Caleb: Not interested in retirement
God’s People on Mission
Caleb: Not interested in retirement
I must be looking old; more people seem to be speaking with me about retirement or at least preparing for retirement these days. If I’m fair, very few are asking me when I’m going to retire, but they seem quite eager for their own permanent holiday, and well along the path of making plans.
Whenever I think of retirement, or the question of retirement ages, I can’t help thinking about Caleb. At a time when men much younger than he was, were keen to go back to comfortable (not) Egyptian Slavery, or just settling down in a poorly defended patch of the Promised Land, Caleb was heading out to lead his house in taking down a tribe of giants, and he is eighty-five years old. Just listen to him:
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 on the day that Moses sent me; just as my strength was then, so now is my strength for war, both for going out and for coming in. 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 the 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.” (Joshua 14:10-12)
And God was with Him, and in God’s strength, he did! In the following chapter we discover that Caleb was successful in driving out ‘the three sons of Anak’ and their tribe. Caleb’s hope was in the Lord forty-five years earlier when he crossed the Jordan with Joshua and the ten other spies, and his faith, and his strength hadn’t wavered, because his strength was The Lord.
Over the years I’ve met many Saints who share the same conviction, faith and strength that Caleb did. Long after their peers, and even people decades younger than them have become way too comfortable (and maybe a little weak and flabby (I’m speaking spiritually of course)), they are still looking and praying to be used of God in whatever way is open to them. And it is so good to ride a little on their enthusiasm.
My prayer is, that if the Lord tarries (and that has to be a big ‘IF’!), and if He is gracious enough to extend my life to eight-five and beyond, that I’ll also be faithful enough to be looking for the spiritual giants to take on so that God can be shown to be strong in me.
There are two things that this story highlights for me today that I want to share with you. The first is to look around us for the Caleb’s that God has placed in our lives – to pray for them, to listen to them and to value them. They are often quiet achievers, because their hope is in the Lord, not the recognition of others, but their wisdom and testimony is a powerful witness to what God has done in their lives, and why we can trust that He might do the same through us.
The second reminder is not to allow my personal strength to hinder spiritual success. It doesn’t matter whether we are five, twenty-five or eighty-five, our strength should always come from the same source. The Lord. It is what Caleb and Joshua knew when they were in their forties, but the other ten spies had lost sight of. It is what we must know also.
Caleb lived before Isaiah, but he certainly knew this one thing that Isaiah did, and I want to invite you to meditate on this greatly loved passage as I close, and I pray that you will experience this for yourself today:
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The everlasting God, the Lord, The Creator of the ends of the earth,
Neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the weak,
And to those who have no might He increases strength.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,
But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.(Isaiah 40:28 – 31)
