Turn with me, please, to Numbers 13, Numbers 13. This is in the context of Joshua and Caleb being two of the 12 spies sent out by Moses with God's permission to search out the promised land. And you remember one was sent from every tribe in Israel is encamping at Kadesh Barnea on the border of the promised land, ready to do battle against the inhabitants of the land and to conquer them as God has promised. So we're going to pick up on verse 26 where the spies have returned and the 12 spies are bringing their report and we'll read through chapter 14 verse nine. And they, that is the 12 spies, went and came to Moses and to Aaron and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the wilderness of Paran, to Kadesh, and brought back word unto them and unto all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land.

And they told him and said, we came unto the land, whether thou sentest us, and surely it flows with milk and honey, and this is the fruit of it. Nevertheless, the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled and very great. And moreover, we saw the children of Anak there. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the south, and the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites dwell in the mountains, and the Canaanites dwell by the sea and by the coast of Jordan. And Caleb stilled, that is he quieted, the people before Moses and said, "'Let us go up at once and possess it, "'for we are well able to overcome it.' "'But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go against the people, for they are stronger than we.

And they brought up an evil report of the land, which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land through which we have gone to search it, it is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof, and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants, and we were to our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight. And all the congregation lifted up their voice and wept and the people cried and the people wept that night. And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron and the whole congregation, said unto them, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt, or would God we had died in this wilderness? And Wherefore hath the Lord brought us unto this land, to fail, to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey?

Were it not better for us to return unto Egypt? And they said one to another, let us make a captain, and let us return unto Egypt. Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembly of the congregation of the children of Israel. And Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh which were of them that searched the land rent their clothes, and they spake unto all the company of the children of Israel, saying, the land which we pass through to search it is an exceeding good land. If the Lord delight in us, Then he will bring us into this land and give it us a land which flows with milk and honey.

Only rebel not ye against the Lord, neither fear ye the people of the land, For they are bred for us, their defense is departed from them and the Lord is with us, fear them not. And the words I want to focus on mostly this morning are on verse 24 of Numbers 14 as the story goes on, "'But my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit "'with him and hath followed me fully, "'him will I bring into the land where into he went "'and his seed shall possess it.'" And so my talk this morning, my address is on following God fully like Caleb. And I have three points. First, it's meaning by grace, what it means that is, that Caleb followed God fully, and we'll spend at least half our time on that. Second, it's root in grace, why Caleb could follow God fully.

And third, it's reward of grace. The promise God granted to Caleb because he followed him fully. Now there are Bible characters you know very well that are on the pages of Scripture to teach us how we should not live. And then there are others recorded to show us how we should live. And Caleb is certainly one of those.

Caleb is one of the few Bible characters of which we read no faults in the Bible. He followed God fully when he was a 40-year-old man here as they were on the borders of Canaan, and then they got pushed back into the wilderness because of unbelief, right, for 40 more years, and he comes out as an 80 or 85-year-old man, and we read in Joshua 14 that he received Hebron for an inheritance because that he followed the Lord fully. What I want to impress upon you in this address is that whether you're five years old, 15 years old, or 85 years old, we are called to follow the Lord fully all our lifetime from today forward. And that is the only way to live. Now, the 12 spies were of a mixed mind on this point.

As far as the external facts are concerned, they all agreed with each other, didn't they? They all saw the same things. They all agreed the land of Canaan is a good land, flows with milk and honey. They all agreed that the people were warlike and powerful and there were giants in the land and the cities were walled and that it would be a complicated thing to defeat the people of Canaan. But the spies parted ways when it came to the conclusions, the interpretation of what they saw.

10, the majority report, brought back a negative report. They said, we're just grasshoppers in the sight of these people. There's no way we can win this battle. It was a report of fear. It was a report of unbelief.

It was a report in which they left out one factor, namely God and his promises. They forgot the God of the Red Sea. They forgot the God who sent water out of the rock. They forgot the God who sent manna from heaven. You see, they did not remember the wonders of the Most High.

Unbelief consults with flesh and blood. Unbelief tallies up the walls, the Amalekites, the Hittites, the Canaanites, the giants, and its conclusion is we can't follow the Lord fully. We can't do it. Well, There was a minority report, thank God, Joshua and Caleb. And they said, we need to go in, we need to go in.

No, no, the majority report said. We got 600, 000 armed men, and we cannot defeat the Canaanites with such an army. But Joshua and Caleb said, fear not, let us go in, let us trust God's promises. God is not a man that he should lie. We go in at the word of God.

But Joshua and Caleb, God is big, the giants of Anak are small. For the majority report, the giants of Anak are big, God is small. The tragedy of this story is that the report of unbelief is believed by the masses. And they weep and they wish they were dead. Unbelief, you see, has a tendency to drag us down.

Unbelief destroys our optimism in the Lord. Unbelief is contagious. Unbelief easily persuades that the giants of Anak are bigger than the promises of the Almighty. So unbelief eats away at the vitals of faith. It stunts our spiritual growth.

But Joshua and Caleb quiet the people. And Caleb says, let us go up at once to possess it, for we, by God's strength of course, are well able to overcome. And so my question to you this morning is, are you following God fully? Are you resting on his promises completely? This is the only way to beat back the chaos of our culture, is to put your supreme and your exclusive trust in the Lord and to follow him fully.

But that raises the question, what does it mean to follow the Lord fully? And I'd like to say to you that it means at least four things. First of all, it means to follow the Lord persistently. That's what Caleb did all his life. For 40 years in the wilderness, Joshua 14, 13 and 14 says this, Joshua blessed him, Caleb, gave him the Hebron for an inheritance.

Hebron therefore became the inheritance of Caleb, the Kenizzite, unto this day, because that He wholly followed the Lord God of Israel. Some people you see, maybe you're one of them, you follow the Lord by fits and starts, as one old divine put it. Some days you rest on the promises of God, some days you don't, but Caleb wasn't that way. He followed the Lord habitually, constantly, evenly. He lived not for this world, but for the world to come.

All those years he lived in the camp of the Israelites. 40 years in the wilderness, he refused to yield to the murmuring rebels which surrounded him. And everyone his age, except Joshua, died in the wilderness, but he kept following God fully. He persevered until he obtained the crown. He fought until he entered the promised rest, the opposite of Lot's wife that we heard about last night.

The opposite of the Jews in John 6, who walked no more with Jesus. The opposite of the Galatians, who turned their back on the way of free grace and slacken their pace. Do you follow God like Caleb persistently? Can your wife, your husband, your children, your parents see that? There's a consistency, a persistency in your walk of life.

Secondly, following God fully means to follow him sincerely. That is with all your heart, not as a hypocrite, not as an outward Christian only. You know, I stopped at verse nine in chapter 14, but verse 10 says this, all the congregation bade stone them with stones. This is amazing. They picked up stones to stone Joshua and Caleb to death for standing up for the living God.

Now what would you do if you were surrounded by a multitude of hundreds of thousands of people with stones in their hand to kill you? Well, maybe I would say to them, you know, let's sit down, you know, drop your stones a moment, let's talk this out, maybe we can come to some kind of agreement here, some kind of compromise. And no, Caleb doesn't say that. We follow God fully with all our heart sincerely despite enduring insults and jeers and potential stoning. We would rather die than sin against our God.

It's like Daniel and his three friends. If the Lord doesn't deliver us and we get thrown in the burning fiery furnace, be it known to you, King, we're not going to bow before your gods. We are going to follow God fully. This is tremendous, tremendous peer pressure. And you young people, you know peer pressures, particularly those of you who are in college or university.

How do you resist peer pressure and stand like Caleb in the midst of a stone-throwing people. Well, let me give you nine quick points. Nine, this is a subpoint of my main point. But I want you to get this down right. So I'll give you the nine points very shortly so you can get them down and think about them.

If you really want to withstand negative peer pressure, number one, understand its strength. Understand its strength. Understand your own weakness and how strong it is. Number two, search, know, love, and live Holy Scripture. Be in the Word every day.

You won't stand, You won't stand if you're not in the word. Three, lean hard on Christ. Ask him every morning, even before your feet hit the ground out of your bed, that you might walk like Caleb today and be a consistent witness for the Lord. Four, be true to God. Pray for the Spirit's strength.

Be true to God, be true to His word. Remember that God is gracious and will graciously reward those who endure persecution for his sake. Five, be true to yourself. Be true to your own convictions. Be true to the principles that are formed within you.

Six, remember that true friends seek your best welfare. If you've got friends who are giving you negative peer pressure, they're not friends, they're enemies. And you need to break friendship with those who are enemies who are trying to lead you in pathways of sin trying to drag you down. You know, Ralph Erskine, the Scottish Divine said, fight or flight is the way to address temptation and persecution. If you're strong in an area, you might fight back.

If you're weak in that area, you need to flee it. You need to break those friendships. Seven, take the long-term perspective, the long-term perspective. You know, people who might persecute you today and they see your consistent lifestyle might have tremendous respect for you next week. Eight, lead rather than be led.

I used to say that to my son so many times when he was young. He was always watching people. And he wouldn't lead. I kept saying that to him. Lead rather than be led.

Then God converted him when he was 15. And that just kicked right in. And he started becoming a leader in youth group. He started becoming a leader of his friends. You be a leader.

You lead them in the paths of godliness. And number nine, remember that inner thoughts often contradict outer actions. When I was in the army, I experienced that big time. The very people that would mock me for my Christian beliefs, if they came in trouble, if they had a loved one die, for example, they'd come over to me and ask my advice and ask if I'd pray for them. You see, their outer actions in front of peers were, oh, this is fun to pick on this guy, but their inner thoughts, by the grace of God, were thoughts of respect, and they would turn to me when they were in need.

So don't just go by people's outer actions. They may persecute you to test you, or they may persecute you to be cool, but inwardly, they actually have respect for you, most of them. So these are some of the principles, no doubt, that Caleb was operating with when he stood up against the stone-throwing people and said, I will serve the Lord with all my heart, no matter what man does to me. So following God fully means to follow Him persistently, to follow Him sincerely. Thirdly, it means to follow Him indivisibly.

Our forefathers would say holistically. And what that means is that there's no part of my life that I don't dedicate holy and solely for God. So let's say your life is like a, oh like an apple pie cut up into 16 slices. And one slice is your friendships, one slice is your parents, one slice is your family, one slice is your hobbies, one slice is your work, one slice is your leisure time, et cetera. Every piece of that pie must be dedicated wholly and solely to the Lord.

Show me the books you read and I'll show you who you are. Show me how you spend your leisure time, I'll show you who you are. Are you following the Lord fully? That's a key question. It's a key conviction of Caleb.

He did not pick and choose what he wanted to do. He always asked, what does the Lord want me to do? I am here, Lord, I am willing to go. I am willing to spend and be spent for thee. This is his way of life.

And then fourthly, to follow God fully means to follow him exclusively. Caleb had no other gods. Everything we put above God becomes an idol to us. And so what we need to understand is that we must follow God consistently, sincerely, indivisibly, but also exclusively. He must be the preeminent pursuit of our lives.

So that when we lay down our heads and our pillows at night, if we've had no communion with God, we've had an empty day, no matter how good things went for us that day. But conversely, if we've had communion with God, we've had a good day, no matter how badly things outwardly went for us that day. You see, here's the point. Caleb understands that if God is real and God is alive, God is worthy of our entire heart, our entire being. My son, my daughter, give me your heart.

If you just resolve to be a Christian outwardly, you'll never stand against the powers of our culture. You'll break down. But if you purpose in your heart like Daniel not to defile yourself with the king's meat and the king's wine that is the Babylonian lifestyle of worldliness, you purpose in your heart, you will receive strength from God to follow him fully and you will be blessed. Now, Caleb's freedom to follow God fully by grace is rooted in the grace that the Lord put in his heart. That's my second thought.

You see that in the very opening words. Behold my servant Caleb. You see, he's a servant. God calls him servant. God says I know your heart.

I know you're here in this world to serve me because I'm either worth everything or I'm worth nothing and since you believe in me, you believe I'm worth everything and your life is centered around serving me." That's what life is all about. Young people, when I was 16 years old, I had a brother who was 19 and he came to me one day and he said, you know, I figured out what life is all about and I can say it in one word. And I said, wow, what's that? He said, service. I said, what?

Service. But what do you mean by that? Explain. Well, he said it's quite simple. God put us in the Garden of Eden originally to serve God, to serve each other, his husband and wife, Adam and Eve, and to serve creation, to dress the garden and keep it.

Our life was designed to be a life of service, he said. So I figure that when we fell, we became selfish instead of service-oriented. And when we get regenerated, the principle of service is put back into us. And Now, I understand it this way, he said, that the only way we can ever truly be happy is when we live for the purpose for which God has made us, which is service. We weren't created to be selfish.

And so it's only when we serve God, serve each other, serve his kingdom and cause, that we will be happy deep in our souls, that we will truly be blessed. Blessed is the man who fears the Lord. You know, my dad was a carpenter and he took me on the job. The very first day, he had some nails there and a saw and a hammer and some wood and he said, son, remember when you worked for me now, remember you never tried to take a hammer and saw a board. You never tried to take a saw and nail home a nail because those instruments aren't designed for that." And I said, well, Dad, I know that.

But he said, do you know why I tell you? And I go, no. He said, well, God has made you for one purpose, to live to him fully. And as long as you aren't doing that, what's happening is you're trying to saw a board with a hammer. You're trying to nail home a nail with a saw.

It doesn't work. Selfishness is the surest road to unhappiness. Seeking your own happiness is the sure road to unhappiness. Holiness is the king's highway to happiness. You surrender completely to God and his will.

You follow him fully, and you will know genuine happiness, blessedness. Now, Caleb did this, of course, our text says in verse 24, because there was another spirit in him. That is, of course, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was working in him, a spirit of dependency upon God, a spirit of finding his spiritual life in God. He was born again.

His spirit was different than the spirit of the 10 majority report. Theirs was a spirit of distrust, his of trust. Theirs was a worldly spirit, his a heavenly one. Theirs was a spirit of angry disobedience, his was of affectionate obedience. Theirs was satanic, his was of God.

There's was lazy, his was active. They had their own spirit, the evil spirit. Caleb had the Holy Spirit. So it's all rooted in grace, you see. Caleb could follow God fully because the Holy Spirit indwelled him.

That's the beauty of grace. We need the Holy Spirit to dwell within us. My servant Caleb, he had another spirit. But then, thirdly, and fascinatingly, Caleb receives this amazing reward of grace, doesn't he? But my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed me fully, and notice this, him will I bring into the land whereinto he went, and his seed shall possess it.

Now what does that mean? Well, it means three or four things. Number one, it means this. The Lord is promising to preserve Caleb's life until the day that he could come in the land of Canaan, which is a type, of course, of the heavenly Canaan. And this is astonishing because Caleb is already in his 40s and Israel's gonna wander the wilderness for 40 years, so he's gonna be in his 80s before they come back.

But Caleb's life will be preserved. But him will I bring into the land where into he went. God honors them that honor him. But Secondly, the Lord promises Caleb not only to give him a long life, but to give him the land that he went to spy out for an inheritance. And that's fulfilled in Joshua 15 in a remarkable way.

The Lord is not only determined to prolong Caleb's days and all his peers will die except Joshua but also to preserve his strength and his vigor. When he's 85 the Bible tells us He had the strength of a man of 30. Now I hope that happens to you and to me spiritually, that we would be young in heart and strong in spirit, even when we're 85, if we lived that long. But Caleb actually was still physically strong. He was able actually to still fight the enemies when he was 85 years old.

I mean, this is staggering. He's an old man living beyond the age of most of his peers. And we read in Joshua 14, verse 10 and 11, these amazing words. And now behold, the Lord hath kept me alive, this is Caleb talking, as he said, these forty and five years, even since the Lord spake this word into Moses, while the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness, and now lo, I am this day four score and five years old. As yet I am as strong as the day as I went into, as I was in that day that Moses sent me, as my strength was then, even so as my strength now, for war both to go out and to come in.

And verse 13 and 14, and Joshua blessed him there and gave to Caleb the son of Jephunneh, Hebron, for an inheritance. Why? Verse 14, because he wholly followed the Lord God of Israel. And then we read in the next chapter, Joshua 15 verse 14, And Caleb drove from thence the three sons of Anak, remember these are the giants, Shishai and Ahimein and Telmai, the children of Anak. Now it's almost as if God is exercising astonishing miracles here, But yes, but almost a sense of humor as well.

I want you to think about this. There's 600, 000 men, there's 2, 500, 000 people in Kadesh Barnea waiting to go in and take the land of Canaan, a land that was promised to them. They refused to go in. God sends them back into the wilderness for 40 years because they believe that the 600, 000 men can't do the job. And then Caleb, an 85-year-old man, takes his three sons, and the four of them go into the land of Canaan, and they do the job and kill the giants of Anak.

This is what God can do with a life that is wholly dedicated to him. But then thirdly, God also promises to give Caleb's seed, land to possess. Caleb will have a legacy. Caleb will leave behind something. He will leave a blessing to his children, and in Joshua 15 we read that that promise is also fulfilled.

You see, when you walk with the Lord fully, it's God's normal way as a covenant-keeping God to bring your children, not necessarily all of them, it can be at Esau as we heard in the last few days, but it's God's normal way to bless those parents who covenantally follow the Lord fully with children who in due time follow him fully as well. So my question to you this morning is are you parents following the Lord fully? Are you setting the example for your children that they could look at you and say, my dad, my mom are wholly dedicated to the Lord and they know deep in their conscience, even if they're not living that life yet themselves, that that is the only way to live. And of course you're buttressing your lifestyle hopefully with talking to your children explaining this is the only way to live. Now my wife likes to point out this sign that we saw one time.

It says, your talk talks but your walk talks more than your talk talks. And you see, talking is important, but you lose your witness with your children when your lifestyle doesn't match. And so it's critical, parents, that you follow the Lord fully, that you don't expect your children to be more godly than you are. You call them to godliness, but you call yourself to godliness as well. That's where the Puritans excelled.

And that's why I always stress we should be reading the Puritans, stirring up our souls to godliness. So, Let me conclude by asking you this. Today, if God were to take away your life, do you belong to the minority report or do you belong to the majority report? Do you belong to that despised minority of two or the popular majority of 10? Are you following God fully?

I'm gonna close with this wonderful example of David Livingstone. You know David Livingstone was so loved as a missionary in Africa that when he died, it seems rather gross to us, but The local natives loved him so much that they actually cut out his heart from his body and kept it there. And then they sent his body back for an honorable Westminster Abbey funeral in London. And the day of his funeral, when the hearse went down to the abbey, there were thousands of people on both sides of the road out of respect for David Livingstone. And there were two men in the crowd.

One was an older man, rather shabbily dressed, and one was a pastor standing beside him. And as the hearse went by, the rather shabbily dressed man said, you were right, Davy, you were right, Davy, you were right, Davy. After the hearse went by, the pastor said to him, what did you mean by that? And the man said, well, you see, I grew up with David Livingston. I went to the same church, same Sunday school.

When I got to be a teenager, I said to him when I got to be 18, I'm going now to live on my own, and I'm going to make a lot of money, and when I get older, I'll come back and I'll serve the Lord." And David Livingston said to me, "'That's no way to live. "'The only way to live is to follow the Lord fully, "'all your lifetime.'" And now I see, too late, David Livingston was right. Will you stand with David Livingston? Will you stand with Joshua and Caleb? Or will you live a life of nothingness and go to hell in the end because you refuse to follow the Lord?

You know, when I first came to my church in Grand Rapids, there was a thousand members. I went to visit every single one of the 400 families in the first two years. And I asked every single family about their relatives, what family they belonged to. Asked them about their parents, their grandparents. And of course, many of them were deceased.

And they would talk about their loved ones. And something dawned on me when I was about halfway through that I'd never forgotten all my life. If their ancestors were godly and followed the Lord fully and were bright witnesses for Christ. They would talk at length about them. There was a lot to say.

But if their parents and grandparents didn't follow the Lord fully, the conversation, at least that part of the conversation, was over in a moment. So you can be a church member all your life, you can be outwardly decent all your life, but if you're not following the Lord fully, when you die, your relatives will have very little to say about you. What is there to say when you don't love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? When you don't follow him fully? When you don't live for him?

When you live essentially selfish? Or live just outwardly, maybe not like the world, but outwardly religious, but not inwardly captivated by Jesus Christ. And so I came to this text in those years when I was visiting all these people, and I preached a sermon after I visited them all to my church on this text. And so I saw the wicked buried, Ecclesiastes 8 verse 10, who had come and gone from the place of the holy all their lifetime, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done. This is also vanity.

Many of these people I talked to had parents and grandparents who all their lifetime came to church, but their heart was in the world. Their heart was really like Lot's wife. This is no way to live. The only way to live is like Caleb, like David Livingston. Not just going back and forth to church and being forgotten, but leaving a witness behind, a legacy behind, living for the glory of God.

And you will not be forgotten because your life will be salt in the earth and light on the hill. People will say of you, what they said of Abel, he being dead, yet speaks. Let's pray. Great God of heaven, we ask thy benediction upon this short address, and we do pray that we might live like Caleb and follow thee fully, and withstand peer pressure, and be able to be a witness for thee, and be principled on the groundings of scripture, and that our lives may be open witnesses, showing the love of Christ, and be filled with thee, the triune God. May we be Trinitarian people who worship the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and love the souls of sinners.

Love our own soul enough to follow thee by grace fully, and to receive the reward of promises coming our way, for thou wilt bless those who follow thee fully. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Soon.