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What's Next?

At every stage of life, God helps us stay strong, hopeful, and ready for what’s next. In this series, we learn how grow stronger in our faith as we enter middle and late adulthood.

“Now then, just as the LORD promised, he has kept me alive for forty-five years since the time he said this to Moses, while Israel moved about in the wilderness. So here I am today, eighty-five years old! I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now as I was then. Now give me this hill country that the LORD promised me that day. You yourself heard then that the Anakites were there and their cities were large and fortified, but, the LORD helping me, I will drive them out just as he said.”  

Joshua 14:10-12 NIV

Caleb was a man in the Bible who boldly pursued God’s dreams for his life at every age. At the age of 40, he was one of the Israelite leaders who was chosen to explore the land that God had promised to give the people (Numbers 13:1-3). Caleb went on this mission with eleven of his peers, and they returned to give a report to the rest of the Israelites about what they found. Unfortunately, all but one of Caleb’s peers succumbed to fear and unbelief. They spread a bad report about the promised land, convincing the people to rebel against God’s plan for them. 

Caleb boldly spoke up for the truth—risking the possibility of getting killed—but the Israelites wouldn’t listen (Numbers 14:1-10). God was merciful, but he would not allow those with contemptuous and unbelieving hearts to enter the promised land:

…Not one of those who saw my glory and the signs I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness but who disobeyed me and tested me ten times— [23] not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their ancestors. No one who has treated me with contempt will ever see it. [24] But because my servant Caleb has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he went to, and his descendants will inherit it.

Numbers 14:22-24 NIV

Through no fault of his own, Caleb would have to wait and wander in the wilderness before receiving God’s promise. Caleb’s faith in God stayed strong in the years that followed, as he waited 45 years without losing his bold and vigorous faith in God. 

Caleb’s story teaches us that we can stay hopeful and strong in faith even when we face unfulfilled expectations. God keeps his promises, and we will see his dreams for our lives come true as long as we don’t quit or compromise while we wait. God can also help us be bold even when we feel weak and limited. Like Caleb, we can keep our boldness as we age. Let’s look at four lessons we can learn from Caleb so that we can age boldly like he did.

Don’t let disappointment steal your faith.

One of the most difficult challenges to our faith—especially as we age—is unfulfilled expectations. 

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life.

Proverbs 13:12 NLT

When the things we hope for don’t happen, we can become sick at heart—sad, crushed, and heartbroken. These are a few common examples of unfulfilled expectations that many of us experience during this stage of life:

  • Unfulfilled expectations for our children: We can hope for a certain outcome in our children’s lives, but feel sad or worried when it isn’t happening.
  • Unfulfilled expectations in marriage: We can expect our marriage to be closer or more mature than it is. This can become even more apparent when our children move out of the house, leaving us to face things in our marriage we may have neglected.
  • Unfulfilled expectations in our physical health: We can develop health challenges we didn’t plan for.
  • Unfulfilled expectations in our finances: Something unexpected can derail our plans or desires for retirement.

In addition to these situations over which we have little control, this is usually the stage of life when the decisions we made in our youth catch up to us. Sometimes, we feel disappointed in ourselves because of mistakes we have made or regrets we have. Perhaps we have hurt someone we love with our anger, unfaithfulness, or neglect. 

It’s important to be honest with ourselves and God about these disappointments so that we can learn how to face them with faith rather than being crushed by them. God cares about our disappointments and wants to save us from the discouragement we feel:

Pray to the LORD, and he will hear you. He will save you from all your troubles. The LORD is close to those who have suffered disappointment. He saves those who are discouraged. Good people might have many problems, but the LORD will take them all away.

Psalm 34:17-19 ERV  

Caleb’s story shows us that it’s still possible to be vigorous in faith, even when our expectations have not been fulfilled. He had to wake up in the wilderness every day for 45 years, knowing that he could have had his own home in the promised land—but he didn’t. 

Caleb kept his faith strong through these years by fixing his heart on the promises of God:

“Now then, just as the LORD promised, he has kept me alive for forty-five years since the time he said this to Moses, while Israel moved about in the wilderness. So here I am today, eighty-five years old!

Joshua 14:10 NIV

Caleb had a conviction about living by faith in what he couldn’t see. He held on to God’s promise year after year, even when he couldn’t see anything happening. In fact, this faithful heart is what gave him the courage to boldly stand up for God in the first place. He believed that God would give them the promised land, regardless of how big or strong the people who lived there seemed to be. 

Caleb believed that if God said it, God would do it. And that simple faith kept him bold throughout his life. 

Pause and reflect

  • What unfulfilled expectations have I experienced in my life?
  • How have these disappointments affected my faith?
  • What promises of God can I choose to believe so that I keep facing the future with boldness?

Follow God’s lead wholeheartedly. 

For Caleb, though, it’s a different matter. He’s distinct from the others by having a different spirit and has followed My lead wholeheartedly. I will make sure that he is able to enter the land and to live in it-he and his descendants after him.

Numbers 14:24 Voice 

God’s dreams for Caleb never changed, despite the years Caleb had to wait. Caleb stayed strong in his faith because he followed God’s lead wholeheartedly, trusting that God would fulfill his plan and purpose for his life. 

Similarly, to experience God’s dreams for our lives, we have to make sure we keep wholeheartedly following God’s lead. That means we can’t be halfhearted about our relationship with him. 

Halfheartedness is sometimes difficult for us to see. Those of us who are very religious often still do the right things on the outside even when our hearts are not in it. This is what Jesus described in the religious teachers and Pharisees of his day:

These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

Matthew 15:8 NLT

These are some common signs that we have become halfhearted in our relationship with God:

  1. We are content with minimum spiritual effort. We define for ourselves what is absolutely necessary to be a Christian, and we don’t go beyond that. For example, we might make the effort to come to church on Sundays, but don’t engage daily in the spiritual relationships the Bible describes (Hebrews 3:13, Galatians 6:9-10).
  2. We prioritize convenience over sacrifice. When we see needs in others, we limit our availability to meet them based on what’s convenient to us. We no longer lay down our lives for others in the way Jesus expects us to (John 15:12-13, James 2:14-16). 
  3. We look for comfort more than we look for growth. Our relationship with God becomes solely about finding relief from our challenges rather than transforming us through our challenges (Romans 12:1-2). 
  4. We do good things, but not cheerfully. Perhaps we do the right things on the outside, but inwardly we are begrudging and bitter. Our actions don’t match our heart. (2 Corinthians 9:7-8). 
  5. We tell ourselves that we have done enough, and it’s time for other people to do their part. Though it’s great to let other people step up, we know we are halfhearted when we use our past efforts as an excuse to do nothing now (Romans 12:11-13 MSG).

These signs of halfheartedness reflect the condition of our faith in God. When we don’t want to take action to serve, sacrifice, or grow, it’s a sign that something is hurting our faith (1 Thessalonians 1:3, James 2:17). Often, our halfheartedness comes from discouragement, disappointment, and unprocessed pain. 

Instead of becoming halfhearted, we can respond to the discouragements of life by increasing our humility toward God in prayer. 

Some of us once sat in darkness, living in the dark shadows of death. We were prisoners to our pain, chained to our regrets. For we rebelled against God’s Word and rejected the wise counsel of God Most High. So he humbled us through our circumstances, watching us as we stumbled, with no one there to pick us back up. Our own pain became our punishment. Then we cried out, “Lord, help us! Rescue us!” And he did! His light broke through the darkness and he led us out in freedom from death’s dark shadow and snapped every one of our chains.

Psalm 107:10-14 TPT

Pain unprocessed through prayer ends up imprisoning us. God will rescue us when we are humble enough to cry out for his help, but if we resist prayer we will get stuck. Because we won’t work through pain in prayer like David shows us in the Psalms or like Jesus did many times (Hebrews 5:7), we end up being chained to the past. We become halfhearted because we are discouraged by our regrets or failures of the past and we don’t want to try again. 

What this halfheartedness exposes is that our physical lives and responsibilities have grown past our prayer lives. When life gives us more challenges, we need to respond with more prayer. This requires learning to pray in new ways, with increasing depth and increasing vulnerability. We need to spend more time praying, not less—which is often our temptation when we face painful circumstances. 

God allows us to go through difficult and humbling circumstances to help us develop into who he wants us to be. He is developing our resilience, our vulnerability, our humility, and our faith so that we can fulfill the dreams he has always had for our lives. If we resist this, we will find ourselves underdeveloped in some areas of our heart, faith, and character.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

James 1:2-4 NIV

Following God wholeheartedly means letting him train us through hard times (Hebrews 12:5-6) rather than quitting. When we do, we will discover that God has a purpose in everything we go through, and every loss, perceived failure, difficulty, challenge is leading us to the fulfillment of that dream and that purpose.

Pause and reflect

  • What does it look like when I am not wholehearted in my spiritual life? 
  • What areas of my life do I need to process through prayer rather than resisting? 

Build conviction rather than compromising. 

Caleb was a man of conviction; he would not compromise his faith in God despite the intense pressures he must have felt from people around him. The Israelites were ready to stone him and his friend, Joshua, who both stood up for what they believed. But Caleb was focused on God, not other people or himself. He had a conviction to trust God, his power, and his plan. 

This conviction undoubtedly helped Caleb stay bold throughout his life, no matter what happened. 

To age boldly and carry out the will of God in our lives, we need to make sure we have deep convictions and don’t compromise our relationship with God in difficult circumstances. 

For you have need of patient endurance [to bear up under difficult circumstances without compromising], so that when you have carried out the will of God, you may receive and enjoy to the full what is promised. [37] For yet in a very little while, he who is coming will come, and will not delay. [38] But my righteous one [the one justified by faith] shall live by faith [respecting man’s relationship to God and trusting Him]; and if he draws back [shrinking in fear], my soul has no delight in him. [39] But our way is not that of those who shrink back to destruction, but [we are] of those who believe [relying on God through faith in Jesus Christ, the Messiah] and by this confident faith preserve the soul.

Hebrews 10:36-39 AMP

God never wants us to shrink back into fear and compromise; all he needs is for us to keep believing in him and he can carry out his will through us. We compromise and give way to fear when we stop fighting for our love and trust in God—trust in his power, in his love, and in his plan for our lives. When our love for God shrinks, so does our courage and conviction. We begin to long for what’s easier.

Compromise is extremely tempting in difficult situations because it is usually the quickest way to find relief from our stress. It would have been much easier for Caleb to compromise with unbelief and go along with the other Israelite scouts, but in the long run it would have led to much more pain and it would have hurt God.

To compromise is to justify a sinful or unspiritual decision. Much like allowing a little bit of yeast into a batch of dough, this compromise usually starts small and then grows. Let’s look at a few common ways we might be tempted to compromise our convictions as we age:

  1. Compromising with pride: We cut short our times with God or put less effort into them than we did in our younger years (Psalm 10:4). We get offended or embarrassed when people tell us truths to help us grow rather than being teachable (Proverbs 11:2).
  2. Compromising with deceit: We get tired of searching our hearts daily for our sins (Hebrews 3:12-13). As a result, we accept distance from God.
  3. Compromising with selfishness: Our top priority is no longer the same as God’s priority, which is seeking and saving the lost (Luke 19:10). Other endeavors take precedence over Bible studies and building new relationships.
  4. Compromising with worldliness: When our love for God shrinks, the pleasures of the world look more appealing. Tired of saying no (1 John 2:15-17), we begin to indulge ourselves in the things we feel we have missed out on. 
  5. Compromising with unfaithfulness in marriage: God holds everything together, including our marriages (Colossians 1:15). When we lose our focus on God, we will stop prioritizing depth, love, and intimacy with our spouse, settling for comfort or distance instead (Hebrews 13:4) Unfaithfulness doesn’t always look like adultery; it can be simply choosing to love something or someone else in our lives more than our spouse. 

Ultimately, compromise comes from us questioning whether it’s worth it to take the more difficult path. Is it still worth it to be humble, honest, selfless, or faithful? Caleb must have had this question at times as he wandered through the wilderness for forty-five years. After all that time, at age 85, was it still worth it for him to fight to believe and follow God?

The answer, of course, is yes. What makes the difficult path worthwhile is the one it leads us to—God. We have to hold tight to our convictions because God can work through us powerfully even in our old age: 

Even when I am old and gray, do not abandon me, O God. Let me live to tell the people of this age what your strength has accomplished, to tell about your power to all who will come.

Psalm 71:18 GW 

Pause and reflect:

  • In what ways am I tempted to compromise?
  • What good things could happen if I keep strengthening my convictions rather than compromising? 

Redefine boldness

Be strong and bold; have no fear or dread of them, because it is the LORD your God who goes with you; he will not fail you or forsake you.”

Deuteronomy 31:6 NRSV

God calls us to be bold, so it’s important to reflect on what that really looks like. Sometimes, we have a picture in our minds of “boldness” that is difficult to live up to and different from what God sees as bold. 

What’s important to remember about Caleb’s story is that God commended his faith, not his confidence or ability as a warrior. Boldness is not necessarily charging out to lead an army to victory, but about believing in God. When we boldly believe in God, he will empower us to take the actions we need to take.

What else can I say? There isn’t enough time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets. Their faith helped them conquer kingdoms, and because they did right, God made promises to them. They closed the jaws of lions and put out raging fires and escaped from the swords of their enemies. Although they were weak, they were given the strength and power to chase foreign armies away.

Hebrews 11:32-34 CEV

These heroes of the faith described in Hebrews 11 were also described as weak. They probably did not feel bold, but they made bold decisions to trust God. As a result, they were given the strength and power to chase foreign armies away.

When we are addressing the challenges of aging, we have to address the feeling of being weak and limited. it is difficult not to compare our current selves to our younger selves. We could see and hear better; we were faster, had more endurance, recovered from long days quicker, could process the many emotions and demands coming at us quicker, and our outlook was unspoiled by the realities of our mistakes and shortcomings. Compared to our younger selves, we often feel weaker.    

The above Hebrews 11 scripture teaches us that God is not hindered by our weaknesses. In fact, God can turn our weaknesses into strengths. As we age we are very aware of limitations and weaknesses, and we can forget that our weaknesses help people see God:

But we have this precious treasure [the good news about salvation] in [unworthy] earthen vessels [of human frailty], so that the grandeur and surpassing greatness of the power will be [shown to be] from God [His sufficiency] and not from ourselves.

2 Corinthians 4:7 AMP

So I am well pleased with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, and with difficulties, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak [in human strength], then I am strong [truly able, truly powerful, truly drawing from God’s strength].

2 Corinthians 12:10 AMP

Boldness is not an absence of weakness, but it’s a willingness to trust God to work through our weaknesses. It’s also a willingness to get back up again when we have fallen down:

For the lovers of God may suffer adversity and stumble seven times, but they will continue to rise over and over again. But the unrighteous are brought down by just one calamity and will never be able to rise again.

Proverbs 24:16 TPT 

Caleb had this kind of boldness. He stood up for the truth, and it didn’t go so well. People were mad at him, and despite his best efforts, they wouldn’t change their ways. But Caleb didn’t wallow in feelings of self-focused failure. He got back up from that difficult day and kept moving forward, believing in God’s promises. Because he had the boldness to keep believing, he later saw his dreams come true. 

This is an important kind of boldness we get from God—the courage to get back up and keep fighting, despite the very real possibility of failure or pain. This boldness gives us the courage to keep giving our heart in friendships or in relationships with our kids, even when conversations don’t go the way we want. It gives us the courage to forgive and try again, and to have uncomfortable conversations for the good of someone else. It comes from the belief that God goes before us and is able to orchestrate everything into something good on our behalf (Romans 8:28 VOICE).

Every time we boldly get back up again, we will find ourselves closer and closer to the dream God has for our lives. 

Pause and reflect:

  • What is my idea of boldness? How might it be different from God’s idea of boldness?
  • What are some bold actions God might want me to take?
  • In what areas could I make bold decisions to get back up and try again?

Final thoughts

In closing, Caleb’s story reminds us that we, too, can hold on to hope and remain steadfast in our faith, even when our expectations go unfulfilled. Just as Caleb waited 45 years without losing his bold and vigorous faith in God, we can trust that God will keep his promises in our lives. We will see God’s dreams for our lives come to pass as we follow his lead wholeheartedly, hold on to our convictions, and let him make us bold in our moments of weakness.

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What's Next?

At every stage of life, God helps us stay strong, hopeful, and ready for what’s next. In this series, we learn how grow stronger in our faith as we enter middle and late adulthood.

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This article was developed by the Deep Spirituality Editorial Staff.

Deep Spirituality logo

This article was developed by the Deep Spirituality Editorial Staff.

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