Numbers 13:30
Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, "We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it."
I taught from this passage Saturday night.
Too often we skirt the edges of recovery, thinking that just being near someone, or going to a meeting without the commitment is all we need to do.
Crippled by fear and doubt, we are like the ten other men who were sent by Moses to spy out this new land that God had given to the Hebrews. It was a fantastic place with an abundance of natural resources needed to survive. The timing was perfect because it was harvest season. The fruit trees and vines were full of ripe fruit just waiting to be picked. But there was one thing wrong.......the people who lived there.
The ten naysayers who were a part of the group made a collective statement that sounds so much like what I have heard in recovery before. Comparing themselves to the people they say, the ten said, "We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes...and we looked the same to them." Recovery means facing up to the giants that we have created through our own destruction of using. It does seem insurmountable and impossible. But II Corinthians 5:7 commands us (not suggests to us) that we are to Walk by faith. We can't let what our natural senses tell us be the measure of whether we do or don't do. Whether we go or stay. We move, eat, breathe, play, sleep and rest by faith.
On the surface, Caleb's statement of "let's go get'er done!" sounds a bit over confident. Maybe even a pie-in-sky kind of statement. Not so. It was founded on the knowledge of who God is and what God wanted to accomplish through this new nation of people He had claimed as His own. Caleb merely stated the truth. We can do this!
That is what I share with the men who come through the program at Rapha. Why would God go to all the trouble to created a treatment facility (and it was the hand of God who brought Rapha to life) only to see a person fail and remain in addiction? I can truthfully say that Rapha can be the last rehab a man has to go to, because I know that God can and will deliver anyone who is ready to go in and possess this new "LIFE" that only He can provide. Pie-in-the-sky? Nope. God-in-my-life! That is difference between laying hold of what He has promised and walking away in fear only to be consumed by the giants of addiction.
God on you...
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