My wife, Claudina, forwarded me the following thoughts and I asked her permission to share them with the world. Hope you find it as challenging as I did.

I was reading about Joshua and Caleb; the two men who went to spy out the land God had promised the Israelites.  Twelve spies went into the land and only two came back believing in the promise of God.  Only two returned ready to conquer the land flowing with milk and honey.  Only two believed in the power that was displayed to them so many times before. 

The people were so closed minded and lacked in faith that after Josh and Caleb proclaimed that it could be done, the people wanted to stone them.   They wanted to return to Egypt back to their lives of slavery and turmoil.  Nothing that God had done impacted them.  Nothing that God had done changed their heart status.  They may have left the physical status of slavery, but their hearts were still in bondage with chains that were difficult to break and burdens that they never laid down.  None of these people made it to the promise land....only Joshua and the new generation of Israelites.  

The world still hasn't changed.  Many come to know Christ and step out physically from the things that bind them,  but fail so many times to break the binds on their hearts that later in life bring them back to the state in which they began.  Sometimes to the same sin, but many times to a different form of sin masked by their "repentant" status.  The bondage of the heart eventually reveals itself in different forms throughout our lives. We must have the discernment and heart attitude to recognize it and immediately change it before other things resulting from that bondage begin to darken our hearts and leave us in a state where we can't even recognize the sin we have allowed to control our lives.  Therefore we fall into a form of godliness without power and surrendered to a life of spiritual staleness and luke-warmness that we can't even discern.