Get Launched Into Your Destiny

Get Launched Into Your Destiny by Steve Montag

Over the last couple of weeks, God has been talking to us about shedding things from our past and our problems so He can take us individually and as a Body into great things. God literally wants to launch us into our destiny, to launch us into our purposes.

Let’s look at Joshua chapter 14. Israel has entered the land of Canaan, the Promised Land, and they’ve conquered the nations and have been doling out the land, giving out to each tribe their inheritance. In verse 6 a man named Caleb comes to Joshua and said to him:

“You know the word which the Lord said to Moses the man of God concerning you and me in Kadesh Barnea. I was forty years old when Moses the servant of the Lord sent me from Kadesh Barnea to spy out the land, and I brought back word to him as it was in my heart. Nevertheless my brethren who went up with me made the heart of the people melt, but I wholly followed the Lord my God. So Moses swore on that day, saying, ‘Surely the land where your foot has trodden shall be your inheritance and your children forever, because you have wholly followed the Lord my God.’ And now, behold, the Lord has kept me alive, as He said, these forty-five years, ever since the Lord spoke this word to Moses while Israel wandered in the wilderness; and now, here I am this day, eighty-five years old. As yet I am as strong this day as I was on the day that Moses sent me; just as my strength was then, so now is my strength for war, both for going in and for coming out. Now therefore, give me this mountain of which the Lord spoke in that day; for you heard in that day how the Anakim were there, and that he cities were great and fortified. It may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall be able to drive them out as the Lord said.’ And Joshua blessed him, and gave Hebron to Caleb the son of Jephunneh as an inheritance. Hebron therefore became the inheritance of Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite to this day, because he wholly followed the Lord God of Israel.”

Let’s go back to verse 8. Here’s Caleb, he’s 85 years old. He had been given a promise from God through Moses, forty-five years earlier and he was laying claim to that promise. There is a reason he didn’t get the promise forty-five years earlier. Let’s look at that account in the book of Numbers chapter 13, to see what Caleb was referring to, beginning in verse 28. Here’s the background of what was happening at the time. Moses had sent 12 spies, one from each of the tribes of Israel, to spy out the land of Canaan and after 40 days they were to return and give an account of what they had seen there. Those 12 spies are a classic example that the majority is not always right; they may rule, but they aren’t right all the time. They came back saying it was exactly what God said it would be, a land flowing with milk and honey. They described grapes so large that it took two men to carry a cluster on their shoulders. These grapes must have been the size of grapefruit! Now I haven’t seen the kind of grapes they described at our local Waldbaum’s, have you? They saw the abundance of the Lord in the land but they also saw giants, describing themselves as grasshoppers in comparison. They allowed fear to grip their hearts. In chapter 14 it says:

“Then all the congregation lifted up their voices and cried, and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, ‘If only we had died in the land of Egypt! Or if only we had died in the wilderness.’” At that point God was ready to grant them that request and as Moses and Aaron fell on their faces to intercede, Joshua and Caleb tore their clothes because they knew what God had promised. Verse 11 through 20 details Moses’ prayer to God on behalf of the people, asking God to spare them for their iniquity and in verse 20 the Lord responds saying: “I have pardoned, according to your word; but truly as I live… because all these men who have seen My glory and the signs which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and have put Me to the test now these ten times, and have not heeded My voice, they certainly shall not see the land of which I swore to their fathers, nor shall any of those who rejected Me see it. But My servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit in him and has followed Me fully, I will bring into the land where he went, and his descendants shall inherit it.’”

What we read in Joshua 14 was the fulfillment of what God said in Numbers 14. Now what happened between Joshua 14 and Numbers 14? I’ll tell you, it took them 40 years of wandering in the wilderness to make an 11-day journey and then 5 more years of warfare after they entered the land. And Joshua and Caleb were the only two of their generation who entered into the promises of God. The truth remains that even though Joshua and Caleb didn’t die in the wilderness with all the others they still had to wander 40 years with everyone else. They may not have died but they had to wait an awfully long time to get what they should have had 45 years earlier. God in His faithfulness used that time to prepare them to lead Israel into her destiny. That’s how God works; He doesn’t waste our years. He will even use the wilderness to prepare us for the greatest things in our lives, so that the old things in our lives can fall away and die and new life can come and birth what God has for us.

God makes us promises and we may have to wait one year, five years, ten years, even forty years for God to fulfill it and He’ll let you go through that experience. He will see how you react when the enemy puts negative thoughts in your head. But the day will come when God says it’s time for your destiny to be fulfilled, when the timing of God hooks up with the purposes of God in your life and you’re launched into your destiny. We don’t all have the same wilderness experience but we all have them. God is after the same thing in every one of us through each of our wilderness experiences and that is to bring death to the old in order to bring forth newness of life, purpose and destiny. There are different experiences, but all share the same design in the mind of God. He wants to bring you out of your wilderness into rich fulfillment, in abundance, into our destiny. No matter how awful your wilderness experience may be, He promises to strengthen you through it in order for you to seize what He has planned for you. Caleb declared at 85 that he was as strong that day as he was 40 years earlier. God will do the same for you!

As we leave one year behind us and enter into this new year we are leaving behind the wilderness to enter into the land of Promise, into our God-given plan, purpose and destiny. We are leaving behind the prisoner mentality and the poverty mentality and we are entering into a place of promise and rulership. He has made you the head and not the tail. He sets us above and never beneath. He’s bringing us into a place of new life and all that we have had to endure, the pain, heartache and trial was to bring us into the destiny He has promised us. Now is the time, God wants to launch us into our destiny! He’s bringing us out to bring us in!

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