Is fear making you forget about God? This weekend Pastor Devin Gough continued our MOSES series with a message about what happens when fear gets the final word.
Numbers 13:31-32
“But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored.
The people of Israel still saw themselves as unable to possess what God had promised. They had left Egypt behind, but they hadn’t left the mentality that kept them small. Why?
1) Fear will make you see yourself smaller than God sees you.
Faith does not require you to lie about what you see. Fear calculates the size of the obstacle without considering how big God is. Fear makes assumptions then treats those assumptions as though they were facts. Don’t let imaginary conversations cancel a real promise.
Psalm 34:3
Come magnify the Lord with me,
Let us exalt his name together.
Whenever you magnify something, something else always gets pushed outside of your field of vision. You can either magnify your problem, and God seems small, or you can magnify God, and your problems seem small.
2) Faithful leaders fight for people who are fighting their future.
Fear has a way of editing your memory. Sometimes the people you are trying to lead into their future will fight you because their past feels safer. Sometimes the biggest obstacle is not what’s in front of us, it’s what’s inside of us.
Numbers 14:2
“All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, “If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this wilderness!”
When the people rebelled against Moses, he fell on his face and he prayed for them. Moses wasn’t interested in defending his own name, he was interested in protecting God’s name.
Immature leaders protect their own name, but mature leaders protect God’s name.
There is a greater leader than Moses who would come to set people free. Jesus would also be misunderstood and rejected. When he was betrayed and mocked, when he was crucified, he didn’t say, “Father, get them!” He said, “Father, forgive them!” Because of his faithfulness and love, we can live in God’s promises today!
