Carter Conlon from the historic Times Square Church in New York City. God promises you, and He promises me, that if we will get up and go into that place that He has for each of our lives, nothing can stop us from going to the place that God says He's going to take us.
If you're going to escape the snare of fear, you've got to get something very deep in your heart. God is for me, therefore nobody can be against me. Thank you for joining us for A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon. After the death of Moses, God instructed Joshua to lead the children of Israel to cross the Jordan River and to take possession of the land He promised them. God told Joshua to be strong and be of good courage.
God was with them. Let's join Carter now with his message from Joshua chapter 1 titled, Don't Be Afraid to Come Home. We are now in a window, which I have preached about for years, called a mercy moment.
This is a moment of mercy for this nation and other nations around the world. It's a season where the gospel can be preached freely, and by God's grace, we are going to go in and be the people that God has called us to be, every last one of us. We're going to break through the barrier of fear, because it's only fear that keeps us from becoming everything that God has called us to be. I'm going to share about that today in a message entitled, Don't Be Afraid to Come Home.
Don't be afraid to come home. Joshua chapter 1, if you have your Bible with you. After the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, it came to pass that the Lord spoke to Joshua, the son of Nun, Moses' assistant, saying, Moses, my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, to the land which I am giving to them, the children of Israel. Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given you, as I said to Moses.
From the wilderness in this Lebanon, as far as the great river, River Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and to the great sea towards the going down of the sun shall be your territory. No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and of good courage, for to this people you shall divide as an inheritance the land which I swore to their fathers to give them. Only be strong and very courageous that you may observe to do according to all the law which Moses, my servant, commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may prosper wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage. Do not be afraid or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. I wrote a book on the topic of fear.
It's called Fear Not, Living Courageously in Uncertain Times, and I want to read to you from the preface in that book, just a few paragraphs, which is about my own journey. The nurse dropped the blood pressure cuff and ran out of the room. Apparently, she feared that the young man who had just been rushed in by ambulance was in grave danger of an immediate stroke or heart attack. He clearly had a problem, but the source wasn't physical. Rather, it was spiritual and emotional. Lying there in the hospital was an otherwise healthy human being, not yet 20 years old, a victim of fear. I recall the scene so vividly because that young man was me. This wasn't my first visit to the emergency room.
I had been there in the past for the same reason. Today, we call these episodes panic attacks, the result of an interior implosion, somewhat like a computer meltdown due to an overload, only striking a human body. Without warning, the walls seem to start closing in. It feels as if somebody is pouring a bucket of sand on your head while insidiously declaring the eternal hopelessness of your situation. The nonstop ringing in your ears is deafening, and it seems like your heart is going to pound right out of your chest.
Surely death is right at the door. I started having these panic attacks when I was only 15. Perhaps it was because of the high expectations I placed on myself and that others placed on me as well, all of which I felt powerless to fulfill. All I know is that without warning, fear became my constant companion.
It got so bad that I would sometimes be afraid to travel too far from home or spend a night by myself, even in familiar surroundings. In Joshua chapter 1 in verse 2, God begins by telling Joshua, he says, Moses, my servant is dead. In other words, what God will do sometimes when he's taking us into a new place is he will cause death to come to the place that we're in right at the moment. Whatever we trust it in goes away. It seems like the foundation maybe falls out from underneath us because God is calling us to move with him into an inheritance that he wants to give us.
And many of us, if we are content to be where we are, wouldn't move. And so God removes in a sense our former trust. God takes away what we trusted in the past and he says it's time for you to rise up and go into your inheritance. Joshua, I have something for you and I have something for you to go into yourself and you're going to lead others into this inheritance of this place called the promised land of God, this place of God's promise.
In verse 5 he says, no man will be able to stand before you all the days of your life as I was with Moses. So I will be with you. I will never leave you nor forsake you. God promises you and he promises me that if we will get up and go into that place that he has for each of our lives, nothing can stop us from going to the place that God says he's going to take us. God says, don't be afraid.
I am with you. You will not be overcome. You will not be overpowered. You will not be hindered. You will not be stopped.
I have a purpose and a plan for your life. I'm going to do something through you, but the enemy is going to try to stop it through fear. He's going to bring fear against you. He's going to bring accusations against you. He's going to sow thoughts in your heart, even against God.
He's going to try to redefine your circumstance. Voices are going to roar against you at the base of every mountain that God calls you to climb or move out of the way of his purpose in your life. But God says no one will be able to stand before you all the days of your life. You have to get that deep in your heart.
If you're going to escape the snare of fear, you've got to get something very deep in your heart. God is for me, therefore nobody can be against me. And the one who created the universe by the word of his mouth has decreed that my life is going to go from this place over to this place.
And I don't care who's in between those two destinations. They have not got the power to override the word of God, or the power of God, or the purpose of God, or the plan of God. They can't override it. They can roar against it.
They can try to stop it, but they can't stop it because God has decreed. Verse 8, he says, this book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in a day and night that you may observe to do according to all that is written. Then you will make your way prosperous and then you will have good success. What the Lord is saying, and then he goes on and says, have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage. Do not be afraid. Do not be dismayed for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. God is saying to you and I, meditate on this book, meditate on the things that I've said to you. Learn what I've said, then meditate, absorb it. Think about it.
Get it into your heart until you believe it. I'm taking you to a certain place. I'm taking my church, God says, in this generation to a certain place. All hell will try to stand against it, but there's no weapon formed against my people that can prosper. God says, every tongue that rises against you in judgment, you shall condemn.
This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord. You have the right to condemn those fears. You have the right to condemn those voices.
You have the right to condemn those thoughts that come against you and say this far and no farther. You can go to the borders of Jordan as it is in Joshua's case, but you can't go into the promised land because I have a stronghold there and you're not going to be able to overcome it. God said to Joshua, he knew he was going to face Jericho. He knew just moving into the place of God's promise for him and for the people, there would be tremendous obstacles to overcome.
And he told him, I've commanded you. I've told you you're going there. Don't be afraid.
Don't be dismayed. Now, fear comes when you and I are called to go into new places which are promised to us, but presently occupied by something which opposes us. That's where fear comes from. When we're called to go somewhere, we're called to be something, but something else is in that place that's promised to us.
A stronghold, and I put it that way, that's been there maybe for a long, long time. And the devil says, no, you can't go beyond this. You know you're never going to go beyond this. You know you can't defeat this. And dismay comes into our lives when we look at the magnitude of the calling and we conclude that our own resources are not enough to achieve it.
We look in the mirror, we look at our resumes, we look at our past, we look at our diplomas or lack thereof, whatever it is that's in our lives, and we come to a false conclusion. That's where dismay comes in. Dismay goes, I'm never going to be able to do this. I will never know the calling of God. I have a glimpse of it, but I'll never achieve it in my life because I don't have enough strength to do it, which is true.
You don't. But the thing is it's not about you. It never was. It's about the promise of God. It's about the purpose of God. It's about the person of the Holy Spirit. It's about God's plan for your life.
Not your plan or mine. It's God's plan for my life that determines my future. And if God is for us, who can be against us? Now Joshua is going in to take the land and to bring a lot of people into this place of promise with him. It's a type of a pastor like Pastor Delina that's doing everything he has to move you and I into that promise that we're going to be soul winners in our generation. We're going to be supernaturally empowered by God where we're going to be given a burden for the lost. We're going to be given of the Holy Spirit this ability to desire to live a life that brings glory to God. Now David is moving into a place where he's going to rule and he's going to reign.
He's a Christ type, or may I put it this way, a type of the church going into the promises of God, ultimately which tell us that we will rule and reign with Christ. But in that place, on that journey, there is a giant. And there are a lot of people with this giant that are saying, you were not coming here. You're going to serve us. We're not going to serve you. You're going to serve us.
Have you ever heard that voice? You get up in the morning and go to bed at night and alcohol says, you're going to serve me. Or drug addiction, you're going to serve me. Or pornography, you're going to serve me. Or despair, you're going to serve me.
Or depression, you're going to serve me. Or fear says you're going to serve me. And so the enemy took the biggest person they could find with the loudest voice, with the most military history and sent him out every morning and evening to challenge the armies of Israel. If you are the people of God, then choose somebody to come and fight with me. And if you can defeat me, then we will serve you.
But if not, you will serve us. So David comes into the camp. I love this story because it speaks of the journey that God calls us on.
We're going to rule and reign with Christ one day. And David comes into the camp. He's got no military training, but he's had experience with God. He has known the anointing of God. The Spirit of God has come upon this young man. And he knows that God gives supernatural strength to those who place their confidence in him. He was just a boy when he took a lion by the maneness it is and threw him down and killed him. I don't know how he did it, but he did it by the Spirit of God.
I don't know the methodology. I just know he says he grabbed it, threw it down and killed it. He killed the bear. And he comes into the camp and everyone is afraid. Verse 45, then David said to the Philistine, you come to me with a sword, with a spear and with a javelin. You come against me, in other words, with the weaponry that you have and have been able to manufacture. But I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.
You come to me with everything this world can produce, everything that darkness has in its arsenal. But I come to you in the name of God. I come to you in the name of the one who has called me. David could say personally, as a future king, I come to you in the name of the people of Israel that have been called of God to inherit a promised land and be a blessing in the earth. And I come to you in the name of God. Then the Holy Spirit comes upon him and he begins to prophesy in verse 46. This day, the Lord will deliver you into my hand. I will strike you and take your head from you.
That's exactly what he did. This day, I will give the carcasses of the camp of the Philistines to the birds of the air and the wild beasts of the earth that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, not just you, Goliath, but every demonic power of hell that walks with you. God's going to give you into my hand. He was only a teenager. He had no armor like they had come to trust in in those days. All he had was the, all he had, he had what he needed. He had the armor of God and the presence of God. Then all the assembly will know that the Lord does not save with sword and spear for the battle is the Lord's and he will give you into our hands. And so it was when the Philistine arose and came near and drew near to meet David. David hurried and ran towards the army to meet the Philistine.
David put his hand in his bag and took out a stone and he slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead so that the stone sank into his forehead and he fell on his face to the earth. Doesn't the scripture say I give you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and overall the power of darkness, the weaponry of your warfare is not carnal, but mighty and God to the what? The pulling down of strongholds, bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Jesus Christ. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
David is saying you thought you could govern our future. You thought you could overpower the armies of God, but I'm going to put another thought into your forehead. You stand against the living God and when you stand against the living God, the battle is not ours.
The battle is the Lord's. I had come to Christ at the age of 24 and it was shortly after, remember he told Joshua, read this book and your way will be successful. And I was reading one day and I had only half a verse of scripture.
I heard Pastor Tim speak on it I think last week and he said, if God before us, who can be against us? And I went home that night and I went to bed and I was just a young believer in Christ, but I've been paralyzed for nine years. Do you understand? I've been paralyzed by this fear. I would work out like a fiend physically to try to keep my body in a state of exhaustion to not have to succumb to these panic attacks. I was taking Valium like they were candy and if one of these attacks would come on me, I'd take a usually a straight glass of whiskey to try to just get myself out of this cycle of fear.
And so I was laying in bed one night, it was late at night and I felt one of these panic attacks coming upon me. Now I'm a believer now in Jesus Christ, a type of David facing a Goliath. David didn't need a gravel truck, you understand to take down Goliath, he just needed one stone. I didn't have all of the promises of God, but I had half of one and that's all I needed.
If God before us, who can be against us? I happened to believe that promise. I got out of bed that night and I said, no more pills. I'm a believer in Christ now and I'm not taking any more pills and I'm not drinking any more whiskey. Those things are gone out of my life. I'm not going to cower under this power of fear and darkness any longer.
So I went into my living room and I remember the words as if it happened just yesterday. I said, Satan, you can only kill me if God allows it tonight. And if he does, I'm going to heaven. So I win tonight.
I win either way I win. So I said, you throw at me everything you've got, but I throw back at you what I now have in the name of Jesus Christ, the son of God, I resist you. That was my prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, the son of God, I resist you. And as I stand here and bear witness to God, a heat hit my feet, not a warmth, not a fuzzy warmth, a heat like you had two hairdryers pointed at your feet.
A heat hit my feet went through my legs, through my torso, through my chest, out the top of my head. And I was completely set free that night from nine years of hell. Hallelujah. Hallelujah to the lamb of God. Hallelujah. There's a time in your life where you have to stand up and fight.
There's a time in your life where you have to just draw a line in the sand and say, I'm crossing over this. I'm going into the promise of God. I'm not going to be afraid.
I'm not going to be dismayed. The battle is not mine. The battle belongs to God. And where God says I'm going to go, I'm going to go. What God says I'm going to be, I'm going to be. What God wants to give me, I'm going to possess. And I'm going to live a life that brings glory to his name.
And David, the young David could say, not only am I going to defeat you, Galathen, I'm going to take down a whole host of hell with you and encourage the people of God to go into the battle, which is exactly what happened. There is a fear because it's unknown. We want to know things. You understand? We want to prescribe.
We want a 10 year plan and a 15 year plan. We want to know where we're going to be. But Jesus said, those that are born of the spirit are like the wind.
You don't know where it's coming from and you don't know where it's going. There's a confidence in God that has to come into the human heart and it guides us and leads us throughout our life in a way that only God can. Maybe today you're even afraid of approaching God. Like a lot of people are afraid of God himself. They're afraid of God, the father, because they knew this and rejected it or walked away from it. In order to go into that place of promise, you have to have a relationship with God.
You have to come to God first, then go into the place of inheritance. And just so many people are afraid to come home to God because of the way they've lived or are living. And they know, God, I'm not living right. I'm not doing right.
I haven't been doing right for a long time. As Paul said in Romans, I know what to do, but I don't know where the power is to do it. I delight in one sense after the things of God in my mind, but there's a power in me that leads me back to living in a way that I shouldn't. So I'm afraid of even approaching God, let alone the calling of God that's on my life. And thirdly, people are afraid of approaching God because they don't know his heart.
They have an incomplete view of his heart. Now, in Luke chapter 15, Jesus Christ spoke a story, a parable, to show his heart. We call this red letter in our Bibles.
Red letter means this is directly from the voice of Jesus Christ. So he is showing us the heart of God in this story. It's a parable, but it contains the heart of God. He talks about a man who had two sons, and the younger son took what he once had, took what he once knew, and he went far, far away from the heart of his father, from the heart of God. And he spent everything that had been given him on himself. This boy went so far into this journey away from God that he ended up in a place of famine with everybody else.
And he had to press through, no doubt, the fear of coming back to his father. What is my father going to say? Is God fed up with me?
Has he rejected me? But the scripture says even though he ended up in a place where he was feeding pigs, can you imagine, it can't get worse for a Jewish boy than feeding pigs. But one day he said, I'm just, I'm meant for more than this. I'm starving. And there's bread in my father's house. There's nourishment there.
There's purpose there. There's a lot that goes on in my father's house. And I don't know what I was thinking when I walked away, but I'm going to get up and I'm going to go home and I'm going to say to my father I'm not worthy. How surprised he was when he came down the road.
Now this is out of the mouth of Jesus and he starts declaring his prayer. But his father saw him. He comes running down the road. He must have wondered what's he going to do when he gets here? He's looking up and this old man with his white beard and he's hiked up his garment so he can run full spin. He's coming down the road. Oh God. What's he going to do when he meets me?
Is he going to say, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, far enough. You brought a lot of disgrace on the family name. You just go back where you came from. You're not my son anymore. You're not my daughter anymore.
Whatever the case might be. How surprised he must've been when his father fell on his neck and kissed him. Oh God, there must've been a collective gasp in everybody that was accompanying the father when he fell on your neck and he fell on my neck and he embraces us even when we fail, even when we falter, even when we've made bad choices and he just falls on you and kisses you. And the beauty of this story was under Jewish law, if this boy was unclean, which he was because he'd been in appealed with a field with pigs. When the father embraced him, he took the uncleanness of his son upon himself.
That's what happened on the cross. When Christ stretched out his hands and embraced us, he took our uncleanness upon himself, not because he felt obligated because he loves you. He loves you with an everlasting love. He said through the prophet Isaiah, even though a nursing mother could forget her child, I cannot forget you.
I have loved you with an everlasting love and I have engraved you on the palms of my hands. And he embraces his son, takes the uncleanness of his son upon himself, kisses him on the neck and then says, bring out the best robe and cover him. And then he tells the servants, take the ring, the signet of God and put it on his hand. Another collective gasp of all the servants of the father. He's bringing him back, not just as a slave, but as a son with power and authority over darkness. Puts the ring on his hand, then tells them, bring shoes and put them on his feet.
And the shoes were symbolic of a commission. Son, you are now ready to represent my house because you now understand this is all about mercy and the goodness and the kindness of all mighty God. Go son, go my daughter and don't be afraid of the journey before you. Don't be afraid. God's not given us a spirit of fear, but power and of love and of a sound mind.
Don't be afraid to come home. Thank you for joining us this week for A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon from Times Square Church in New York City. For more information, log on to tsc.nyc. That's tsc.nyc. You can count on a powerful message each week on A Call to the Nation with Carter Conlon.
