“But my servant Caleb has a different attitude than the others have. 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.”
(Numbers 14:24 NLT)
The world is full of negativity. It is hard to go through our day without encountering someone with a negative attitude. What is really sad is when we also encounter negative people in the Church. In many cases, the negativity is fueled by fear.
That is what happened in this story. Twelve spies were sent into the land that God had promised his people. All twelve of the spies saw the same things. Ten of them, however, came out of the experience with a negative attitude. “There is no way we can conquer this land. The people are giants. There are too many of them. The walls on their cities are too high.”
Two of the spies, though, saw things through different eyes. They had different attitudes than the others. Caleb and Joshua saw everything that the other ten spies did, yet they both came to the conclusion, “Let’s go and take this land right now! God has given it into our hands!”
Isn’t it interesting that all twelve of the spies were correct? The negative attitude of the ten kept them from achieving their destiny. Their fear and lack of faith kept them out of the land that God wanted to give them. The positive attitudes of Joshua and Caleb gave them entrance into their destiny.
Joshua ended up being the man who replaced Moses as the leader of the Hebrews. Caleb was the only other person from his generation that God allowed into the promised land. At eighty-five years of age, Caleb entered the land that God had given him.
Even at that age, Caleb still had a bright, positive, and faith-filled attitude. He asked Joshua for the hill country where “giants” lived. These giants were the tall people that the other ten spies had fixated on. At eighty-five, Caleb still felt that he had some unfinished business with those giants. He told Joshua, “I am as strong now as I was when Moses sent me on that journey, and I can still travel and fight as well as I could then.”
There are a lot of things in life that we cannot control. One of the most important things that we have absolute control over, however, is our attitude. I can choose, just like Caleb and the other eleven spies, how I am going to respond to what I see and experience. May God help us to all be like Caleb and to have a different attitude.
What is the default position of your attitude? Are you normally positive or negative? Is faith or fear your default position?
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