By Diane Hunt
There I was face down pleading with God for insight and wisdom, tears welling in my eyes. I believed Psalm 77:1, I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me. Morning after morning I was on my face literally crying out to God, but I did not feel like He was answering me.
I had spent a year studying and preparing for a women’s conference that I was speaking for and it was time to start laying out the outline and the sessions. Whenever I begin preparation I pray 1 Corinthians 2:2-5 and often post it in an obvious place to keep it before my face while I work. “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” I genuinely desire the women at a conference to hear from God not from me.
But this time my thoughts were so garbled that I struggled to make sense of the massive amount of information floating around in my head. Every passing day the tension grew. I spent hours a day for weeks writing, rewriting and then starting over. In 18 years of speaking I have never had such a battle.
My message was from the book of Joshua and I was excited about what I learned from Israel’s journey to cross the Jordan into the Promise Land – finally returning to the land God promised Abram generations before in Genesis 12:1-3 “Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
I have prepared and shared many messages for women’s meetings, conferences, seminars and weekend retreats and my hope is always that God will make it absolutely clear to me what He wants me to say. Still, there I was on my face pleading with God for His message. What was I to say? What was my point or rather what was His point? What did He want to say to this group of women I was going to be speaking to?
To be honest over the weeks that followed my faith was frustrated because day after day I did not get the discernment I sought. I knew God heard me but I did not feel that He answered me. I did all I knew to do – for a year – but was disappointed that God was not giving me clarity.
I started to mold the 5 messages from Joshua around these two questions: (1) Will you walk by faith or will you walk by sight? (2) What is the difference between a non-believer that cannot walk by faith, and a believer that does not walk by faith?
Since the Garden of Eden there have been two choices and only two choices:
Choice #1 – To walk by faith, believing and trusting God
Choice #2 – To walk by sight, unbelieving and not trusting God
In Numbers 13, Moses sent 12 spies into the land of Canaan. Ten of the 12 returned with a report filled with fear “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. 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 13:32-33
Their report led the people of Israel to respond in unbelief and it had dire consequences.
Two of the spies Caleb and Joshua, returned with a faith-filled report. And Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had spied out the land, tore their clothes and said to all the congregation of the people of Israel, “The land, which we passed through to spy it out, is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land that flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not fear the people of the land, for they are bread for us. Their protection is removed from them, and the Lord is with us; do not fear them.” Numbers 14:6-9
This is a great example of the two choices: walking by sight (10 spies) and walking by faith (Caleb and Joshua).
Finally, the weekend arrived. I still had little confidence that I had God’s message for the women. I had knots in my stomach from the time we crossed over the Delaware Memorial Bridge into New Jersey.
Friday night’s session began and I shared the first message about Joshua. As the weekend progressed I pulled back the curtain of my own life to give a behind-the-scenes commentary of my experience of the previous weeks.
As I stood on the platform sharing my heart about what God had shown me through my year-long study in Joshua, it occurred to me that I was living my own message. My journey itself was the testing ground for my own question. Will I walk by faith or will I walk by sight?
I wanted God to lay it all out for me so I could see it and feel it and know it. Yet for His own reasons His message was revealed in the midst of my sharing. Oh, sure I had my notes but as I look back it really was all Him. Was He faithful? Absolutely! Did God answer my prayers? Yes, just not in the way I wanted or expected.
M
y own journey had times of strong faith and times of weak faith but even as I walked, the act of putting one foot in front of the other was evidence of faith because…faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1
Diane is a writer, Biblical Counselor, and Women’s Conference and Retreat speaker. She has been on the staff of America’s Keswick since 1999 and continues to serve part time remotely from her home in North Carolina. Diane is married with 2 children, 3 step-children and 11 grandchildren. She loves to hike, camp, travel, and play with her grandkids.