Transcription
So, Lord, first, we just want to thank You for tonight and for the blessing of Your heart towards Your people, all people. And we just come and ask You, Holy Spirit, to be present among us tonight, to be with us. And we thank You for the power of Your Word. We thank You for the blessing of Your Word. We thank You for the transformative power that comes upon us as we spend time in Your Word.
And so tonight, we ask, Lord, for every person that You would move in Your goodness and Your graciousness. We ask that You would bring a spirit of wisdom and revelation upon us as we dive into the beautiful truths of Your Word about believing You and trusting You and taking You at Your Word. We ask, God, that You would move in our lives in such a way that our relationships and the world around us would be changed, that they would come into a revelation of who You are by the way Your children choose to believe You and trust You and act on Your goodness and on Your promises. In Jesus' name, amen.
So, I love this teaching. Thank you for being here tonight. We're going to be talking about the importance of believing God and how our decision to take God at His Word, to believe who He is and to believe what He says, can transform everything about our life, our relationships, our destinies. And we're going to look at scripture and look at people, example after example, of how believing God brought people into their destiny.
So, from the beginning, we can see in scripture the importance God places on His beloved believing Him, His Word, His promises, and believing Him for the promises that He states to come to pass. God is trustworthy. He tells the truth. He does not lie. Therefore, we are called to believe Him. This believing marks the beginning of our spiritual journey. Whoever believes in the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved. We come to Christ through faith and believing. If God could choose any way in the world to birth us into the kingdom, and He chose that it was going to be faith and believing, then this should solidify in us the importance we should place on believing God, His Word, and His promises. He could have chosen any way to do it, and He chose to call us to believe Him. Abraham's belief was credited to him as righteousness, and as a result, he had a son that was the declared promise of God. Believing God matters. Believing God moves His heart. It's a declaration of our trust, our hope, and our confidence in His character.
In this teaching, we will learn about the importance of what we choose to believe and really look at how our beliefs impact our life, our relationships, and our spiritual destiny. Proverbs 23 states, "As a man believes in his heart, so is he." My beliefs form me into the person I am, and that's a big statement, but it's true. What we choose to believe, who we choose to believe, and what we choose to believe impact who we are. Believing God also impacts our destiny in great ways. We were created by God with a destiny on our lives, each and every one of us. He orchestrated our days, and the Word tells us that He prepared in advance good works for us to do. Each of our days were established before one of them came to be. He has ensured the power to complete this life victoriously through Jesus. This is good news. Many factors impact completing our destiny in God, but what we believe is perhaps the bedrock foundation on which all of God's power moves to fulfill His plans and purposes through us.
Just like the people of Israel, God has given us promises and inheritance in Him that He Himself has secured for us through Christ. And just like the people of God long ago, we see that we have a choice to believe God and take hold of it, or to look at the giants in ourselves or in our circumstances and in the world around us and acquiesce in fear, believing that the hindrances are too big to take hold of what God has faithfully promised.
Numbers, we're going to look tonight, Numbers, at Numbers 13, Numbers chapter 13 through Numbers. And here we see the power of two believing men versus the reality of 10 others who did not believe. They all saw and experienced the same things in the natural realms as they explored, as they explored and actually went to check out the promised land that God had promised. But Joshua and Caleb saw beyond the natural. They believed God. They believed that what He said was true, and it caused them to have a different experience and a different outcome than the other ten.
Our believing God, taking Him at His Word and declaring it out, might bring a lot of opposition in the natural. I want us to be aware of that, that when we choose to step out and truly begin to believe God and what He says and what He'll do, we will meet opposition in the natural. But in that same way, we are met by God Himself and His power, His sometimes His angelic, miraculous power to bring about what He declares. Remember, He doesn't lie. He literally extended Joshua and Caleb's lives and allowed them to see the promise that God had declared that they had chosen to believe.
The battle to believe God not only impacts your life in the here and now, it impacts your descendants, all those that follow you. We see this where Joshua and Caleb were the only ones who didn't die in the desert, and their descendants were the first to be given their portion, their portion of the inheritance in the promised land. So, let's look at some of their journey because I like for us to look in Numbers 13, 14, and 15. And it mimics our lives pretty intensely. So, we're going to spend some time there.
So, in Numbers 13, we see that Moses, God, God says to Moses, "Send out from among your leaders men to explore the land of Canaan." Now, this is important. These, these were not just any men. They were leaders who had proven themselves to be people of character and leadership, and God trusted. I mean, God trusted him because Moses said, "Pick from among your leaders." And so he picked 12, one from each of the tribes, and he sent them out. Moses gave them instructions how to explore the land. And so we see this, and starting in chapter 13, verse 18, he says, "See what the land is like and find out whether the people living there are strong or weak, fewer or many. See what kind of land they live in, is it good or bad? Do their towns have walls? Are they unprotected like open camps? Is the soil fertile or poor? Are there many trees? Do your best to bring back samples of the crops you see."
So, they went up and explored the land from the Wilderness of Zin as far as Rehob, near Lebo-hamath. When they came to the Valley of Eshcol, they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes so large that it took two of them to carry it on a pole between them. I love that scripture. They also brought back samples of pomegranates and figs. After exploring the land for 40 days, the men returned to Moses, Aaron, and the whole community of Israel at Kadesh in the wilderness. They reported to the whole community that they had what they had seen and showed them the fruit that they had taken from the land. This was their report to Moses: "We entered the land you sent us to explore, and it is indeed a bountiful country. It is a land flowing with milk and honey." Does that sound familiar? Here's the promise completely fulfilled evidence. Here is the kind of fruit it produces, and they show them the grapes.
But this is their report: "But the people living there are powerful, and the towns are large and fortified. We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak." So, here, here we see that the report is evidence of the truth that God had spoken, and it's also evidence that there are some obstacles. But Caleb tried to quiet the people as they stood before Moses. "Let's go at once to take the land," he said. "We can certainly conquer it." Here we see Caleb speaking words of faith, speaking words of belief to the whole community. But the other men who explored the land with him disagreed. "We can't go up against them. They are stronger than we are." So, they spread this bad report about the land among the Israelites. "The land we traveled through and explored will devour anyone who goes to live there. All the people we saw were huge. We even saw giants there. To them, we felt like and looked like grasshoppers, and that is what they thought too." In another version, it says, "And that is what we are."
Now, I want us to stop right here and I want us to see. We have two. These are the people of God. They've all experienced the miracles of God. They've been delivered, and here we have a promise that's been given, and they're right on the brink of coming into their destiny. And we have 10 leaders who come back and say, they all carry the evidence. Here's the evidence of the actual truth of the promise of God being fulfilled. But right then, they also have some among them that stand up and begin to talk about the obstacles, begin to look at circumstances, and fear takes over. And actually, the fear goes so deep that they begin declaring what is actual unbelief among all the people. And we're going to see what a big deal this is to God in further scriptures.
So, here Caleb stands up as all this negative starts being talked, and Caleb is the one that says, "No, stop. We could take this land at once." And then I just, this last verse of verse 13, it just gets me every time. "We even saw giants there. To them, we felt like grasshoppers, and that is what we are." Or, "that is what they thought too." And here we see that what we begin to believe is actually what we become. So, here's the promise of God. Here's the evidence of God. But when we look and we perceive things in unbelief, then we begin to become just like that. "As a man believes in his heart, so is he."
So, here's what happens as a result of the unbelief being spoken out. Then the whole community began weeping aloud, and they cried all night. Their voices rose in a great chorus of protests against Moses and Aaron. So, here we see unbelief begins to attack the trust and the submission to authority. "If only we had died in Egypt or even here in the wilderness." So, we go from the evidence of what we see God has promised to beginning to speak out and think on unbelief, declare it. And then, if it just stopped there, but belief really does come. I'm sorry, unbelief comes to steal and kill and destroy our destiny and the promises of God being taken hold of. They get, they go from "we look like grasshoppers" to "oh no, we're going to die. Let's go back to Egypt. Let's go." I mean, when you think about that statement, yet sometimes we're not so different than that, you know? When we're on the brink and we have evidence of God moving, but we begin to see obstacles or we begin to see the work of the enemy to resist it, and that unbelief sets in, and a lot of times, even with our mouth, well, we, we don't want to take those steps of faith it takes to continue to operate and believe. And they then they begin to. So, they've accused Moses and Aaron, and now they come and they say, "Why is the Lord taking us into this country only to have us die in battle?"
So, here we see unbelief begins to cause them to question the heart of God. What, what was evidence of His promise and His good plan for them, now becomes, "He's taking us into this country to have us die." And the enemy will lie like that in unbelief. He won't just have us stop at, "Oh, okay, we better not do this." He'll have us believing the worst about our leaders, about God. Why? So, it's verse 3 and chapter 14. "Why is the Lord taking us to this country only to have us die? Our wives and our little ones will be carried off as plunder. Wouldn't it be better for us to return to Egypt? Let's choose new leaders and go back to Egypt." There's a lot in here about how unbelief begins to twist our thinking and our trust towards authority, especially God and our leaders. But I just want us to see that unbelief really becomes very, very destructive in our life, and we want to root out any hint of it.
Then Moses and Aaron fell face down on the ground before the whole community of Israel. Two of the men who had explored the land, Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, tore their clothing. They said to all the people of Israel, "The land we traveled through and explored is wonderful, and if the Lord is pleased with us, He will bring us safely into that land and give it to us. It is a rich land flowing with milk and honey. Do not rebel against the Lord, and don't be afraid of the people of the land. They are only helpless prey to us. They have no protection, but the Lord is with us. Don't be afraid of them."
And I want to speak to this because here we see Joshua and Caleb's faith, their belief. They're trusting God. They're saying, "God is with us, and God is on our side." And the Lord has spoken, and the Lord has declared a Word, and therefore it is true. And so we act powerfully in belief on that Word. And in that, they literally say they are like helpless prey. So, unbelief says, "We're grasshoppers. We can't do this." Belief says, "They got nothing on us. We're, we, because God is for us, because God will do this Himself, because He's true to His Word. Don't be afraid of them."
But the whole community began to talk about stoning Joshua and Caleb. I just want to speak this: as you begin to believe God's promises for your life, the battle intensifies, and we will have to choose. We will have to choose to believe God, or we will have to choose to believe all the obstacles, all the things the enemy throws to convince us that what God is saying isn't true, these promises aren't real. And we will find opposition from the most astounding places. I, I don't think that Joshua and Caleb would have thought that their very own people would have gotten into so much fear and so much unbelief and so much anger towards their belief that they would literally consider stoning these, these two men. They were friends, they were leaders, they had been trusted at one point.
Then the glorious presence of the Lord appeared to all the Israelites at the tabernacle, and the Lord said to Moses, "How long will these people treat Me with contempt? Will they never believe Me, even after all the miraculous signs I have done among them? I will disown them and destroy them with a plague. Then I will make you into a nation greater and mightier than they are." Now, that sounds kind of harsh, but I want us to understand what a big deal belief is to God. God is saying that literally, they are, that through their unbelief, they are treating Him with contempt. That's a strong word. And we need to understand that our belief moves the heart of God. Our unbelief hurts the heart of God. He is serious about us trusting Him and believing when He makes a promise.
So, as this continues, we see a lot of things because God has said, "I'm going to kill these people because they are, they've seen all these miraculous signs and wonders, they've seen evidence, but they still move against Me in unbelief." Moses begins, as the leader that they have wanted to replace and rebel against, he instead, and this is a good word for leaders, a side note, but not really. We see Moses, he goes before the Lord and he cries out on behalf of these very ones, these very people, and he asks God to spare them. He says, "In verse 9, 'And keeping them in keeping with Your magnificent, unfailing love, please pardon the sins of this people, just as You have forgiven them ever since they left Egypt.'"
Now, I want you to hear the strong word that Moses uses. He says that unbelief is sin. He declares it as sin. And in the life of believers, we need to be very serious about the sin of unbelief in our own life. It is robbing, it kills, it destroys. And you matter to God, and His promises and His declarations over your destiny matter, not just for you, but for generations and for many people around you. And so, He's serious, and we need to take seriously rooting out any hint, any sin of unbelief in our life.
Then the Lord said, "I will pardon them, just as you have requested." Well, that's astounding. I want to be a leader like that, where God is so moved by my heart and my faith that when I intercede for others, God will move on their behalf. But, "as surely as I live, and as surely as the earth is filled with the Lord's glory, not one of these people will ever enter that land. They have all seen My glorious presence and the miraculous signs I performed both in Egypt and in the wilderness, but again and again they have tested Me by refusing to listen to My voice. They will never even see the land I swore to their ancestors. But My servant Caleb has a different attitude than all the others. He has remained loyal to Me, so I will bring him into the land he explored. His descendants will possess their full share of that land."
And then He tells them to turn around and go back toward the land of the Canaanites. And I just want to say this here: we see there are consequences to unbelief. There are serious consequences to unbelief, and there are magnificent, amazing rewards to belief. And we need to choose daily. Sometimes these come. Unbelief wants to come in really subtle ways because, just like these other 10 men, we begin to look and see. We see things with our natural eyes that make evidence proven. The enemy will present proven evidence that this is not going to happen, or it can't happen, or why it can't happen. And it's very important that we take hold in our mind and set our heart resolute to believe God despite obstacles, anything that the enemy throws. We are going to set our heart resolutely towards the promises of God, and we're going to hold on to the evidences that God gives us along the way that His Word is true, that He is trustworthy, that He can be depended on, and He will come through with the promises He makes.
He said, "God declares this: You will not enter and occupy the land I swore to give you. The only exceptions will be Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun." And here, at the very end, as the Lord is punishing the Israelites for their unbelief, He honors, He honors these two men. And the truth, as you finish reading, the truth is, these two men, all literally all the descendants of that time up to the age the Lord declared, they lost, they died in the wilderness. They didn't get to go see, just like the Lord said they wouldn't. But Joshua and Caleb, the Lord extended their life to where they were able to see the promise that they had believed for. And then we see on in chapter 14 that everything they said with their mouth, every single thing they said with their mouth happened. And so, we're going to talk more about that in a future class about the power of our words. But we want to be very careful that our thinking, our heart, and our mouth is aligned with statements of belief and trust in God.
In another part of the scripture, God talks about the fact that the ten men that spread disbelief among the camp, God literally struck them down and killed them. And I want to speak this, especially to leaders, about that scripture, that when we are placed in positions of influence, and all of us are, but when we are placed in positions of influence, there is so much importance God places on you trusting Him and believing Him, especially in spite of any opposition to the Word of God. We are to stand as leaders, and we are to be the voice of faith, and we are to be the ones that look to our people and say, "Just like Joshua and Caleb, we can believe our God. We can trust Him." And we're coming into days in the church where this is going to be vitally important, that His leaders, when we begin to see the evil rise, that we will be the ones to speak life and to speak hope and to speak the truth of helping the beloved of God believe every promise He has.
So, what is belief? It's a conviction or persuasion that develops over a period of time. And we see the world from our own, as we see the world from our own unique perspective. It is not necessarily based on fact, but on what we experience and or learn. An assumption that certain things are true or real, or not true or real. It's a set of lenses by which we see the world around us. Probably nothing impacts our relationships with God, with ourselves, or with others more than what we believe. Beliefs that agree and line up with the Word of God, His Word, His nature, His character, are called godly beliefs. Beliefs that do not agree or line up with the Word of God, His Word, His nature, or His character are called ungodly beliefs.
Where do these seeds of godly beliefs and ungodly beliefs begin to grow? The Bible tells us that many, that we are impacted. We are not just an island unto ourselves, and that our relationships, we have influence, and in relationships, have influence upon us. So, these, these beliefs begin to be formed primarily through those relationships that are closest to us. And sometimes the beliefs are formed through the experiences we have, especially when we're growing up. And so, we all grow up in families to one very degree or another of those that are broken. There's no perfect family, and we are impacted by the beliefs around us that we grow up in. As young children, we're like sponges. We take on and are shaped by the beliefs and the environments of our home or our family unit. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes those are godly and in alignment with the Word of God, and sometimes they are far from that. And things like fear, things like unbelief, things like expecting the worst. There are many things, I'm sure you can think of in your life, that you might have believed or gained from your family that don't line up with the Word of God. But there are also things that I'm sure that you can think of that you did that did line up. And we need to begin to discern and to ask the Holy Spirit to come in and come into our beliefs and show us, okay, which ones are true? Which ones line up with Your Word? And which ones are ungodly? And we need to root them out and get rid of them.
Okay, so I want us, I also want to talk about the fact that our life experiences, especially traumatic life experiences, are open doors for the enemy to plant seeds and lies, especially seeds of unbelief in us. Through traumatic experiences, we begin to question, we begin to question God, His goodness. We begin to question ourselves. We might even begin to question the trustworthiness of those around us. And while these experiences are real, we must look closely at our chosen response to these events and how they formed our beliefs about ourselves, God, and others. I want us to be clear here. We're not at all negating that these experiences were painful or were wrong. But what we are saying is, we respond, sometimes in a natural, normal way, we respond to traumatic and hurtful experiences. But we have to recognize that even in the midst of that, we do make choices about what we begin to believe out of those experiences. When we're young, sometimes we may not realize it. When we're older, we make willing choices to believe certain things about ourselves or God or others based out of these experiences. And oftentimes, in addition to trauma, repetition of negative actions or spoken words begin the formation of ungodly beliefs. So, if we're told certain things that are not in alignment with the Word of God about who we are, or about who others are, or about who God is, over and over, then we begin to believe that this is just true. And in that, the enemy begins to lay a framework, kind of a susceptibility, if you will, to lies. And out of those lies, we begin to believe ungodly beliefs.
All of these are great places to start when asking God to reveal ungodly beliefs at work in your life. Take a look at your experiences, negative actions, or negative words spoken over you repetitively over your lifetime. Maybe negative experiences that reoccur. Sometimes this happens in friendships and relationships. It's the place you can see it most. So, negative words spoken repetitively over you, your family. Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal wounds and ungodly beliefs present and active in you from these places. He is happy to reveal these. He wants to reveal these. He doesn't want us in bondage or even hindered from fulfilling our destiny based on ungodly beliefs.
So, one of the other ways that we can begin to detect ungodly beliefs is if you see repetitive patterns of behavior in yourself that you know clearly, this is not in alignment with who I know God wants me to be, or how God wants me to be experiencing life. You can probably go back and align that somewhere to an ungodly belief rooted in your life. And many times, we try to change our behaviors when we look at transformation, where we want to start, where we often try to start, what we got, where we get in patterns of stuckness, is we try to change our behaviors first. And I want us to see that in the pattern of transformation in the Word of God, we see over and over that really, it's our beliefs that begin to impact most profoundly our behaviors and our expectations of God, sometimes of ourselves, or others.
So, we're saying that experiences do have profound impact on our behaviors. They do have profound impact on our expectations, and they have profound impact on our beliefs. And so, what we want to do is look very closely and begin an examination process of our beliefs. We, we tend to move to examining and trying or worrying or being discouraged by behaviors. And I'm not, it is important that our behavioral patterns change. But really, the most effective form of transformation to those behaviors is if we will go back and look at what we're believing. Maybe what we're believing about ourselves, is it true? Is it godly? Is it in alignment with the Word of God? What we're believing about God, is it, is what we're believing true of Him? Is what we're believing right about His character and nature? And even what we begin to believe about others, because what we believe about others, well, I mean, what we begin to, what we believe impacts our expectations of other people. And a lot of times, that very expectation repeats experiences. And so, what we really want to do ultimately is decide. We have a choice to make. Either our experiences are going to dictate our reality as we see the world, or we are going to see these experiences as real as they are through the Word of God, or we're going to say, "While this experience is true, I choose to believe the Word of God even over my life experience." And I, all the all the ramifications of this behavior and experience may be there, but we believe in the power of God's Word enough that that Word, put over, laid over our heart of the experience, our beliefs and our expectations will be transformative in our life.
So, in this, we see we have the choice. If we choose to believe the Word of God, and if we choose to align with that truth, and we choose to decree this truth and persevere in the belief and the decreeing, changing and getting our behaviors in alignment with the Word of God, then we begin to see promises manifest. And we see this over and over and over again in scripture. And out of those promises, life is produced. And for the believer, the beautiful thing generationally is that that life is multiplied. The same is true if we begin to let our experiences dictate our reality. And I would say that when you allow your experiences to be the lens by which you're going to operate in your life, that deception begins to occur. And the deception begins to occur about your circumstances, it begins to occur about yourself, about God, and about others. And oftentimes, we align, meaning we begin to live out of that deception. We believe, begin to live out those ungodly beliefs. And many times, we don't stop at just believing, then we begin to profess them out of our mouth. We decree these very lies. So, we're either going to decree the truth from the Word of God, or we're going to decree lies, which has creative power. And that begins to separate us, honestly, from God, from others, sometimes even from ourselves and our destiny for sure. And destruction comes from that wrong alignment. And He's not just satisfied with the destruction of our destiny or our heart or our relationships. He really wants death. And that's what the enemy is after through these experiences. And just like, just like the truth, these deceptions will end up as that, they'll end up in death. And then that is multiplied. And so, we see again how important it is for us to align, or rightly, with the Word of God.
And I want us to think about a couple of examples of this. So, I want you to stop and think about it with me. I want you to think about an ungodly belief that you know does not line up with the Word of God, that you know is not absolutely true. And this can be about yourself, it can be about God, or it can be about other people in general, or authority. I want you to think about what happens from an experience that brought that belief about. If you can do that, usually pretty quickly, we know what those ungodly beliefs are tied to a painful, maybe a traumatic, maybe words that were spoken that over and over again, repetitively. I want you to think about how you respond out of that pain, what you believe, what you expect, how you behave in relationship to God, or to yourself, or to others, out of that. And then I want you to see how the, in that cycle, those experiences begin to repeat themselves.
And now I want you to stop, and I want you to ask Holy Spirit to come. Say, "Okay, God, in that experience, could what is the truth of Your Word? What is the declaration of Your Word? And how, if I was going to believe Your Word, how would I be behaving differently? How would that truth begin to impact my behaviors? What would I believe that's different about You, or about myself, or about others? How would my expectations be transformed?" And honestly, how, if I was expecting different things, behaving different ways, believing You, taking You at Your Word, how would my life experience be transformed in that place?
Someone is just to stop as you've gone through at least one of those. And we're going to ask Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, we ask You to come right now. And I'm asking Him to, Holy Spirit, would You come upon each person? And would You, Lord, reveal three ungodly beliefs: one about themself, one about others, one about You. And in this place, as God reveals them, I want you to have to think about them too much right now, but I want us just to confess these ungodly beliefs to God in repentance. Remember that unbelief, that believing wrongly about God, even about yourself and others, it hurts God's heart. And we need to repent that we have aligned with the wrong kingdom. We've aligned with the doubt and the fear and the accusation of the enemy over the truth of God's Word. I want you to ask Him to show you how these ungodly beliefs have affected your behaviors, how they've affected your expectations. And now we're going to ask the Holy Spirit for truth to replace these lies, these ungodly beliefs that you believed. Lord, would You show each one of us how believing You will change our expectations and behaviors? We're asking You to show us how to correctly align with Your Word, the transformative power of believing Your Word.
So, Lord, I just want to call up the destinies attached to these godly truths and godly promises that You just revealed. Lord, we just come against the enemy's schemes where we, where he has brought ungodly beliefs and brought evidence to help to confuse us and to help convince us that Your promises in these places were not true. And Lord, we, we just, we break the power of those ungodly beliefs right now in Jesus' name.
So, Lord, we just call forth the peace, the power, the authority, and the blessing that comes with aligning rightly with Your Word. We thank You for the destinies that You have called on each person. And we thank You for the fruit, the lasting fruit that is attached to these godly beliefs. And Lord, I ask that You, in Your graciousness, would continue to cause a passionate fire in us to uproot any ungodly beliefs that reside in our hearts. And we ask, Lord, that the power of Your Holy Spirit would ignite the truth of Your Word over all of our circumstances, over our life experiences, over any patterns behaviorally where we have been longing for transformation. And we ask, Jesus, that the joy of the Lord, the joy of the truth of His faithful Word, would come to pass in our lives, in our families, and in our destiny. In Jesus' name, amen.