Whose Report Will You Believe?

So I have a question for you…whose report are you going to believe? I can still remember years ago when we would sing the lines to this song frequently in church:

Whose report will you believe?
I will believe the report of the Lord!

Well not that long ago one morning I was reading the account of the 12 spies who were sent by Moses to check out the Promised Land. The story is a riveting account full of all kinds of good lessons to be learned.

During this particular time of reading the account, what stood out to me was the name of the land…it was the Promised Land. Especially in biblical times, names carried a lot of meaning. There is a lot of meaning behind the naming of a land with the word promise—that means what God says is going to happen, is going to happen! The Israelites were told ahead of time that it was the Promised Land; it wasn’t like a surprise to them.

So we know the story, that 10 spies…10 out of 12 (bad odds!) came back with a negative report. How do you come back with a negative report when God has already promised you good things? The problem is that the spies only saw the things that looked impossible. Their eyes were fixed on the difficulties.

But two of the spies, Caleb and Joshua, came back with an entirely different report. See, it’s all about perspective. They didn’t see the difficulties and impossibilities…they saw what God could do. They saw beyond the circumstances and believed that God’s word was true.

But isn’t that just like us, most of the time? We become so fixed on the way we see things that we fail to put on God’s eyes. Wouldn’t you love to have a pair of “God goggles?” These would be goggles that we could slip on at any time and suddenly see things through His eyes. How differently we would live each day!

However, I think that’s exactly what God expects of us. We may not have a literal pair of goggles to put on but we can certainly choose to view things through the eyes of faith. Faith really is a choice. We either choose to believe or we choose not to.

Recently my daughter came back from a friend’s house where she has spent many a time in their pool. Several months ago she had taken my husband’s goggles with her and came back empty-handed. She had no idea what happened to them. After all these months, on this last visit to her friend’s house she very happily pulled out my husband’s goggles declaring that they had been found. We asked where she found them. They had apparently gotten stuck in the filter.

Think about it. We often get our goggles stuck in filters. We see things very dimly or we see things with a very cloudy perspective. Then we take that and run with it. We make choices based on that or worse yet, we try to tell others what they should do as we are looking through those cloudy lenses.

You know, over the course of these last several years, I have run across a lot of “regulating” from other Christians. These are believers who are trying to “look after” other believers. Yet they fail to see how critical, judgmental and cloudy their vision is. I come from a background of homeschooling my children. My reasons for doing so were directed by God. It was the right choice at that time for our family. Then we entered into a new season when the right choice was to put my children in school. At each season, whether I was homeschooling or my children were in school, I was following the direction for our family for that time.

I can look back and see why we were in those seasons. I have never regretted any decisions because I knew we were doing what was right for us. Yet often I have been told by other believers that my choice was wrong—whether it was a non-homeschooling family criticizing my choice to homeschool or a homeschooling family criticizing my choice not to.

Whose report are you going to believe? Where has God sent you? Where is He leading you right now? Are you going to look through the eyes of your flesh? Or are you going to look through the eyes of faith? It might be time to dig around and see if you got your goggles stuck somewhere. Wipe them off and be amazed at how clearly you can suddenly see when you have God’s perspective.