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Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the book of Numbers, reading various verses from the thirteenth chapter. The Lord said to Moses, "Send men to spy out the land of Canaan, which I give to the people of Israel.

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From each tribe of their father shall you send men, every one a leader among them." So Moses sent them from the wilderness of Paran according to the command of the Lord, all of them men who were heads of the people of Israel. Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan and said to them, "Go up into the Negev yonder

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and go up into the hill country and see what the land is and whether the people who dwell in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many, and whether the land that they dwell in is good or bad, and whether the cities that they dwell in are camps or strongholds, and whether the land is rich or poor, and whether there is wood in it or not.

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Be of good courage and bring some of the fruit of the land." Now the time was the season of the first ripe grapes. So they went up and spied out the land from the wilderness of Zin to Rahab near the entrance of Hamath.

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And they came to the valley of Eshkol and cut down from there a branch with a single cluster of grapes, and they carried it on a pole between two of them. They brought also some pomegranates and figs. That place was called the valley of Eshkol because of the cluster which the men of Israel

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cut down from there. At the end of forty days they returned from spying out the land, and they came to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation of the people of Israel in the wilderness of Paran at Kedesh.

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And they brought back word to them and to all the congregation and showed them the fruit of the land. 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.

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Yet 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. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negev, the Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country, and the Canaanites dwell by the sea and also along the Jordan."

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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." But then the men who had gone up with him said, "We are not able to go up against these people, for they are stronger than we."

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So they brought to the people of Israel an evil report of the land which they had spied out, saying, "The land through which we have gone to spy it out, it is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are men of great stature. And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim, and we seemed

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to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word, and to him be the honor and glory forever. Stay with me.

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. He was preaching his first sermon in his new church, and he was very anxious to impress the congregation with his memory, and so he learned by heart his manuscript, stepped up into the pulpit, looked out at the congregation, and delivered the first line, "Behold, I come."

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And he couldn't remember what he was going to say next. So he had learned in seminary that when you forget what you're going to say next, you repeat what you said before as if for emphasis, meanwhile trying to grasp again the thread you have lost.

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So he looked at the congregation and said with greater enthusiasm, "Behold, I come." And he couldn't remember still what he was to say next. So he thought he'd say it one more time, and if he didn't remember at this time, he would have to go to his study in embarrassment, find his manuscript, and bring it to the pulpit.

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And so he fairly thundered the words, and he hit the pulpit as he said them, "Behold, I come." And he said it with such vigor that the pulpit toppled off the chancel, and he landed in the lap of a lady in the front row.

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While he got up, he was terribly embarrassed, very much ashamed, altogether humiliated. He apologized every way that he knew how, and she looked at him while he did all of this and then said, "That's okay, preacher. After all, you warned me three times."

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Well when we get into new situations in which when we confront that which is altogether new to us, we're sometimes a bit anxious and a bit forgetful. There is a certain anxiety which comes with new beginnings. I spent a decade on a campus, and I know that when the freshmen come to begin the newness

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of college, there's a great amount of tension and nervousness in them. And at the other end of the academic spectrum, when the students are ready to be graduated and they are facing the work world, there is a lot of worry in them at such a time. There are members of our congregation who have recently been called upon to face the

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task of unemployment, and they're asking great questions. Should I enter into retraining? Can this particular old dog learn to do some new tricks? And as they think about confronting this newness, there is a certain anxiety which comes.

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There are those in our midst today who are thinking of marriage, of entering into personal relationships deeper than those they've ever known before. And as they contemplate this new adventure and all that it means, there is in them, of course, a certain anxiety and fear.

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Whenever we stand on the edge of the new, well, there's a certain tension that comes with that. Now this morning, all of us stand on the threshold of a new year. And as we contemplate that year, we have questions that relate to international situations.

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We have political problems that we confront as a nation. We have economic worries before us. And many of us personally have questions about our jobs, questions about our health, questions about the personal relationships which exist in our family, which ought to be changed and

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made better. We all confront all kinds of questions. The life of this church is a large question mark. What will the next year hold for this great old congregation?

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There is, with the approach of the new, a certain tension and trembling. And it's to that circumstance that I would like to speak this morning. And the first thing I would like to say is this, that God calls us to face the uncertainties of tomorrow.

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We have been put into a world by him in which we are called upon to make decisions. This is a deciding kind of experience. And not only have we been put in a place where we are forced to make decisions, but we have also been given by God those things which are necessary to make decisions.

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One has only to look at our bodies, for example, to discover this. Our feet are put on us so that we walk much more gracefully ahead than we walk backwards. Our eyes are in the front of our heads so that we see what is before us. And the mere fact that we can see indicates that we are to make some decisions on the

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basis of what we have observed. Our hands are so designed that we can deal much more effectively with what is before us than with that which is behind us. Our ears are put upon our heads in such a way that we can hear what is before us much

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better than we can hear what is behind us, and the fact that we can hear it all indicates that we are to arrive at some conclusions based on our hearing. The very way in which we have been fashioned by the hand of God indicates that we are to be moving forward and making the decisions that are involved in that kind of movement.

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Now, of course, there are some people who try to avoid making decisions. There are those, for example, who procrastinate. Did you know that there was an American Society of Procrastination? There really is.

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They just published their 1976 annual book, and in it they announced that the officers who were elected in 1956 and who were to be installed that year have not been installed yet but will be installed soon. They claim to have 12,000 members, but they say they have many other members than that

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but that most of their members haven't gotten around to signing up yet. There are people who try to avoid decision by procrastination. There are others who try to avoid decision by becoming mugwumps. Now, you know what a mugwump is.

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A mugwump is a bird that sits on a fence with its mug on one side and its wump on the other. They try to come down on both sides of every issue. They are, to stay in the world of the animal, they're rather like chameleons. Now, you know that the characteristic of a chameleon is that it takes on the color of

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that which it is set against. Now, that's all right when you are against a solid color. The difficulty is that life rarely comes to us in solid colors. It almost always comes as a plaid.

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And if you put a chameleon up against a plaid, you see nervous exhaustion. And that's what happens to mugwumps. And then there are those who are fatalist about life. If they're Presbyterians, they choose to describe themselves as being rigid predestinarians,

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indicating not only that they don't understand Presbyterianism, but also that they don't understand predestination. There are some who have a memory of some vague doctrine which teaches that God has planned everything in our lives.

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It's a kind of a mixture of certain Hebrew proof texts and pagan Greek logic. And these people believe, you see, that we have no choices to make. Everything is planned out in advance, which of course commits us to the blasphemy of making God the author of evil.

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It also robs us of all moral responsibility, since everything we do, we do because God made us do it. Something else I've noticed about these people, when it comes to making decisions, they seem to agonize just as much as everybody else.

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See, the fact of the matter is we're put in a world which require decisions. We're pressed up against the future. So that it is fair to say that it's much more important to ask, "Which way are you going?" than "Where do you stand?"

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We are always, you see, in the process of moving. And that's what fascinates me about the Old Testament story which is before us this morning. The children of Israel came up to the edge of the promised land, and they sent scouts up to look over that land.

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Now some of the scouts came back, and they said, "This is a wonderful place. It's flowing with milk and honey. And the grapes there, why one cluster was so large that it took two men to carry it. Let's go up and claim the promise of God and take the land."

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But there were others who said, "Oh no, we can't do it. They've got fortified cities there. And the people that live in those cities, they are big people. They are giants.

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They are so big that beside them we look like mere grasshoppers. And to them, when they look at us, we appear only to be grasshoppers." Now this to me is a picture of Mozart as we face the new, as we stand on the edge of 1985, for example.

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Before us is a land of promise. And it can flow with milk and honey. And there can be great grapes there. But as we look over the border, we also see these giants.

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We see these places that are fortified against us. And so many don't go into the land of promise, but hold back. The question you see is, are we grasshoppers? Or are we going to go for the grapes?

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Now there are some people who do have a grasshopper complex. They are given over to despair and to alarm. The Bible speaks of three kinds of fear. It speaks first of that kind of fear which we might call psychic fear.

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This is the natural recoil that occurs in us whenever we encounter that which makes us afraid. This is what makes you look up and down the street before stepping from the curb. This is a good fear.

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The Bible never asks us to be foolhardy. Now the second kind of fear that's mentioned in the Bible is that fear which is the fear of the Lord. And it doesn't mean abject terror.

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What it means is a sense of awe or reverence in the presence of God. It is to have such a sense of the majesty of God that one feels a kind of mysterium tremendum. The Bible says of this that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

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It's when you have a proper reverence for God that you begin to understand him and also the life process of which you are a part. Now the third kind of fear that's mentioned in the Bible, it's the fear that happens to those who have forgotten the greatness of God.

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This the Bible describes as being faint-hearted. It's that which is common to people who knuckle under to things that are much less than God because they have forgotten the power of God. This is the fear that possesses those who have the grasshopper spirits and have forgotten

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that they are nothing less than the children of God. They're paralyzed by their contemplation of the future because they look at the future through eyeglasses, that is through themselves, their own feelings, their own anxieties, instead of looking at the future in terms of the grace of God.

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These people never cross the frontiers into tomorrow because they're terrified that they might come back empty. Now none of us like to come back empty. Jim Longstreet on our staff is quite a fisherman, as you know, he goes fishing all the time.

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And if he has a great trip, we all hear about it. If he doesn't, we never even know that he was away. None of us like to come back empty. I was in his home just before Christmas and I looked all over the house and nowhere on

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the house did I find a great big empty plaque on which there was a sign that said May 17th, 1983. We don't put up plaques to the times we come back empty. None of us like to come back empty.

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But what happens to people who have the grasshopper syndrome is this. They're so afraid of coming back empty that they never throw a line into the water. The possibility of their loss is greater to them than the reality of the presence of God. And so they retreat from tomorrow and live in that gray twilight that never knows victory

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or defeat. Now there are other people who don't view life with despair and alarm, but rather with delight and with alacrity. These are people like Caleb who said this land is flowing with milk and honey.

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God has promised it to us. Let us go up and take it. These are people who don't analyze their situation by their own insight. They don't make their decisions on the basis of what other people say.

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They make their decisions on the basis of what God has promised them. There's no faintheartedness in these people because they realize that God's been in the giant killing business for a long, long time. They have a passion for the possible and they move ahead in the presence and the power of

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God. There used to be a very, very colorful umpire in the National League named Bill Clem. And he really controlled every situation of which he was a part. And in one game, which he was umpiring at the home base, the man was on third and the

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ball was hit and the man came in from third and the ball was pegged in and the man and the ball and the catcher and the umpire all hit the home plate at the same time. And there was a great cloud of dust and one bench was yelling, "He's safe! He's safe!"

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And the other bench was yelling, "He's out! He's out!" And when the dust cleared, Bill Clem was standing there and said, "He ain't nothing till I call it!"

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Well, the fact of the matter is that sometimes we feel like grasshoppers. And sometimes other people say to us, "You're nothing but a grasshopper." But it's the umpire who calls the plays and we ain't nothing until he calls it. He puts into us, you see, of himself.

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And that means he gives us the power to move ahead. He says, "Be all you can be. Use the talents which are yours. Press on toward the mark."

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This is the one who says, "Be ye therefore perfect. Launch out into the deep. There's the land of promise. Go up and take it.

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Yes, times will be tough. You're going to make mistakes. There are going to be blunders and bonehead moves, but you are moving not in your own power alone, but also in mine."

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During the Second World War, when the Nazis were blitzing London, they moved a lot of the children out of town in buses. And one busload of youngsters leaving the city was being interviewed by a reporter. And the reporter said, "Do you know where you're going?"

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And they said, "No, sir." And he said, "Are you afraid?" And they said, "No, we're not afraid." And he said, "Well, if you don't know where you're going, why are you not afraid?"

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And they said, "We're not afraid because the king knows." They were referring, of course, to George VI, who led his country so nobly during the Second World War. They weren't afraid because the king knows.

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And sometimes when we go out into that land there that's called the future, we're not exactly sure how things are going to go. But we know the king knows. And that's what gives these people, not the faint-hearted, but gives the people of God,

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the Caleb's of the world, the power to move out and take what God has promised. You see, the future belongs to those who claim it in God's name. I heard somebody say the other day that they hope in 1985 that we as a nation get back to God.

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And you know, I really don't like that phrase, "get back to God." When most people say that, they have in mind a kind of a Victorian moralism, an anachronistic kind of religion, a series of rigid legalisms which were never part of the Christian faith. And the other thing I don't like about that phrase is you don't go back to God.

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God is always ahead of us. Our task is not to retreat to him, but to move out to catch up with him. That's the reason I say again, it's not important where we stand, it's even less important where we stood.

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What's important is which direction are we marching. Fear not! He's promised the land, go up and possess it. Go for the grapes.

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In Chicago, in one of the suburbs, there was a fellow who owned a little retail store, just a small one. And a great big department store decided to come in and build a branch right next to his store, a vast building.

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And one of the other great department store lines in Chicago, knowing that its competition was going to be opening a big store out in this suburb, decided they would do the same thing and they chose the opposite end of the same block. So here is this one great vast department store going up, and here is the other great

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vast department store going up, and in between the two, literally on the property line of both, was this little retail store that had been there for a good number of years. Well it came time for the opening day. And on the front of the one big building was a sign that said "Grand Opening Sale."

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And on the front of the other great vast building was a sign that said "New Beginnings Sale." But this little storekeeper, he wasn't stopped. He hung a sign over his front door which said "Main Entrance." When you look back over 1984, it was a vast year, full of many things.

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As we look out at 1985, it will be a vast year, full of many things. But we're standing at the entrance with God. And that means we can go into it for the grapes. Israel didn't go.

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Israel listened to the counsel of those who said "There are giants there, and to them we look like grasshoppers." And because Israel didn't go, it wandered for 40 years in the wilderness. But Caleb and those who were with him, they went up into the land of promise, blessed

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by God, and they prospered there. And you know when they got there, they discovered that the giants disappeared. We've learned that too. You see, the word we translated "giants" in our version of the Bible, we've recently discovered

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doesn't mean "giants" in the ancient Hebrew at all. It actually means "people with long necks." In other words, the land belonged to the people who stuck their necks out. And Caleb and his friends stood head and shoulders above everybody else in Israel because they

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claimed the promise. So my beloved people, to those of you in this room, and to those of you in our radio audience, and to those of you who might listen to these words sometime in the future, reproduced in some way mechanical, what I say to you in God's name is this.

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When you stand on the edge of the new, remember, out there, there's milk and honey. Oh yes, there are things that look like giants too. But fear not. God has promised.

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Go up and claim it! Come on now. Let's go for the grapes. Let us pray.

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You call us always to be honest, Father, and we never, and we never have the demands of honesty laid more heavily upon us than when we pray. So we will admit that there is some fear and anxiety in us as we confront the new. We see the shadows of giants.

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But we know you're in the giant-killing business, and we know you've given us great promises. Fill us with the promise of the sweetness of the grapes, and grant, by the presence of thy Spirit, that we might taste that sweetness all the way home. For we pray it in Jesus' name.

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Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.