before you really start looking at opportunities and what God has already blessed you with, examine whether your perspectives are coming from God or. Or coming from Egypt.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:15:32] Speaker A: And in this next podcast, we're actually going to drop in a few keys on how you can activate your faith, because clearly only 2 out of the 12 had faith for the promised land.
And further on in the book of Joshua, only those two were able to go into the promised land and claim their inheritance because they believed God way before they actually walked in. All right, so with that said, I am going to. In the next couple weeks, you will be seeing at the end of the podcast, a link for you to go to a website where we're going to get a newsletter out for you, where we are going to find ways and communicate to you ways that you can shift your perspective in the middle of the week. Sometimes you may not get to a podcast, but maybe you get to your email. But I want to find ways that we can encourage you to shift your perspective that maybe you might be having a crazy week, you might be boss, might be getting on you, your kids are driving you up the wall, whatever. But if you had a little bit of encouragement from the word of God that can shift your perspective, get you anchored and abiding in the vine that is Jesus Christ and getting you back to God I think you would be encouraged. So look out for that. Probably the next couple weeks I'll make sure to have that announced and it'll be in the comments there. So but if you haven't yet make sure you subscribe to this podcast on YouTube and wherever you listen, Spotify podcasts, Apple podcasts, wherever and we'll make sure to have that link@ryanrock robinson.com for you so that you can be encouraged, exhorted and built up for whatever is coming your way. All right. But we will see you in the next podcast excited to give you the keys to activating your faith.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: Peace.
