Deuteronomy 1:21-36 • Giants or Grapes

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We continue our flight through the Bible in a whole year by moving all the way past now the early books of Moses to the very last book of Moses, the book of Deuteronomy. What God is doing, of course, is He's unfolding the message of grace that is going to culminate in the work of Jesus Christ. It started early, the message, as God told us what He would do through the family of Adam, that failed.

Then the family of Noah, that failed.

Then the Lord said, "Okay, I'm going to work through Abraham's family," which is not much better.

You may remember from last week the great-grandsons of Noah, of Abraham, excuse me, Sel Joseph, their brother, into slavery in Egypt.

It's a terrible thing, but God meant it for good.

And the good was that God is in the incubator of Egypt going to build a nation, millions of people who ultimately are going to be served by Moses in the Exodus who's going to lead them out of the most powerful ancient country in the world to the Promised Land.

They get to the banks of the Jordan ready to go into the Promised Land.

They say, "Let's figure out what it looks like over there."

And so Moses sends spies into the land. You remember? They come back with reports. They say, "It is a land flowing with milk and honey." There are grapes there as big as grapefruits, and they really mean that. It takes two men just to carry one cluster of grapes. It's a great land with giant grapes, one little problem.

Real big people, not just giant grapes, giants! The people say, "Next to the people of that land, we're like grasshoppers."

They sacrifice their children to God's. They are a fierce and evil people, and they're giants.

We can't go against them.

And so the people of God turn and wander in the desert for 40 years. Now a generation later, their children are on the banks of the Jordan again with Moses. And Moses doesn't want it to happen again.

And so we catch him about mid-speech, reminding the children of the first generation what has happened and what now needs to happen. Let's stand as we honor God's Word. I'm going to start about verse 24 of Deuteronomy 1, read through verse 36, as Moses reminds this generation of what has and should happen.

Following the spies of the preceding generation, Moses says, verse 24, "And they turned and went up into the hill country and came to the valley of Eschol and spied it out.

And they took in their hands some of the fruit of the land and brought it down to us, and brought us word again and said, "It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us.

That you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, "Because the Lord hated us, he has brought us out of the land of Egypt to give us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us. Where are we going up?" Our brothers have made our hearts melt, saying, "The people are greater and taller than we. The cities are great and fortified up to the heaven. And besides, we have seen the sons of the Anakim there." It means people with long necks.

"Then I said to you, "Do not be in dread or afraid of them. The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes. And in the wilderness where you've seen how the Lord your God carried you. As a man carries his son all the way that you went until you came to this place. Yet in spite of this word, you did not believe the Lord your God who went before you in the way to seek you out of place to pitch your tents, in fire by night and in cloud by day to show you by what way you should go.

And the Lord heard your words and was angered and he swore not one of these men of this evil generation shall see the good land that I swore to give to your fathers.

Except Caleb, the son of Jephana, he shall see it and to him and to his children I will give the land on which he has trodden because he has wholly followed the Lord."

Let's pray together.

Holy Father, the New Testament writer said everything that was written in the past was written for us.

So that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures, we would have hope.

Teach us the hope of a God who goes before his people to fight for them and to carry them where he calls them. That we might serve you in Jesus name. Amen.

Please be seated.

So was it Yanny or was it Laurel?

Now some of you in the room know exactly what I'm talking about. Internet sensation of the last year, the very same word on a video being interpreted quite differently by different sets of ears. Some people, given their language background or their age or their ethnicity, heard coming out of their computers the word Yanny.

Other people listening to exactly the same sound heard the word Laurel.

What you heard really had very little to do with what was coming out of your computer. It was what was inside you, your background, your language patterns that determined what your ears heard. And something similar is happening as Moses is recounting to a new generation what happened to the generation before them. They sent spies into the Promised Land to figure, "Should we go in? What will it be like?" And some spies came back with the report, "Great grapes!"

And other spies, people heard, come back with the report, "Giant people!"

And whether or not you heard grapes or giants depended not so much on what the spy said,

but on what was going on inside the listeners. Why bring up such an ancient debate? Because it still goes on in our hearts every time we are confronted with God's calling. If God is calling us to consider, do we forego a promotion or a second income for the sake of the spiritual good of our family? We're often thinking, "If I don't do that, there will be giants. Or if I do that, there will be grapes." The harvest or the obstacle, which gets the most attention? Do we give sacrificially to God's purpose?

Or grapes?

Do we have a child?

Do we adopt a child?

Do we foster a child?

Do we abort a child?

Giant problem?

Or a grape harvest?

Do I speak to my friend or my family or my boss about my faith? Whether I be a giant or there will be grapes to harvest.

Which do we hear when we are hearing the mission of God? It is not a new problem. It's the consistent problem that God's people determine when they consider what they hear. As you well recognize, the grape reports are the opportunities to see God work.

The obstacle reports, the giants, are the obstacles standing in the way of doing God's work. And which we hear is largely going to determine what we do in the calling that God gives us. The temptation, of course, is only to listen to the giant reports. Because if all you hear are the giant reports, you begin to think, "Well, that's too big a task. That's not fair to ask of me." We begin to consider options other than the calling that the Lord puts in front of us. If you think of what obstacles are coming into view, it's not hard in this passage, verse 28, the people having heard the reports actually say, "Where are we going up now?" "Our brothers have made our hearts melt, saying that people are greater and taller than we. The cities are great and fortified up to heaven. And besides, we've seen the sons of the Anakim there."

It's not just people with tall necks. The further you go into the book of Deuteronomy, they are identified as tall and strong. If you actually go back to the Numbers passage where the first generation of spies reported, they actually said, "They are so big.

We are like grasshoppers in their presence."

Now, believe it or not, the giants are actually getting bigger 40 years later. If you go to the end of verse 28, the spies are reported now as saying, "The cities are great and fortified up to heaven.

Their walls go up to the sky. We're even smaller than grasshoppers next to these."

Why do the giants keep getting bigger?

The answer is verse 27.

There we read, "Moses, speaking of the earlier people, you murmured in your tents and said, because the Lord hated us. He's brought us out of the land of Egypt to give us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us."

The giants are big because God is small.

He's mean and He's petty and He can't take care of His people. And that's just the way that things happen inside of us. Whenever our God gets small, our obstacles get giant.

I have a friend who was struggling in his marriage and wisely sought some counsel, and he and his wife showed up for an early counseling appointment, and the counselor did what counselors do, used some of the diagnostic tools, and said to each spouse, "As we start, would you just take some time, and I want you to list on a piece of paper what you perceive as a difficulty with your spouse?"

And my friend said he washed as his wife took the pencil and began writing and did not lift the lead for ten minutes.

He said she was writing so fast and hard her fingers were smoking. And he was just going...he didn't have anything he could put down nearly the same.

And beginning to fear what was about to happen, he asked the counselor in his most churchy and holy voice,

"Shouldn't we pray about this before we share our list?"

The counselor agreed, and so my friend bent his head and prayed and was blessed to remember just a snatch of a verse that I actually mentioned to you last week. "Be kind to one another, and tender-hearted..." I have a feeling he was kind of peeking at his wife while he was praying this prayer. "Forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you."

Well, even after the prayer, the counselor said, "Okay, let's hear the list."

He asked the wife first.

She looked at her list and then said, "I couldn't think of anything."

And believe it or not, it was that response that was more convicting of the husband than the long list she had actually constructed, that it said to him, "God is here in this room, working in our hearts, working beyond the obvious, working beyond the flesh. My God is larger than I thought. I need to remember He's bigger than I gave Him credit for. He can do more than I thought." And it was that understanding of how large was His God, how big was His God, that gave Him perspective, not only in Himself, but on His marriage in a new way. Because what He actually said to me later was this. He said, "Brian, when your God is big, your problems are small, but when your God is small, your problems are giant."

I will tell you there were some pretty mean giants between Him and His wife. But what led them to health was believing in a God who was bigger than the problems, that the giants were not bigger than God Himself.

Because what happens if God is bigger than the problems, the options that have been coming into view about God's plan and purpose for your life, begin not to be such good options anymore. The option one, when the giants are large, is obvious from verse 26. "Moses, speaking about the people of the past, said, "Yet you would not go up. The Lord had said it was a good land, but you would not go up but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. You said, "Let's just stay put. It's too hard to go forward. It's too hard to proceed on that mission to which God is calling. It's too hard to fulfill God's purpose." And so people assumed turtle mode.

Just pull in, pull in your limbs, don't go forward, just retreat into what's comfortable.

Trouble with going into turtle mode is that giants don't run from turtles.

And the reality is when these people and when we go into turtle mode, we will not see the power of God working in our lives, in our situations, as He's calling us forward.

I'm thankful that five years ago when this church faced the giants for real through its leadership and through congregational meetings, we just said simply, "There are some things we have to face.

We are getting older. We are ethnically restrictive, and we have been shrinking for 30 years.

And if we do not change something, we will surely die. There are changes that we must bring about, and some of them will be comfortable and some will be not so comfortable. We're going to change some color patterns. We'll change some signage.

We will reach out to people of different ethnicities. We will consider different music for all of us, which may not be at our comfort level, but which we hope will minister to a broader community and diverse generations. Nobody gets their own preference. We will do what we believe fulfills the mission of God. We are going to translate sermon outlines into multiple languages every Sunday. We are going to be welcoming of people in our Sunday schools, in our kids' courses, in everything that we do of different ethnicities and diversities and backgrounds because we don't even know how we're doing it, but it is clear that our community perceives us as having put up walls and barriers that we don't even recognize, but they see. And we will do what we can to lower those barriers and to reach to all generations and all peoples, and we unified around that vision. And it's my rejoicing to be able to be a Sunday after Easter to say, "Wasn't that great?" I mean, we had so many different ages, so many different people, different neighborhoods, backgrounds, people gathering here. We had hundreds of you volunteering to make all of that happen, some of us working outside of our comfort zones, but saying the obstacles do not provide us options.

Turtles, we are not. Turtles, we cannot be. We have to be reaching out with the ways that God calls us to do what He says we must do to take the land, to expand the gospel, to stretch forward in the way that God wants us to. And there's so many different ways it's happening. As I look at the ESL ministry, as I look at the special needs ministries of both kids and adults, and those of you who have given yourself sacrificially and wonderfully, there's just this comprehensiveness of what we're doing, even though we make mistakes. They're sometimes difficult and sometimes hard, and we have to apologize for it, but we're moving forward, and I praise God for you. And I praise God for you recognizing I have been in other experiences.

I mean, when I was in seminary and asked to take the Sunday preaching of a little church in the fields around the school,

I was ministering to a church, it was a beautiful little building, where a few families had worshiped for basically three generations

and cut themselves off, not just from the community, but all succeeding generations.

And I can remember being asked, and I'm sure because I was young and did it very poorly, but I can remember being asked, "What are you going to do to fix this?"

And being at a leadership meeting one night and sang to a group of leaders,

"Are you willing to consider some changes and accompany me on some outreach visits in the neighborhood?"

And the answer was, "No."

And when it became clear that changes for this kind of family-locked, established church, even though it was dying, we're going to be so uncomfortable, the choice was rather to die than change.

And I actually put that to the leadership around the day. I mean, it was awkward, it was hard, and I'm not even going to defend it in this moment. But to ask each person individually around the day, "Are you saying that you would rather for this church die than for us to change anything?" "Yes." "Would you rather us die than change anything?" "Yes." "Would you rather us die?" "Yes."

It was after that meeting that the one remaining family in the church with children left the church.

Now that generation ultimately passed away, and another group of people bought the church, which flourishes to this day, because there was a group of people that saw grapes rather than giants. Something to be harvested, something to be reaped. In the Lord's power, in the Lord's blessing, in the Lord's strength, a willingness to move forward and not just to go into turtle mode, into our comfort and our protection.

Option two, of course, is not just going into turtle mode to stay put and pull in. Option two is referenced in verse 30. "The Lord your God," says Moses, "who goes before you will himself fight for you," just as he did for you, "in Egypt before your eyes." Now the mention of Egypt is for the people who've come out of Egypt a reminder.

And you may remember from the Numbers passage when the previous generation heard the reference to Egypt, a little penny dropped, and they said, "You know what?

It wasn't so bad back there."

It's not just that we should stay put. We should go back to Egypt. Those were the good old days. Oh, I know we were slaves.

I know we had to make bricks without straw.

I know they murdered our children.

But you know, it wasn't so bad.

Any time the church begins to say, "The good old days are the ones behind us," then what that does is gives us reason not to move forward. Whenever we perceive the giants as the main message, we don't just pull inward, we look backward. We don't just go into turtle mode, we go into crawfish mode. Let's back up. Let's go back to where it was more comfortable, more productive, better back then. I have actually appreciated an important message by Capitol Hill Baptist pastor, some of you will know, Mark Deverer. So he ministers in our nation's capitol right down there in the district where all the politicians and our courts and national buildings are. And that church is right in the middle of all the polarities of morality and civility and character that we are struggling with right now. And Mark wrote an article which was, "How do you survive a cultural crisis?"

His first answer, "Remember that churches exist for supernatural change.

There has never been a time or a culture when it was natural for people to repent of their sin.

That culture does not exist, has not existed, and will never exist. Christian churches and pastors especially must know deep in their bones that we are always about a work that is supernatural,

which means that our present cultural challenges make our work zero more difficult." Why? Because it never depended on us in the first place. Because whatever the church was going to do was going to be dependent on God's supernatural work. If we were depending on ourselves, our comfort, our ability, if it was just going to be easy, then it was not of God to start with. God had to be doing something or the church would not be accomplishing its mission in a world where giants exist to repel and resist the work of God.

After all, if you just kind of say, "What are the common denominators of any church of God in any time of God?" First common denominator.

Giants resisting the purposes of God. That would be a common denominator of the church in any age that's doing the will of God.

Second common denominator.

Persecution is normal.

It's not strange. It's not new. It's often the time in which the church thrives and multiplies the most when people are forced to their knees and forced to say, "God, you must do something beyond us." Which means if giants are common and persecution is normal, then obstacles are par for the course.

And the last common denominator for the church is, "And God is greater than them all." It is not just us against the obstacles, us against the giants, us against the persecution. We believe in a supernatural God. And that has to be part of our mindset no matter what time or place the Lord calls us. Jim Tallent, the devout former senator from Missouri, once sat in my office and said why he thought it's so tempting for believers to say, "This is the worst time it's ever been in our country for Christians."

Why would we say that he said this? The reason that we are always saying that it's the worst time to be a Christian in this culture is because claiming the good days are behind us gives us a reason to turn from the gospel mission that is ahead of us.

There have been worse times to be a Christian in this culture. You should know that. Far fewer people by percentage attended church in the colonial era than attend right now. Are there challenges now? Of course. Do you know right now 20 percent fewer people attend church regularly right now in this culture than they did 20 years ago? Roughly a percent per year for the last 20 years. Fewer people attending church regularly, which now by the way is defined as three of eight Sundays. That's regular, which means fewer and fewer people are regularly attending. It's tough.

It's not as tough as it was for our nation's forefathers who were Christian. Fewer attended in that time. We may say it's tough, but there was a time when the churches of this nation defended the enslavement or the exploitation of people of different races or genders. The churches defended that. There was a time in this nation when child labor and immigrant hatred and class division resulted in sweatshops and rampant epidemics in the poor districts of our cities. And our cities turned into riots of fire one after another because of the unfairness of class and race division. There was a time when the polarities in politics did not just result in incivility, but in a civil war, which is still the bloodiest that this nation has fought. There was a time. It was harder. And it may not be what you think it all about, the hardest time of being a Christian. After all, if you're actually thinking in terms of spiritual health, not Christian comfort, but spiritual health, were we really any spiritually healthier in the second half of the 20th century when kind of everybody was a Christian?

Habitual and nominal, and it was easy to fill churches at Christmas time and easy to fill churches at Easter time, and people had to make no separate commitment to standing for the Lord in discomfort at church, school, work, and government. Is it not maybe a better time where being a Christian requires us to be on our knees saying, "God, we need to see supernatural power. We're not just depending on us anymore. We need your help." Maybe that is the better spiritual time, even though it may be the less comfortable time. Are there obstacles? Of course there are obstacles. Is it hard to raise children in this present culture?

Yes! There are giants of opposition to raising Christian kids in this culture. Our God is bigger.

Are there obstacles to being a faithful, intergenerational, ethnically united church? Are there obstacles?

Yes! They are huge! Our God is bigger!

Are there obstacles to doing local and global ministry as a church from Peoria, Illinois? Yes! There are huge obstacles to us. Our God is bigger. Just give you a foretaste. I mean, right now we as a ministry are on 500 stations across this country. We probably will not continue to be. Do you know why? Because ministry after ministry in this movement from broadcast to internet culture is not able to sustain, and we probably will not either. But I thank God for leadership among us who is saying, "Let's find out where God is going. Let's not shut down the ability to minister. Let's say, "Why are we able now to be in 70-plus nations, and how do we maintain that?" And as we are thinking about what God is calling us to do, we face the giants, and then we say, "My God is bigger than that. Let's find out where He is going and get behind that." Is it hard for a church on the north side of Peoria to host a cookout for a united group of churches across ethnicities in one of the nation's most racially divided cities, and next week have them here on our campus with us? Is that going to be hard? You bet! Who ought to be there?

We who believe in a great God, we believe God is bigger than the divisions. If nobody comes from any other church, we ought to be there to say, "God, use us. We want to get behind You and Your purpose because we recognize what Your Word is saying about not being in Your mission and in Your path." All the options certainly seem reasonable, but God has characterized them. Verse 26, "Moses, speaking of the past people, you would not go up, but you rebelled against the command of the Lord, your God." Why is not going forward in God's purpose rebellion?

Well, the Lord has said in verse 25 right at the end, "It's a good land that the Lord our God is giving us." There's something good the Lord is doing in moving us forward. Why were the people of Israel going into the promised land?

Because it was the place that God had promised Abraham. Not only would the nation be established, but from which the Messiah would come. There's going to be good that comes. This is my gift to you. Is it a challenge? Yes, it's a challenge, but there is spiritual blessing in pursuing God's will. So move forward in what God is calling you to do because this is a good thing.

It's more than good, the end of verse 26, "You rebelled against the command of the Lord, your God." Now, parents, when you've given every reasonable explanation for the chore or eating the vegetables, and all reason is now at its end, what's the final thing you say? Why do you have to eat those vegetables? Because I... Because I said so. And God says, "It's good. It's a gift because I said so."

And not to do what God says is ultimately rebellion.

We have to hear that when our hurt, when our bitterness is a giant,

that our forgiveness cannot get past, then we want God to say, "Well, you know, that's understandable."

"Well, that's regrettable, but I get it." We don't want God to say, "That is rebellion."

And yet God is saying, "If our bitterness is a giant, that our forgiveness can't get past."

That is disobedience and rebellion.

When our need for profit or position or a test score is a giant that our integrity can't get past,

then God is not just saying, "Well, that's kind of sad." He is saying, "That is rebellion."

When our loneliness or our lust is a giant that our purity can't get past,

then the Lord who loves us more than we love ourselves says, "I care for you so much that I will tell you what this alternative that you are pursuing is." It is rebellion that will hurt you.

And for that reason, our God is straightforward about our need to move forward. And when He is doing that, He is saying, "Here's what is to motivate you, to not only listen to the reports of the giants." They say, "Oh, I've got to have some options."

But listen to the reports of the grapes.

Listen to the harvest that can be available to you. Remember God's faithfulness. Verse 30, "The Lord your God, who goes before you, will Himself fight for you, just as He did for you in Egypt, before your eyes and in the wilderness." God was there with you. He was fighting for you. He was for you.

Recognize these are the people who've come out of Egypt and the horse and riders thrown into the sea by the working of God's hand were those of the most powerful nation of the ancient world. And God is saying, "As I delivered you then, I'll fight for you. I know there are hard things. I know there are difficult things, but I'll fight for you." And knowing that God will fight for us is supposed to give us resolve and willingness to move forward. When I was a smaller shrimp than I am now in junior high and the other guys on the football team had hit their growth spurts and seemed like giants to me, I think that the junior high football coach put a sign on the screen door outside his office particularly for me, and you're going to know it. The sign simply said, "It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts. It's the size of the what? The fight in the dog that counts. And the fight in us greater is he that's in you than he that's in the world. Our God is remind, I'll fight for you. But more than God offering us his power, he's offering us his care. Verse 31, "I fought for you in the wilderness as well as in Egypt where you have seen how the Lord your God carried you. As a man carries his son." I love the image. Here is God so powerful, so strong, and yet here's the offer to carry you where you need to go. Not just pride power, but provide his love at the very same moment.

Because we have some marathon runners in the room, Mike Reeker and Juliet Wue, I pay more attention to marathons these days. Like a few weeks ago, remember the Boston Marathon? And did you see the Marine veteran who, honoring his three fallen comrades, ran the marathon but couldn't make it all the way to the end?

And so he actually crawled over the finish line.

And it brought back to my mind, you know, the accounts of Derek Regmon, the great Olympic sprinter, who in the sole Olympics, just 10 minutes before the race that would make him a victor, had an Achilles tear that meant he couldn't enter the race. So he waited until the Barcelona Olympics, entered again, and in the heat before the finals, heard the pop of a hamstring so that he could not enter the finals. And there he is in agony on the track, just barely able to get up and hobble toward the finish line. And as the cameras focused on him, suddenly you see a flurry off to the side. And there is his father pushing through the crowd, pushing through the officials, coming and grabbing his son and carrying him as his son hobbles, carrying him across the line. And to think, here's the picture of God as he's saying, "I'm not just giving you my strength, I'm carrying him, I'm giving you my heart so that you know I will be with you and I will help you. I am your refuge, I am your strength, I am your hope." It's what God is saying over and over again so that we would rely on him. Ultimately, our willingness to rely on God is what we are even going to read out of the key portions of this chapter and what our ears will hear. Why would you rely on this God who is powerful and loving as you go up against the giants of your calling?

Maybe the best place to think about that is the last verse that I read to you, verse 36. "No one's getting into the promised land except Caleb, the son of Jephana," last clause is, "because he has wholly followed the Lord."

Who's the hero of this text?

Well, surely Caleb is being commended. He wholly followed the Lord?

Who would Caleb say is the hero of the text?

"But the God who said, I'll fight for you, I will carry you.

I have been with you, I will be with you." Caleb believed that. And while in our translation, it's really a good one, "he wholly followed the Lord," some of your NIVs say, "he followed the Lord wholeheartedly," it may help you know the actual Hebrew, which is, "he fully got behind the Lord."

Now, isn't that interesting? The Greek translators, centuries later, trying to interpret this particular phrase, used a word only once in Bible translations of any Greek translation, and the one word they said was, "Caleb attached himself to God."

Isn't that wonderful? It's the gospel in early declaration. As you would see a psalmist saying, "God is our refuge and strength." As you would hear a prophet say, "He will lift us up on eagle's wings." As you would hear the words of Jesus, "As I am in the Father, you are in me." And the Apostle Paul saying, "Be strong in the power of His might." Who is the hero of the text?

Ultimately, it is God. And in my weak little mind, what I'm perceiving is Caleb as this kind of small back, you know, on the goal line, trying to go into the promised land. And he knows he can't get through the giants on the opposite side of the line. And so he's got this huge alignment in front of him. And he puts his hand on his back, and his shoulder on his back, and his head on his back. And he's going to get through the line. But it's not his strength. He's just got to keep his feet moving. Whose strength is he depending on?

It's the one in front of him. And God has said, "I will go before you." And we depend upon him, not believing in our strength, not courage in our courage, not resolve to resolve to resolve. It is ultimately saying, "No, I'm just going to find out where is God going, and I'm going to get behind him, and I'm going to stay right on him, and I'm going to attach to him. And when I do that, God will so lead us." Just a little bit more. Last night, a couple of hundred miles from here, I was at the first church that I pastored after seminary, their 200th anniversary. And at their 200th anniversary, pastors came. We gave our reminiscences and our memories.

But for me, what I said was, "You know what? I must wonder, what I must question, with all the sweetness of what we talked about was, was I faithful to the gospel?

What did you hear when I preached?"

And one of the things that we struggled with, all of us pastors, was that Scottish Presbyterian tradition, where prior to taking communion, you were supposed to show up at a midweek service, which was called a preparation service,

to get your communion token so that you could pay, they never said that, so that you could earn, no, they would never say that, so that you would qualify to partake of communion.

How did people perceive of that token?

This is what you do to earn your approval with God.

There's a different way to think about it. What was I actually preparing?

My heart to depend upon Him. I was not earning anything. I was emptying.

I was not leaning on my strength, but His strength. Ultimately, I was not counting what I was achieving,

but attaching myself to the Savior.

When we do that, we say, "God, show me where you want me to go, and I will follow you." Your strength, not mine. Your work, not mine. I believe in the God who provided for people who murmured and complained and rebelled, and that's me. So I need you.

And God, show me the way, and I will trust in you." What do you hear? Giants or grapes? Hear Jesus and get on His agenda for the purposes to which He calls us. It is a glorious and good thing to which He calls us. Father, so work in our hearts, we pray, that we, trusting the one who gave Himself for us, might not lean on our own strength, but on His. Might not trust our accomplishment, but attach ourselves to Him. And in doing so, we know the blessings of grace that you have provided for us. In Jesus' name, amen.
(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)