Confident Abandon

“Now, as you can see, the Lord has kept me alive and well as he promised for all these forty-five years since Moses made this promise—even while Israel wandered in the wilderness. Today I am eighty-five years old. 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. So give me the hill country that the Lord promised me. You will remember that as scouts we found the descendants of Anak living there in great, walled towns. But if the Lord is with me, I will drive them out of the land, just as the Lord said.” [Joshua 14.10-12]

What Caleb said, "But if the Lord is with me, I will drive them [Anakites] out of the land..." is an example to all of us how to approach life. We really should live with confident abandon to the will of God!

The most difficult thing to grasp is, like Caleb noted, "if the Lord is with me..." It was understood that if God was not with Caleb, he would likely perish. The first thing Caleb had going for him was that he was unafraid to perish - he was not afraid to die. This, although quite foreign to modern man, is the mindset that God can use.

The problem for most of us today however is that, although we may have some degree of confidence in God, we are not so sure of ourselves! By this I mean that we, in an alarming way, are unsure of our standing with God because of sin in our lives. Even though we are far beyond the days of splitting hairs like the Scribes and Pharisees did in Jesus' day, we still split hairs in our own lives and fail therefore to attain the confidence that God is actually "for us."

How can we know God is for us?

Jesus.

Because of the sinful nature of man, from which we cannot escape (and remain on earth), we must do something to get past the guilt that limits our ability to move forward with God! That "something" we must do however has already been done! It is called death on a cross, and Jesus already did it. It requires faith on our part to believe and receive it!

Father, please help first me to repent and plead the blood of Jesus over all my sinful failures, but then to confidently move forward with You in victory - to have confident abandon to Your will which is victory!