The Effect of Doubt

As we continue to track along in the year of obedience as we are calling it we have been talking about why we can trust God and what it means to really understand who God is and why we can trust Him. This morning I want to take a pause and address doubt in our lives. What is the cost when God has called us to do something and we do not follow through? Is it really that big of a deal? I mean after all the only person the doubt affects is us right? Doubt is a poison and it starts as what some would say as innocent.

You have seen it a so have I. A child walks to the edge of the water slide and backs up, they walk to the edge and back up. The thoughts in their mind are racing and they are unsure how to handle the situation. Watching other children go down the slide they can tell themselves that the slid is safe and it is fun. As they are standing on the edge of the slide the fear fills their hearts. What if the slide falls apart? What if I fall out of the slide? What if at the end of the slide the pool of water takes over and I cannot find my way to the top? These questions seem to be legitimate questions. After these questions come the less realistic questions. What if this whole slide falls apart when I get on it? What if the water pressure increases and shoots me 100 yards across the pool and onto the concrete. What if this water is not safe and it kills me? The questioning increases, the anxiety builds. This is what doubt is.

Does this sound familiar to any of you? God has called you to something and before you ever get up the stairs to the ride you have convinced yourself you cannot do it. God cannot do it. Both of you together cannot do it. You are not alone in this. Turn with me in your Bible today to Numbers 13 and Numbers 14.. In this passage today we will see the Lord command Moses to send spies into the land of Canaan to see the land that He was giving them. We all know this story and have even spoken about it recently. What happens in the first part of Numbers 13 is that Moses is commanded to send spies into the land, he appoints spies one from each tribe. Moses then gives them commands to spy out and see what the land is, if the people of the land are strong or weak, if they are few or many, and whether the land is good or bad. They go out and they are terrified by the people they see and they come back and report that the land is overrun by Giants and that the cities are fortified and that the people are strong and large in number. Caleb says forget it man God has our backs lets go get what is ours! The people in Numbers 14 turn and say we would have been better to die in Egypt. Then because of their doubt God steps in and says that he is going to disinherit them. Moses asks God not to do it for His name sake and God says He will not but that He will punish the Israelites for their doubt. God makes a promise that none of the men who saw His glory in Egypt or in the wilderness will see the promised land except for Caleb and Joshua. We will not read the whole chapters this morning but will read passages from each chapter. Because of this I will not ask you to stand this morning and will present the scriptures as we read them. This morning we will see the effect of doubt and how it plays out in the lives of those who say they are children of the one true God. This morning we will see 3 things. First Doubt begins with deviation. Second we will see that Doubt leads to Fear and Dissatisfaction. Third we will see that Doubt results in a lost blessing.

Doubt begins with deviation

Numbers 13:1–2 ESV

1 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Send men to spy out the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the people of Israel. From each tribe of their fathers you shall send a man, every one a chief among them.”

Numbers 13:17–20 ESV

17 Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan and said to them, “Go up into the Negeb and go up into the hill country, 18 and see what the land is, and whether the people who dwell in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many, 19 and whether the land that they dwell in is good or bad, and whether the cities that they dwell in are camps or strongholds, 20 and whether the land is rich or poor, and whether there are trees in it or not. Be of good courage and bring some of the fruit of the land.” Now the time was the season of the first ripe grapes.

I want to point out a small but very important aspect of what happened when the Israelites sent in their spies. God told Moses to send spies to see the land that He was giving them. There were no other instructions given to Moses other then to send men to see the land that I am giving you. When Moses handed down his orders to the spies what did he do? Did he direct them exactly as God told him to do? No, if he had he would have said, go into the land and see what God is giving us. There would have been no other instructions. Moses instead sends the men and he tells them to look and tell us what these people look like, are they big or small? Are they strong or weak? Are they great in number? There is one distinct problem with what Moses told the spies to do. The problem is they did exactly what he told them to do. We look at the spies and we say that it is all their fault, it is to an extent but it is also Moses fault. Did God tell Moses, go see the land and whip up a war plan and let me see what you come up with? No God did not tell Moses this at all, He told Moses to send the spies into the land to see what He was giving them. If God was giving it to them, why would it matter who lived there or what they looked like? It wouldn’t. You see doubt begins in the small deviations. We think that we know more that God and so we begin to create plans and we feel like we are addressing things that God forgets. The fact though is that God did not forget, He told Moses plainly. I am giving you this land, it is yours, I will handle the people of this land, go and look at it and prepare to take the blessing I am giving you. God was prepared to do the work to hand the promised land over He simply wanted the people to see the blessing He was giving before He gave it. Moses inadvertently created a space for doubt and dissension. Not because he truly doubted God, but because he did not simply do what God said to do. Have you ever found yourself in this spot in life? You are told by God to do something and so you begin to address the unknowns that God has not thought about?

In 2010 I went on a trip to Ukraine and I was so blessed to be able to go on the trip and be a part of summer camps and building homes for abandoned children. While we were preparing for the trip I knew that God had called me to go on this trip and that if He called me to go that He would supply for the trip. It was amazing, funding was almost immediately available, my passport was quickly approved and I was ready. The most nerve wrecking thing to me was the plane flight. It was a flight to Atlanta, a flight to Laguardia, then a 4 hour flight from NY to Ukraine. I could not stop thinking about that flight. I knew that God had already provided for me and that I was going to make the trip, in my mind through I could not get over the many flights and was worried that I was going to get on a malfunctioning plane. After seeing God provide for everything I had convinced myself that the flights were going to be the issue. In order to mitigate this I went and had my Dr give me some sleeping pills. The pills would be no good from JAX to ATL or from ATL to LGX, but from LGX to Ukraine the pills would be exactly what I needed. As we boarded the plane in NY bound for Ukraine I took my sleeping pill and was ready to wonder off to sleepy bliss. As I woke up 8 hours into the flight I looked over to see myself in a different seat than I had started in. I was very confused. I came out of my sleepy, groggy time and found that I was in fact in a different row and a different seat than I had started in and the problem was that I did not move. I was sat next to our trip leader and his wife and they told me not to get up, not to talk, not to do anything. I was a little confused at this. As we sat there I began to ask questions of how I got to the seats I was in. You see what I was not aware of is for someone who had never taken Ambien that the side effects were sever in some cases of crazy behavior. What I was told is that as the plane began to take off I started off just raising my hands like I was on a roller coaster. By the time the wheels had come off the ground I was almost completely out of my seat with my hand in the air screaming woooohoooo! This prompted the stewardess to become concerned for others safety. Thankfully on her way to me our group leader was able to stop her and ask if he could help with me that it might be a side effect of my sleeping pills that they had tried to convince me not to take. Instead of getting the air Marshall the stewardess moved me to the seat next to our trip leader and restrained me in the seat. I of course have 0 recollection of any of these events. The thing I did to try and help my trip almost wrecked it and almost landed me on a no fly list for the rest of my life.

This is a true story as told to me. Could you imagine? I had tried to cover something that I thought God had missed. I had convinced myself that I needed this because if the plane went down I did not want to know about it. I wanted to wake up in heaven. I feel though now that God would have been disappointing in me. The first conversation we would have had is Ryan, do you really think I would kill you after getting you all the way from no funding to fully funded, made sure everything else that you could not do for yourself was done, and then I was going to abandon you? I am guilty of this behavior in my life. I trust God and I say that I believe in Him, I just don’t trust that He covered everything. This is what Moses did. Moses said we need more details than God is going to give us the land. Do you try to make plans instead of trusting Gods? Do you deviate from what God said to do to mitigate oversights that you see in God’s plans? Mans plans are flawed and they lead to destruction. God’s plans are perfect.

James 4:13–15 ESV

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

Psalm 33:10 ESV

10 The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples.

Proverbs 19:21 ESV

21 Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.

Proverbs 16:9 ESV

9 The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.

Moses desired to lead the people as God had called him to but he deviated from what God told him to do and because of this deviation we find the Israelites in a place of Fear and Dissatisfaction.

Doubt Leads to Fear and Dissatisfaction

Numbers 13:25–33 ESV

25 At the end of forty days they returned from spying out the land. 26 And they came to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation of the people of Israel in the wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh. They brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land. 27 And they told him, “We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. 28 However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. And besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there. 29 The Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negeb. The Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country. And the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and along the Jordan.” 30 But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” 31 Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.” 32 So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. 33 And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

Numbers 14:1–4 ESV

1 Then all the congregation raised a loud cry, and the people wept that night. 2 And all the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The whole congregation said to them, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! 3 Why is the Lord bringing us into this land, to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become a prey. Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?” 4 And they said to one another, “Let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt.”

We are very difficult on the spies because we look at them with this historical prejudice. What we really do is we see the cost of their doubt and we say, how could they have been so stupid? Well in the same way we are. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that we are not capable of doing the same things. Have your doubts about God’s plans in your life ever lead you to a place of fear and that fear lead you into a place of dissatisfaction? It often times sounds like this.

“God, how could you let this happen?”

“God, why do you let this happen to me?”

“God, do you not see what is happening here?”

The list goes on and on and is often times the way we voice our fear for the path that God has set us on and we voice our dissatisfaction with where He currently has us. The fear of the enemy lead the Israelites into a dissatisfaction of where they were. It lead them to forgetting all the things that God had done previously. We seem to act like this is some kind of act of blatant disobedience. It is but it is also the same thing we do. When is the last time you forgot how many times God has gotten you through something in your life? When were you last in a situation and doubted God could handle it? You see we are not so different than the Israelites are we? When we are in the middle of our most difficult times it is tough to lean in and say God, I trust your plan and provision in my life. When life is going great and we have all we need and God is supplying we look and we say we have enough, what we have is fine. I am not going into that challenge God has called me into because why do I need to leave the dessert and heck with my dessert why don’t I just go back to what I had before it wasn’t so bad.

God is calling you to trust Him and to take the next step. We must become people who do not understand retreat but constantly look to what God has for us next. If the Israelites would have listened they would have known that God was going to do all the work, they simply needed to follow and walk.

When Julius Caesar landed on the shores of Britain with his Roman legions, he took a bold and decisive step to ensure the success of his military venture. Ordering his men to march to the edge of the Cliffs of Dover, he commanded them to look down at the water below. To their amazement, they saw every ship in which they had crossed the channel engulfed in flames. Caesar had deliberately cut off any possibility of retreat. Now that his soldiers were unable to return to the continent, there was nothing left for them to do but to advance and conquer! And that is exactly what they did.

The doubt that the Israelites had was because of their inability to trust God. Are you trusting God in your life? Are you walking where God tells you to go? Scripture tells us of the doubt of the flesh.

James 1:6 ESV

6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.

Matthew 21:21 ESV

21 And Jesus answered them, “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen.

Matthew 14:31 ESV

31 Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

Mark 11:23 ESV

23 Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.

Does your life say that you do not doubt God and you are ready to walk in His blessing? Or because of the doubt in your heart are you discontent with where God has taken you and discontent with how He has provided for you and are you ready to turn back? We know that Doubt starts with deviations from God’s plans, it leads to Fear and Discontentment. It also leads to a loss of the blessing.

Doubt leads to lost blessing

Numbers 14:20–38 ESV

20 Then the Lord said, “I have pardoned, according to your word. 21 But truly, as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord, 22 none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test these ten times and have not obeyed my voice, 23 shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers. And none of those who despised me shall see it. 24 But my servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit and has followed me fully, I will bring into the land into which he went, and his descendants shall possess it. 25 Now, since the Amalekites and the Canaanites dwell in the valleys, turn tomorrow and set out for the wilderness by the way to the Red Sea.” 26 And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, 27 “How long shall this wicked congregation grumble against me? I have heard the grumblings of the people of Israel, which they grumble against me. 28 Say to them, ‘As I live, declares the Lord, what you have said in my hearing I will do to you: 29 your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and of all your number, listed in the census from twenty years old and upward, who have grumbled against me, 30 not one shall come into the land where I swore that I would make you dwell, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun. 31 But your little ones, who you said would become a prey, I will bring in, and they shall know the land that you have rejected. 32 But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness. 33 And your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness. 34 According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, a year for each day, you shall bear your iniquity forty years, and you shall know my displeasure.’ 35 I, the Lord, have spoken. Surely this will I do to all this wicked congregation who are gathered together against me: in this wilderness they shall come to a full end, and there they shall die.” 36 And the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land, who returned and made all the congregation grumble against him by bringing up a bad report about the land— 37 the men who brought up a bad report of the land—died by plague before the Lord. 38 Of those men who went to spy out the land, only Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh remained alive.

Because of their doubt in God the men of Israel and everyone counted in the Census 20 and above lost the blessing of the promised land. God said to them something very important.

Numbers 14:28 ESV

28 Say to them, ‘As I live, declares the Lord, what you have said in my hearing I will do to you:

Remember when they were complaining and saying that they were going back to Egypt? God said OK, well have it your way. This isn’t BK but you can have it your way. You will all die in the wilderness. Will you be careful next time you speak to God in discontentment and fear? What will it cost you when you decide to grumble against the plans of God in your life? The other thing to take note of is that Aaron and Moses also were not permitted to enter into the promised land. This doubt that crippled the Israelites from listening and following through with what God had called them to do lead to all of them losing the blessing of the promised land except for Joshua and Caleb who believed and were ready to follow God into the promised land.

I’ve told this story before but one day I was driving back to school. I was late after leaving home way later than I should of. I hit traffic in Atlanta that delayed me by over an hour. After finally getting past Atlanta and moving towards my school it was nearly 10PM. As I hit some back roads towards the dorm rooms I found myself cruising along when suddenly the blue lights went off behind me. I knew what this meant and I knew it was going to be worse since I was doing 85 in a 65 in the mountains on a state road. The lack of red in the lights meant that I had been spotted by one of Georgias state troopers. I was frustrated, how could things get any worse. I had an exam due the next day, I had no time to study, I was mad. As the officer approached my window he asked, sir, do you know how fast you were going? I said no but I am sure you can tell me. At that he said I sure can, I will even write it on a nice piece of paper that you can hang on your wall if you would like. If you don’t like the paper you are welcome to fight it in court and we will see each other again there. My words sealed my fate and I knew instantly I should have shut my mouth and been kind.

What are you saying about God’s plans in your life? Are you understanding that you do not have to understand why life is the way it is, you simply need to honor God in it knowing that He will deliver your promised land? Are you resting in the scripture that lets us know that we have a God who is ready to bless us if we will simply trust Him. Lack of trust in God will result in the loss of His great blessings in our lives.

Jeremiah 17:7–8 ESV

7 “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. 8 He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”

Proverbs 16:3 ESV

3 Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.

Philippians 4:19 ESV

19 And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

Jeremiah 29:11 ESV

11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Are you prepared to follow God, give up your doubts and take your promised land? Will you allow doubt to cripple you and to cause you to lose your blessing? God is calling all of us to trust Him and go where He tells us to knowing that He will handle the giants. God never told the Israelites that they had to fight the giants. God told them to walk and trust and they chose to doubt and fear. What will you do with the plans in your life from God? Will you trust and obey?