FAITH CAPSULE: Focus on your source for deliverance, not your surroundings.

Numbers 13

What do you see in confronting challenges?
What one sees determines what one receives. 
What one receives is what becomes of such.
The Israelites were not strangers to the wonders of their deliverance from the bondage of over four hundred years.
The Israelites saw how God dealt with Pharaoh and the whole land of Egypt with ten painful plagues that prompted Pharaoh to allow their departure from bondage. 
As they advanced in their journey to the Promised Land, they could not focus on the source of their deliverance but on what they saw around them. 
During their journey, “…when Pharaoh drew near, the children of Israel lifted their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians marched after them. So they were very afraid, and the children of Israel cried out to the Lord.” (Exodus 14:10) 
Are you one that lifts eyes to behold confronting challenges with negative confession? 
The Israelites saw fear and failed to cling to the testimonies of how they came out of Egypt. 
In response to what they saw, they confessed negatively by saying to Moses, “…Because there were no graves in Egypt, have you taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you so dealt with us, to bring us up out of Egypt? Is this not the word that we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness.” (Exodus 14:11-12) 
How do you see your confronting challenge? 
Do not forget how far the Lord God has brought you.
The Israelites could not cling to the testimonies of their deliverance as they saw and confessed death in their journey. 
Testimonies experienced in your life should become your meditation.
 Psalm 119:2 states, “Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with the whole heart.”  
Seeing the positive in the face of the negative is evidence of seeking God. 
Joshua and Caleb could not see the negative when they went with their brethren to spy on the land. 
God promised the Israelites the Promised Land, but the spy went and could not keep the testimony of God, but confessed negatively to compromise and complicated the promise of God.
Deuteronomy 32:9-12 documents, “For when they went up to the Valley of Eshcol and saw the land, they discouraged the heart of the children of Israel so that they did not go into the land which the Lord had given them. So the Lord’s anger was aroused on that day, and He swore an oath, saying, ‘Surely none of the men who came up from Egypt, from twenty years old and above, shall see the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because they have not wholly followed Me, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh, the Kenizzite, and Joshua the son of Nun, for they have wholly followed the Lord.” 
Joshua and Caleb kept the testimony of God and wholly followed God.

Prayer for today: Ask that the testimony of God shall become your way of life.