His Encouragement #69

Good morning, and welcome to His Encouragement Thursday! I don’t know about you, but Thursdays are my struggle day of the week. By Thursday, I have already been working hard at school and at home, and I just wish it would hurry up and be Friday already. LOL! I definitely need a little extra Jesus time on Thursdays.

Trisha, my blogger friend at Joy of Reading, and I decided on calling this post “His Encouragement” because our real source of peace, strength, and security can only come from Jesus Christ. He, and He alone, is our constant! We pray and hope that these Thursday posts become a real encouragement to you and help you end your week strong in God’s love and purpose for you. God bless!

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Today’s Thursday Encouragement comes from:

Numbers 13:27-28 (ESV)

“And they told him, ‘We came to the land which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. And besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there.'”

Fear is a seriously powerful feeling.

In Numbers 13, God asks Moses to send spies into Canaan. God tells Moses to tell the spies to “see what the land is, and whether the people who dwell in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many, and whether the land that they dwell in is good or bad, and whether the cities that they dwell in are camps or strongholds, and whether the land is rich or poor, and whether there are trees in it or not. Be of good courage and bring some of the fruit of the land” (Numbers 13:18-20).

God isn’t sending the spies into Canaan so they will suffer torture and death at the hands of crazy giants. He is sending them into Canaan so they can see how amazing the Promised Land is. God wants the spies to see what they will have once they take control of the land. Essentially, God wants them to see that they will have hearty crops, bountiful trees, secure places to live, and an abundance of food. God wants them to realize that they will become BIG because God will take care of them. I feel like God’s thinking is the following: “These 12 men will see how good the Canaanites have it without Me. They will see their future potential, but it will be better than they can conceive because I will be with them!” But this isn’t really what the spies see.

Most humans have a tendency to put God into a box. They define God. They say, “God is x.” Many times x = exactly like humans but with slightly more power. This is SO limiting. God is capable of infinitely more than we humans are able to grasp. God can do ANYTHING.

When the 10 spies came back to Moses with the bad report, they had let their fears take over. Instead of seeing bounty, they saw danger. Instead of seeing positive, they saw negative. When they saw the Canaanites, all they could see were GIANTS, the sons of Anak. In the minds of these 10 spies, God was not bigger than these Canaanite giants. These spies put God in a box. So, God punishes them. They will wander the desert for 40 years and then will die. They will not enter the Promised Land.

We all have GIANTS in our lives. Giants are anything that overwhelm and stress us out to the point that we become myopic. It’s those BIG things that trigger our fears, and then those fears spread really bad lies in our head. We begin to feel that we will be crushed, that there is no hope to overcome our giant. But this is not true.

I want to start a new hashtag trend — #BeLikeCaleb, #BeLikeJoshua. When Caleb and Joshua saw the Promised Land, they saw exactly what God wanted them to see. They did not come back to the Israelites fearful. Caleb and Joshua knew that God is BIGGER than any GIANT on this earth. We need to be more like Caleb and Joshua. When our fears rear their ugly heads, we need to remember that God is BIGGER than any GIANT that may come our way. As long as we walk side-by-side with God, we can overcome anything.

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NOW, IT’S YOUR TURN!

WHAT BIBLICAL VERSE IS ENCOURAGING YOU TODAY?

Check out more Thursday Encouragement from my fellow blogger friends:

Trisha @ Joy of Reading

Jacquelyn @ A Heavenly Home

Jessica @ A Baker’s Perspective

Becca @ The Becca Files

Jenny @ Author Jenny Lynn

Gina @ Stories by Gina

Rebecca @ Rev. Rebecca Writes

If you would like to join us: please contact Trisha or Nicole