When the chips are down, when things are against you – gee it can be hard to hang onto the promises of God.  Really hard.  That’s why He makes promises in a way that – well, puts courage in your heart. So many things in life promise so much but in the end so many of them fail to deliver and my hunch is that, for many people, it kind of sums up their experience of God. This Jesus, I mean He promises so much, peace and joy and a life lived in all of it's abundance but somehow the experience can fall short of the promise. Must have felt a little bit like that for Israel after centuries in slavery and forty years wandering through the desert. They were about to cross over into the land that God promised Abraham all those centuries before, the Promised Land. But as they looked ahead into that Promised Land what they saw was a whole bunch of tribes and nations already occupying it. There'd have to be battle after battle to take the Promised Land, could this really be one of the promises of God, I mean really? Well you know, Israel was there, they were on the banks of the Jordan on one side and they were about to cross over into this Promised Land, they'd spent the last forty years wandering through the desert on the exodus. Somehow kind of believing, very imperfectly I might add, of a promise made to Abraham centuries before that God would give this land to Abraham's descendants. And here they were, Israel, Abraham’s descendants, and they looked across the river and they saw all these people and tribes and kings and fortified cities and armies. On the one hand they wanted to believe in God’s promise but on the other hand they're looking at the reality thinking, "wow, how is that ever going to happen?" You know God calls us to His Promised Land here and now today. It promises all the way through the Bible about a relationship with God. Jesus says in John chapter 10, verse 10, he says: The thief you know only comes to steal, kill and destroy but I've come that you might have life in all its abundance. Well think about that for a minute. Look at our lives and look around at what’s going on, can we have a really abundant life? Again, Jesus says in Matthew chapter 13, he says: The kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it he hid it again and in his joy he went and sold all that he had to buy that field. Wow, you know God’s kingdom, God’s Promised Land is like … well it's like a treasure. When we give our lives to Jesus lock, stock and barrel He invites us into a land of promises and they're promises so different to what the world promises. You see His Promised Land isn't a physical land or physical wealth and all that other stuff, it's quite different. Once He was asked by some religious leaders of the day, when this Kingdom of God would come and Jesus said: