You are what you believe yourself to be. – Paulo Coelho

Tama ang isang kasabihan, “pag gusto, may paraan, pag ayaw may dahilan.” If you believe that it will work out, you will see opportunities. If you believe it won’t, you will see obstacles.

We have to choose faith in everything we do. When we activate our confidence in God, we tap into the most powerful force in the universe.

“You don’t have enough faith,” Jesus told them. “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.” — Matthew 17:20 (NLT)

So Jesus said to them, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. — Matthew 17:20 (NKJV)

Jesus is telling his disciples that they have a belief problem which can be countered with faith, even in small amounts.

In the dictionary, it says that Belief means:

Belief – An opinion or judgement in which a person is fully persuaded.

So our beliefs are things that we are thoroughly convinced of. Usually (but not always) they are ideas, concepts that we gather through acquiring information and experience. Because of that, our beliefs can change over time as we gain more knowledge and experience more things throughout our lives.

Faith = ( Belief × Action × Confidence )

Faith includes our beliefs, but it is bigger than that. Faith requires action. If it doesn’t move us to do something or say something – actually take some kind of action – it’s not really faith at all. James said it this way.

So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless. — James 2:17

The Promised Land

God had promised the Israelites that they would be able to conquer the land with its indigenous Canaanite nations. Moses instructed the spies to report back on the agriculture and lay of the land. However, during their tour, the spies saw fortified cities and resident giants, which frightened them and led them to believe that the Israelites would not be able to conquer the land as God had promised. Ten of the spies decided to bring back an unbalanced report, emphasizing the difficulty of the task before them.

They gave Moses this account,

“We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit. But the people who live there are very powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there.”— Numbers, 13:27-28

Never let your fear decide your future.

Two of the spies — Joshua and Caleb — did not go along with the majority and tried to convince the Israelites that they could conquer the land:

Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.” — Numbers, 13:30

However, the Israelite community believed the majority’s conclusions. All of the spies, except Joshua and Caleb, were struck down with a plague and died.

The Israelites’ belief of the false report  was considered a grave sin by God.

But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there were of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.” — Numbers, 13:31-33

Corresponding to the 40 days that the spies toured the land, God decreed that the Israelites would wander in the wilderness for 40 years as a result of their unwillingness to take the land. Moreover, the entire generation of men who left Egypt during the Exodus would die in the desert, save for Joshua and Caleb who did not slander the land.