Sheryl Brady - The Cost of a Compromised Vision

I want to say to you that when you cannot see, or when you refuse to see, there is always a cost of a compromised vision. Whenever you compromise the vision, it is always going to cost us something. So today, that’s what we’re going to talk about.

Father, I love you and I honor you for this word; it’s a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. Today, there is something that you want to say. People have not tuned in today by accident or by chance; Lord, they are here because there is a word for them. Now, say it through me, Lord; just use me to speak to every heart, every home, every family, and every nation that might be watching today. Say what you want to say because you are God, and it’s your voice that we need to hear. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen and amen.

So I just want to pick up where I left off last week, and I was talking to you about what Moses did. I just repeated it to you, so we should have that down pat. He sent 12 spies over to Canaan Land just to kind of scope it out, and you know what they said—they found that the land was flowing with milk and honey, and they had a cluster of grapes that was so big that they had to put it on a pole, and it took two of them to carry it back. I told you that out of the 12 men that God sent over there, 10 of them saw the land that God was going to give them through the eyes of fear, and only two of them were able to see the land through the eyes of faith. Therefore, when they returned to Moses to give him their individual perspectives of what they saw when they went to the Promised Land, 10 of the 12 reported that they actually saw the Promised Land as more of a place of defeat, a place of obstacles, a place of impossibilities, a place that would be challenging, a place that actually had giants living there.

While all 12 of them agreed that there was fruitfulness in the land, that there was milk and honey, and that there was provision, the majority felt that they did not have what it took to possess the Promised Land themselves. The promise of the Lord to their lives, never mind that God had made this promise to them; never mind that He is not a man that He should lie; never mind that God promised He was going to be with them as they possessed the land; and never mind that God had told them, «I’m going to give this to you as an inheritance.» All of that should have had them looking through the eyes of faith, but instead, they looked at the situation through the eyes of fear. The Bible says that because of their perception and because of their fear, their unbelieving and suspicious attitude caused an entire generation to die in the wilderness without inheriting the Promised Land.

All of that happened because they had an attitude of fear and not an attitude of faith, and it ultimately cost them their destiny. For the Bible tells us that, «As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.» Therefore, your attitude and my attitude will either lock us into the promises of God, or it will lock us out of the promises of God. Periodically, we need to call ourselves on the carpet and do a check-up from the neck up, or do a check-up in the way we think, or do a check-up in the way we perceive things, because we don’t want our attitude to lock us out of anything that God has given us permission to walk in and inherit.

When they got to the land, they saw giants there; they saw the sons of Anak, and the sons of Anak were huge, big people, somewhere between nine and eleven feet tall. So, what that symbolizes to us is that in the Promised Land, they saw some obstacles. Now, somebody thought, «Well, if I ever get to the Promised Land, the last thing I expect to see is an obstacle,» but that is precisely and exactly what they had to see. Based on what they saw, they said, «We were in our own sight as grasshoppers,» and because of that, that is how we saw ourselves. Because of the way we saw ourselves, that is how the people saw us as well.

Can I tell you today that it really doesn’t matter how big the obstacle is? It doesn’t matter how big the mess-up is; it doesn’t matter how impossible it may seem; it doesn’t matter how other people feel; it doesn’t matter what other people say; it doesn’t matter how other people see it. All that really matters is how you see it, because how you see it is how it really is. If you cannot see yourself making it, then you can’t. If you cannot see yourself defeating it, you can’t. If you cannot see yourself possessing it, I don’t care what God has said to you; if you cannot see yourself possessing it, if you cannot see yourself owning it…