Joshua: The God Who Fights for Us

Well, amen, Summit Church. I feel like all weekend, the Spirit of Jesus has been present here and our services to heal and to deliver just in a special way.

So I'll tell you more about that toward the end of our time together. But let me first of all just say good morning to all of you at our campuses and to celebrate with you. Last weekend, we had another 133 people join, those that baptized the week before, which brings us to 215 for the last couple of weeks. Which if you take what we did last fall, that brings us to 622 between the fall and the spring. You might remember that we asked God this year to let us see a thousand people be baptized.

And so we are well on our way toward that number. Maybe just as exciting for us is last weekend, 69 people at our United States church plants, churches we planted in the last few years, 69 people professed faith in Christ through baptism. And so we are just really excited how God is multiplying the gospel through this church around the world.

So one more time, why don't you show your thankfulness to God for doing these things here. You got a Bible. I'd love for you to take it out or look on with somebody that may be close to you if they have one to Joshua chapter one.

Joshua is the sixth book in the Bible. Open your Bible there if you can. As you're turning there, I'll tell you that one of my favorite 1980s movies is Hoosiers. For what it is worth, I think that when we get to heaven, we will see that Western culture reached its pinnacle in the late 1980s. Chicago, REO Speedwagon, Run DMC, Whitney Houston, Chuck Norris, Bon Jovi 1.0, Top Gun, The Empire Strikes Back, the Indiana Jones trilogy. Come on, y'all. I know that not everyone agrees with me in that assessment, but that's just because you're not fully filled with the Spirit yet.

These things are spiritually discerned. Hoosiers came out in 1986. It was in eighth grade. We watched Hoosiers literally every year before my basketball team went into the tournament. In the movie, which is based on a true story, you have this little backwoods high school basketball team in Indiana that overcomes incredible odds and makes it all the way to the Indiana State Championship where they play this school that is like ten times bigger than they are in this humongous auditorium, Indiana University's auditorium, which is like a hundred times bigger than anything they've ever played in before.

Gene Hackman, who plays the coach, walks the team into the arena the day before the game, and he can just sense how overwhelmed these little country boys are at how big this arena is. And so, sensing their fear, he gets out a tape measure and he measures for them the distance between the rim and the floor, ten feet, distance between the rim and the shot line, fifteen feet, and his point is it's the same. It's the same as our little gym back in wherever we came from. He said, look, the basics are the same. The arena is different, but the basics are the same. And the way that you're going to win this game is not by changing. It's just going to be doing the basics the way that you've always done them. That is the exact same point that is being made in the opening scenes of the book of Joshua. God's people are about to go into an entirely new arena, but the basics of what it means to walk with God never change.

They didn't change in that day, and they haven't changed in our day either. In your life, you're going to go through multiple seasons, new seasons. For some of you, you just entered one now. Maybe you just became a student, or maybe for some of you it's getting married or having kids. For others of you, it's building a career. Some of you have just entered into retirement or maybe being single again, or maybe it's becoming famous or going into ministry.

The arenas change, but none of the basics ever do. And sometimes when you go into a new arena, you feel like the fear and the pressure is going to swallow you up, and you start saying, God, do I have what it takes to succeed in this? God, am I really going to be able to make it in this season? And God, in a sense, takes out the tape measure, and he says, all right, you see this?

The distance between the rim and the floor are the same. It's just the basics of what brought you here is what's going to take you onward. The book of Joshua opens up like this. Joshua chapter 1, verse 1. After the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua, the son of Nun, which doesn't mean that he didn't have any parents.

It just meant that his dad's name was Nun. He was Moses' man criteria. Verse 2. He said to him, Moses, my servant, is dead.

Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I'm giving to them, to the people of Israel. A little context in case you forgot this story from Sunday school or never went to Sunday school. Joshua had been one of the 12 spies that 40 years prior to this had been sent in to spy out the land. Of those 12 spies, two of them came back and said, man, the giants in this place are big, but God is bigger.

The other 10 came back and said the giants are big and they would crush us and there's no way we can do this. The two spies who gave the courageous report were Joshua and Caleb that we remember. The other 10 spies, we don't remember them at all.

One because they were not courageous and you never remember a coward. The other reason is because they had really strange names like Shofat. One was named Shofat. Parents, do not name your kids Shofat. You name your kids Shofat, it's not going to go show well for them in high school.

Shofat definitely went to the prom by himself, I guarantee it, but we don't remember them. Joshua and Caleb, we do remember because of their courage. Verse 3.

So God tells Joshua, every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon, I've given to you just like I promised to Moses. No man will be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Why? Because you're awesome? No, because just as I was with Moses, so I will be with you.

I will never leave you or forsake you. Let me stop real quick. Some of you have been taught all of your life to look for confidence in the wrong place. Your parents, your teachers, the talk shows are all like, oh, look deep within, you're awesome, you're special, you're a snowflake, you're a rainbow, you're a skittle. You're actually not, okay?

And you're not going to find much looking within. Yes, God made you in a special way, but a friend of mine, his football coach, used to illustrate it so well to him. He's like, you want to know how irreplaceable you are on this team? Put your hand in a bucket of water and pull it out.

And what happens to the water? That shows you how irreplaceable you are on this team. Joshua's not special. God's not saying, hey, look deep within, you're awesome. He says, you're going to be special. You're going to have confidence, not because of what's deep inside of you, but because of the one standing beside you. You want to know where confidence comes from your life? It's not navel gazing within. It's looking at the God who walks with you everywhere that he sends you.

All right? So verse 7, you're going to be strong and courageous. Be careful to do according to all the law that Moses, my servant, commanded you.

Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left that you may have good success. Wherever you go, you've got to obey because I'm the one that's fighting this battle. And so your job is to walk with me in obedience hand in hand. So know your Bible. Joshua 5, flip over there, four chapters there to your right. Joshua 5, end of that chapter, verse 13. Joshua's first major challenge in taking the land is Jericho. It's not an easy challenge because Jericho is the most fortified city in the world at the time.

Its walls, historians say, were so thick you could ride two chariots across them side by side, which meant it was like a double lane highway. The scene here in Joshua 5 takes place on the eve of the Battle of Jericho. Now as you can imagine, Joshua's pretty nervous. War is imminent, and this is Joshua's first true moment of leadership. So understandably, Joshua's having a little trouble sleeping. So he goes out late at night to take a walk to calm his nerves.

It's late at night, he's out praying or playing Angry Birds on his phone or dipping tobacco or whatever he did to unwind. Verse 13, when Joshua was by Jericho. Now the way that that's written in Hebrew indicates that Joshua had snuck right up to the walls of Jericho.

Because it literally says in Hebrew, when he was at Jericho. When he was at Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked and behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, are you for us or are you for our adversaries? Now first, can we acknowledge Joshua is a man's man.

I mean, he is right by the enemy wall in the middle of the night by himself, and he encounters a strange man in the dark with his sword drawn. A lesser man, like me, would have hightailed it out of there, but not Joshua. Joshua goes right over to him and challenges the guy to a fight.

Come on now, write this down in your Bible. Joshua is the truer and better Chuck Norris. Some people wore Superman pajamas, Superman wore Joshua pajamas. Death once had a near Joshua experience, okay. Joshua is that guy.

Joshua goes right up to him and says, are you for us or are you for our adversaries? And this strange man said, no. No? Did Joshua even ask him a yes, no question?

Hey, what's your name? No. No means you're asking the wrong question. No, but I am the commander of the army of the Lord. Now I have come. In other words, the question is not, Joshua, am I on your side?

The question is, are you on my side? I'm not coming as the lieutenant. I'm coming as the general. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped and said to him, what does my Lord then say to his servant? And the commander of the Lord's army said to Joshua, take off your sandals from your feet for the place where you are standing as holy. And Joshua did so. Now real quick, who is it exactly that Joshua is standing in front of? You might say, well, maybe it's an angel, but it can't be an angel because it says that Joshua worshiped this man and whoever it was didn't stop him. Any other time in scripture that somebody tries to worship an angel, like Revelation chapter 22, the apostle John falls on his face and is worshiping an angel and the angel's like, whoa, Jack, you better get up because God's going to be mad at both of us if you do that. Worship God alone. This guy doesn't stop Joshua.

He's not like, whoa, don't do that. He says, thank you for worshiping me. And the place where you're standing is holy, and there's only one person who can make ground holy. This is God himself. It's what theologians call a Christophany.

Christophany is just a fancy word that means a pre-nativity appearance of Jesus Christ before he was born in a manger. Before he came as Mary's child, he shows up here in Joshua 5, always the commander in chief of the Lord's armies, and what he demanded then is what he demands now, and that is complete and total surrender because he's telling them, listen, this is not a battle that you're going to fight for me with my help. This is a battle that I'm going to fight for you.

You've got to make sure you get the order right. By the way, we skipped right over this, but in one of the middle chapters, while they're there exposed before Jericho, God has Joshua circumcise all the men in the army. Now, you talk about something that make you vulnerable.

All these guys are circumcised. Why would they do that when they're exposed before the enemy? Because God's saying it's not about your strength. I'm going to fight this battle for you. Chapter 6, verse 1, Now Jericho was shut up inside and outside because of the people of Israel.

None went out, none came in. The Lord said to Joshua, see, look at that. I've given Jericho into your hand with its king and its mighty men of valor. Then God proceeds to give Joshua instructions on how to take Jericho, but the instructions are really odd. Now, keep in mind, I just want you to, I know you've heard this if you grew up in Sunday school, but, you know, hear it with fresh ears if you've never heard this before. They're all amped up for a fight, and God tells them, I don't want you to fight. I want you to put the Ark of the Covenant, which houses my presence in front of you, and I want you to march around the city in silence, one time each day for six days.

And then on the seventh day, I want you to march around seven times in silence, and on the seventh time, you then shout, and I'll take care of the rest. Do not lose sight of how bizarre this is. These are real people, right?

They're not different than you and me. They're all amped up for a fight. Joshua's itching to prove himself. Imagine if this happened in a football game. You've got a football team, and the coach says, on offense, I don't want you to run a play.

You've got to hold hands and sing away in a manger or don't go chasing waterfalls or something ridiculous like that. How hard must this have been for Joshua? He wants to prove himself, but God says, no fighting.

I'll do the fighting. Then God says, verse 18, but you keep yourselves from the things devoted to destruction. All silver and gold and every vessel of bronze and iron, they're holy to the Lord.

They shall go back into the treasury of the Lord. Now, that's an important detail, which we'll come back to later. Well, they do as instructed, verse 20, and as soon as the people on the seventh day, after they circled seven times, had heard the sound of the trumpet, they shouted a great shout, and the wall fell down flat. And then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen sheep and donkeys with the edge of the sword. Now, real quick, one thing I want to deal with before we move on, this is not the main point of the message.

It's a little tangential, but I know that a lot of you have this question or you've been asked this question, so let me take just a moment to deal with it. People read this and they say, was this a divinely ordered genocide? How can we say this is God's word when it says stuff like this? Richard Dawkins, the cranky British atheist, because of passages like this one says, and I quote, the God of the Old Testament is a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control freak, a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

If nothing else, that sentence proves that Richard Dawkins owns a thesaurus, which is how he wrote that sentence. A few things to consider when you approach this question, and if this goes right over your head, I'll put this on the blog this week so you can go through it more slowly if you need to, but a few ways that you gotta approach this question. The first one is the word authority. The rightness or wrongness of certain actions is based solely on whose authority stands behind them. For example, if you start writing checks on behalf of your company, that can be wrong or right based on whether or not you have the authority.

There's one way you can do it where it's perfectly fine. If you don't have the authority, then you go to jail. When it comes to issues of life and death, no one on earth has that kind of authority, but God does.

And no one can take that authority to themselves. God gave it for a special season to Israel with very clear instructions, never again to be repeated. In fact, after this period of the conquest, Israel is directly forbidden to ever do this again in Deuteronomy four, two through nine.

Israel was not even allowed to keep a standing army like the other nations did. Also, in these stories, you're gonna notice that God does most of the fighting. He's the one that knocks the walls over. He's the one that sends hellstones from heaven in a few chapters to wipe out another enemy.

Why? Because he doesn't want this sitting on the shoulders of Israel. This is his work, not theirs. The second word to remember, first one was authority, second word is judgment. This was about judgment on Canaan. God had said very clearly that the Canaanites were being judged because of their evil. Both scripture and history tell us that the Canaanites were some of the cruelest, most oppressive societies ever to walk the face of the earth. Deuteronomy 12 tells us that it was common for families to sacrifice one of their children up to two years old in the flames as a way of getting prosperity for themselves. And I know these people seem really far removed from us, but would you feel differently if this was done, for example, to ISIS?

Or if this were done to the Nazi party in the 1940s? This was all about judgment. In fact, in one place, God told Israel that there was a certain part of the land that they couldn't have yet because the people who lived there weren't wicked enough yet. It wasn't about genocide, it was about judgment.

Thirdly, this has got nothing to do with race. There's two ways that we know that. First way is that God spared Rahab, whose story we don't have time to get into. She's a Jericho woman just because she repents and believes. And the implication is that he would have spared anybody in Jericho who repented and believed. Everybody in Jericho knew who Israel was, knew about Israel's God.

She was the only one that responded that way. Here's the other reason we know it's not about race. God told Israel repeatedly in Deuteronomy that these exact same things and worse would happen to them if they committed the idolatry and wickedness of the Canaanites. Now, lastly, you say, well, what about the innocent people? If nobody else, the kids could not have been that much at fault. I've explained before that we all recognize, even today, that there's a communal dimension to our sin. In other words, if a man cheats on his wife, his kids end up suffering for that decision, even though they weren't directly involved. God says he will never ultimately hold the innocent accountable for the sins of the guilty. It's just that from his perspective, eternity will more than make up for whatever suffering any of us go through here on earth.

All people eventually die, so in a sense, when the innocent get caught up in things like this, it's like God is just collecting them early and any suffering or deprivation they experience here will more than be made up for in eternity because what happens here in these 70 or 80 years that we live is just a drop in the bucket compared to what's going on up there. So, see, that's how you approach a question like that. Now, again, some of you feel like I just unscrewed a fire hydrant and you got blasted back about 700 feet. I'll put it on the blog. You can go through it little by little if that would help you, but I wanted to show you how we approach a question like that. Now, there's a lot of you that are like, oh, when do we tell the funny stories again?

All right, you can come right back in. Here we go, chapter seven, verse one. But the people of Israel broke faith in regard to the devoted things, for Achan of the tribe of Judah took some of the devoted things, remember?

God had told him not to touch those things, but he took them and hid them in his tent, and the anger of the Lord burned against the people of Israel. Now, Joshua has no knowledge of this, and Joshua sent out spies from Jericho to the next city, Ai, which is just the city over, and they returned and said to him, this is such a little town. I mean, compared to Jericho, it's nothing. I mean, think of Jericho as like Raleigh and Ai is like STEM, North Carolina. No offense if you live in STEM, but it's just like, you know, it's like, this is nothing. I mean, we just, it let two or 3,000 people go up there and attack Ai for the people there are few, so 3,000 men went up, but they fled before the men of Ai, and then the hearts of the people melted and became as water, and so the people were distraught.

They're like, what happened? Why is the power of God left us? So Joshua gets on his face before God, and God reveals to him what Achan had done and that they gotta get out that sin before God's presence and his power will come back on them. Notice how God describes what Achan did.

It's really important to understand everything that's going on in this story. Chapter seven, verse one, says that Achan broke faith in God. In other words, he violated Israel's posture of trust or faith in God. Now, think about that for a minute, because it looks to me like Achan just got a little greedy, like he just, you know, wanted a little bit bigger piece of the pie and that's what happened, but God says that what Achan did, literally, is broke his faith relationship to God in doing so. In other words, Achan quit depending on God to fight the battle and meet his needs personally and to fill his life with meaning and happiness. So in this one little area, he took things back into his own control. He says, I don't trust God to give me enough.

I don't trust God to provide for me. So in this one little area, I'm gonna take matters back into my hands and I'm going to hide these things in my tent. From these stories, I want us to focus on three postures that God had the people reassume as they went into this new arena in the promised land. Y'all, these are so foundational. Each one is literally a matter of life or death for you. For you to succeed with God in any area of your life.

Going to college, going to high school, going into marriage, having kids, career, retirement, being single again, whatever. These three postures you must reassume in every arena. Here is number one, surrender.

Number one, surrender. The man who appears to Joshua in chapter five makes clear that he comes not as the lieutenant to assist Joshua. He comes as the general to command Joshua.

Here's my question for you. How do you see God in your life? How do you relate to God in your life? That's a point that I make a lot because most of us tend to relate to God like he is our faithful lieutenant.

Somebody who can influence us, guide us when we call on him, comfort us, take care of us, help us through tough times. Most of all, escort us to a safe place after death so that we don't have to be afraid. You see this all the time at funerals, right? Everybody at a funeral assumes that God is on their side.

Recently I walked through a graveyard. It wasn't a religious graveyard, it was just a regular graveyard and I noticed how every single tombstone, every single one has something on it about a Bible verse or about God or about the angels. I'm like every single person assumed that God was on their side when they died.

Now I know statistically all these people did not live for God. So it's just that they assume that God's a lieutenant that hey, when I die, he's gonna rush to my side and take care of everything. Listen, God wants to do all those things in your life. He wants to bless you.

He wants to take care of you. But he comes into your life first as the Lord. That's the first name we call him.

He's the Lord Jesus Christ. You can't have the Jesus part of him or the Christ part of him if you don't take him as Lord. If you invited me over to your house for dinner and I knock on the door and you open the door and you see it's me and you're like, come in, JD, stay out, Greer. I wouldn't even know what to do, right?

I'm like, well, I'm all JD and I'm all Greer. If you were like, well, I want loving Jesus, I want helpful Jesus, I want save me and take me to heaven Jesus. I don't want Lord Jesus. I don't want commanding Jesus. I don't want holy Jesus. If that's you, then you're not gonna get any of Jesus.

You can't divide him up like he's a salad bar, taking the part you want, leaving the part you don't. Now listen, the greatest threat, the greatest threat to true authentic faith in your life, if you live in the South, you need to hear this. The greatest threat to true authentic faith in your life is religion.

And religion is always characterized by partial obedience. That's what you see with Achan. It's not like Achan switched sides. It's not like he started working for the Canaanites or he quit believing in God. He just broke his faith in God, feeling like in that one little area, he needed to take back control from God to guarantee his happiness and security. And I'm sure, I'm sure he said, oh, is this really hurting anybody?

We were just gonna destroy all this stuff anyway. I didn't hurt anybody. Achan's actions were evil, not because of what they did directly to other people. They were evil because of what they revealed about his confidence in God. How many times do you use that same line of reasoning to justify some area of disobedience in your life?

It wasn't really hurting anybody. Well, maybe it's got nothing to do with other people. Maybe it's got to do with the statement it makes about your relationship to God. So let me ask you this. What does this Achan kind of compromise look like in your life? Here's another way to ask it.

In what areas do you feel like you can't fully trust God's ways and so you take back matters into your own hands? Maybe it's a certain habit. You feel like you just can't be without that habit and be happy and fulfilled. You're like, it's not really hurting anybody. So it just stays secret.

It stays hidden in your tent. But you won't really deal with giving it up. You won't deal with giving it up because you feel like you need it. Or maybe it shows up in how you approach relationships. Y'all, for many people, I see this spring up all around how they approach dating and marriage. That is the one area, the one area where they won't let God have his way. I know people who cannot surrender their sexuality to God or cannot do things on God's timetable. And they're like, God, I don't want to be alone.

You're not moving fast enough. So in this one area, I'm going to take it back from you. I see it with people who say, God, I will not submit to you about whether or not I should get divorced because I need to be happy in this situation and I know best.

You might as well say, call me Aiken. Maybe it shows up in how you think about your children. I know many people for whom this is the one area that they will not let God have free reign in. Maybe it's your future plans. God, I want you as a part of my life.

I see high school college students do this all the time. I want you to be a part of my life. I want you to bless me. I want you to take care of me. I want you to show me your will as long as your will's going the direction I want it to go. And I want you to bless me.

I want you to go with me, but this is where I'm going in the future because this is what I need. For many people, it's what they do with their money. I know so many people that this is what they hide in their tent. It's not that they're stingy. They just don't feel like they can trust God enough with that part of their life, their finances, to fully turn it over to Him and just obey Him. What is it that you keep hidden in your tent because you feel like you can't trust God with it?

Because lordship is one of those words that's gotta be total if it has any meaning at all. I've told you before, it's like if I said to my wife Veronica, hey, I'm going to be all yours. I'm completely and totally yours except for Friday nights between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m. Every other time is yours. Now, I calculated that up this week. That's 93% of my week that belongs to her, 93%. She's not gonna say, oh, good, 93.

That's like an A, you know? No, she's gonna say you're totally and wholly unfaithful to me. In order for Jesus to be Lord at all in your life, He's gotta be Lord of all.

He doesn't come to be a part of your life. He comes to take the whole thing over. And the good news, Joshua, the good news, Joshua, is He's got plans far beyond what you ever dreamed.

C.S. Lewis said that coming to Jesus was like living in this old rickety house. It's just totally falling apart.

You know it's falling apart. The pipes are leaking and the toilet makes weird noises and the roof's caving in and the carpet's moldy or whatever. And so Jesus comes in and immediately Jesus goes to work on fixing up the house. And you're so excited about it because He's patching the roof and He's taking the mold out of the walls and He's fixing the pipes. But then all of a sudden Jesus tears out a wall and you're like, why did you tear out that wall? But then you notice there's shiplap behind the wall and you're like, oh, that's cool. And then He rips up a carpet and you're like, oh, under the shag carpet there was this hardwood floor. And you're getting a little excited. But then He just totally knocks out an entire section of the house. Lewis said, you're like, what's happening? What is going on?

Let me quote C.S. Lewis. The explanation is that He's building quite a different house than the one you were expecting. So He launches out on a new wing over here. He puts on an extra floor up there. He starts running up towers. He starts making courtyards.

You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace and He intends to come and live in that palace Himself. God had a better plan for Joshua but it started with surrender. God's got a better plan for you and it starts with total surrender on your part as well. So the first word is surrender.

Here's your second posture, courage. Courage, throughout the book of Joshua the primary thing that derails obedience is fear. That one theologian said this.

You ought to write this down. In the book of Joshua, fear equals rebellion. Fear equals rebellion. Which brings us to perhaps why God did things the way that He did them in the story. It is okay when you read stories like this one to just ask, why?

Why did God do it this way? In fact, put yourself, if you will, in the place of an Israelite warrior. You're ready to fight. But instead, God tells you not to fight. He tells you to march. But He never tells you why or even how long you're supposed to march.

It never says that Joshua relayed that information to them. And while you're marching, literally nothing is happening. It's not like the bricks slowly start to quake. It's not like they fall down one by one and by day six you get there and there. No, on day six it looked exactly like it did on day one. Not a single thing has happened.

I don't know about you, but I feel like I need to see a little progress in what I'm doing in order for me to stay motivated. Are y'all like that? I mean, imagine these men going home at night to their wives. I'm sure that men and women were not that much different back then. So your wife asks you, how was your day?

And guys, you know what that means. This is not a straight recounting of the facts. This is lots of details. And then what you thought about what happened. And then how you thought about what you thought. And then how you thought about how you thought about what you thought.

That's what we're talking about. It's a 90-minute conversation that involves a lot of words, a lot of facial expressions, a lot of nodding, a lot of grunts. You've been there, right? So your wife says, how did it go? And you're like, we walked around. I think Joshua had us on a kind of a vision trip or something.

I don't know. So day two, you come back home and she was like, so baby, how was the battle? You big warrior man. Did you slay the bad guy for me? And you're like, no, we kind of walked around again. We just sort of walked around.

You do this for six days. Can you imagine how, I mean, what do you say? What do you say? Meanwhile, the people on the wall are taunting you. You know that was happening.

They're throwing stuff at you and making fun of you because you're just walking around. Why did God do it that way? Because what God wanted to do in them was much more significant than what he wanted to do through them. God was preparing them for a promise they were about to receive.

You see, as they were walking around the walls, nothing may have been happening to those walls, but something important was happening to them. God wanted them less focused on the outcome and more focused on obedience because outcome is God's responsibility. Faithful obedience is ours. You see, God does not really need you or them or any of us to accomplish anything for him. Does he? No, he can speak the world into existence. He doesn't need your money. He can make donkeys talk. He doesn't need my preaching ability.

God does not need us for anything, so what we do for God is not nearly as important as who we become in God. I told you it reminds me of the story of the proverbial story of the little woodpecker that's tapping away at the telephone pole. Nothing happened to the telephone pole. And as he's in the middle of tapping, all of a sudden, lightning strikes the pole from heaven and splits the telephone pole in two. And the little woodpecker is like, kind of looks at it, and then his goose flies off and gets his friends and he brings them back. He's like, there she is, boys. There she is.

Look at what I did. Now, his tapping had nothing to do with that pole splitting. It was heaven, the lightning that split the pole. What you've got is you've got obedience that often feels like that woodpecker that's just tapping away. And then God sends the power. It's not like your tapping caused it, but your tapping was the faith expression day after day that God's gonna do what God said he was going to do.

So here's my question. Where are you right now? Where are you right now feel like you're in the place of that woodpecker? Maybe it's in your parenting.

Maybe you're just plugging away at a job. Maybe you're just faithfully praying for or sharing Christ with somebody who doesn't seem to be listening and you feel like it's not doing any good. Again, y'all, there are two things that I feel like I need from God whenever I obey.

I need the why and I need the when. I'm like, God, I will go through anything. I'll go through anything. I just gotta see it working and I gotta know when it's over.

In fact, I was thinking this week about, it applies to just like every area of my life. In dieting, I need to see, I need to eat a salad at lunch and have my clothes not fit the next day. That's what I need. Right? In fact, even better, I need to be able to stand on the scale and eat the salad and watch the weight just drop.

That's what I need. Working out. I'm like, I wanna see my muscles get bigger like in the middle of the exercise. I need to know when it's over. This week I was working out with a friend and we were doing one of those timed rep things and he had the clock. And I'm like, this is not gonna work. I need to know like when we got 30 seconds left and when we got 10 seconds, because otherwise I'm just not gonna be able to make it.

I gotta know how much time is there. Here's the thing. God rarely gives us either the why or the when.

He rarely does. And the greatest danger is that you're gonna quit. What if these people had stopped on day six? I wouldn't have made it to day six, I don't think.

I'd have been like day three of it. Like, this ain't working. Every day, all I'm doing, my Fitbit thing's going off. Every day I'm getting my 10,000 steps. That's the only thing that's happening.

That's it. There's no way I would have made it to day six. What if they had stopped at day six? What if you stop at day six?

What if you stop at day six and say it's not working? Courage is the ability to keep going even when you can't see the results because you know that God is faithful. Courage is the ability to keep going for a long time even when you don't see any progress because you know that God's gonna do what he said he's gonna do.

In fact, write this down. Endurance is what courage looks like over the long haul. Endurance is just courage repeated day in and day out because God is faithful. What derails most of us in obedience, what derails most of us is a lack of courage. So let me ask you, where is fear keeping you from obedience this weekend? Maybe there's a relationship that you know you need to end, but you're scared. You know God wants you to end this relationship, but you're scared of what life is gonna be like when you do. Maybe it's in pressing through a relationship. Maybe that's where you're afraid, but you know God wants you to press through in it. Maybe it's in coming clean with a sin, admitting your problem. Maybe it's in obeying God with your sexuality and you've got like, how is this gonna work?

I don't even know how this is gonna work. Maybe it's in obeying God with your finances and being obedient like he's told you with the first fruits of what he's given you or making the financial sacrifice. Maybe it's in having the hard conversation with somebody, maybe telling that person about Jesus or confronting them with hard truth and you're not sure how they're gonna react. For some of you ladies, maybe it's quitting the job and staying home with your kids. You've been sold this bill of goods by your culture about what you should do to have worth and you know that God is telling you to do something different.

For some of you ladies, maybe it's to go back to work and you feel like everybody's gonna judge you for doing that. I don't know, I'm not the Holy Spirit. I'm just telling you that you have to listen to him and you have to shut out the other voices and you have to act without fear. Maybe God's been telling you in this season to quit the job or start the business but you're just so scared because this is the only security you've ever known and you've got so many questions. God has so much for you but it starts with obedience.

Maybe it's going on your first mission trip and there are a thousand reasons you can think of why you should not go but there's one reason you know why you should go and that is God told you to go. For some of you, maybe it's to actually go out you guys and buy the ring and get down on one knee and ask the question. You've been dating her for seven years, Hoss, all right?

You don't need to know anything else, right? She knows you're not doing it because you're scared. You know you're not doing it because you're scared. Right now you're sitting beside each other.

You both feel awkward because you both know I just called you out. You need to act in fear, get your backbone out of your mama's purse and do what you know God wants you to do, all right? Whatever it is, whatever it is, you need to act with faith. I promise you that when you do, when you say, I'm gonna do this, what's gonna well up in you is fear.

It's gonna be like you're gonna get crushed. Do you know what is the most often repeated command in the Bible? Now based on the context, you should be able to figure this out. The most often repeated command in the Bible is fear not. 366 times.

I always look at that as one for every single day of the year, including leap year. There's not a single day you will ever live that God does not look at you and say, fear not. And when we look at it from the other side, there's a very disconcerting line in the book of Revelation at the very end of the book when God describes all the people that are gonna go to hell. Here's what he says.

Look at this. The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars. They're the ones who'll be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. Now, there's a lot of things in that list I would expect. Liars and vile and sexually immoral and idolaters people practice magic, people who think Harry Potter is for real and they try it.

I get that. But you notice the very first one, the cowardly. But what leads off the list are those who not that here they didn't know what they were supposed to do. It's that they didn't have the courage to actually act on it. Fear equals rebellion. It is rebellion to delay doing what God has told you to do today. Number three, the faith to wait. The faith to wait. In Joshua, the people are ready to fight. In the book of Joshua, the question of faith is not are you ready to fight? The book of Joshua is are you ready to wait?

I hate waiting. I think it is the source of my troubled relationship with Time Warner Cable. Why do you need my phone number?

Again, do you not have caller ID software on the computers? Why am I reentering my phone number to you again? It's why I hate flying to Atlanta. I don't know what it is about that city with their airport and I'm like why are we circling the... Did you not know that we were coming?

Why is there a traffic jam? Just let us... I'm like I can see the airport. Just give me a backpack and a parachute.

I'll jump out right here. I have nowhere I want to go. I hate it.

I hate it. Whenever God calls people to do something in the Bible, always, I can't think of an exception. Maybe you can come up with one, but always there is this time of circling and it drives you crazy. Moses gets called to deliver Israel 40 years in the desert. 40 years exist between the call and when he did. Paul, the apostle, remember this when we went through the book of Acts? Between the time that the apostle was... Paul was called on the Damascus road to the time he was actually commissioned in a ministry, 17 years. 17 years exist between the call in Acts 9 and when he's commissioned in Acts 13. That's a lot of circling.

That's a lot of re-entering your phone number. King David. King David gets anointed to be the next king of Israel. What happens? You run off to the palace and try on robes and start ordering people around?

No. He goes back to the pasture where he shovels sheep dung for seven years. That is so standard in the Bible I would say it is par for the course. That when God is going to call you what he's going to do first is he is going to begin to prepare you he's going to have you circling because he doesn't really need you to do that much for him because he's God.

What he wants to do is something in you and that is to teach you to trust and obey. So where are you circling this weekend? Where are you circling? Don't give up.

You might be on lap six. This is the hardest faith of all y'all. It's the hardest faith of all.

It's the faith to wait. The time of circling. The time where you can't see what God is doing. It's that circling pattern for example of sickness or poor health. That circling pattern of singleness. That circling pattern of the loss of a job. Maybe you got passed over for a promotion.

Maybe the mission board turned down your application. The circling pattern of infertility. The circling pattern of being a student or an intern when you want to be doing something significant. The circling pattern of praying for a loved one to come to faith. God says don't give up because I'll fight for you but I want you to obey. Well Joshua leads him through this and many other conquests in the book of Joshua. And then he ends the book this way. Go all the way to the last chapter, chapter 24.

Let me show you this real quick. Chapter 24, Joshua gathers all the tribes of Israel to shekem, summons all the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel. And they present themselves before God. And Joshua gives his farewell sermon and reminding them of everything that God had said and all the things that God had done for them.

And then Joshua closes his farewell sermon like this. Now therefore, fear the Lord the Lord and serve Him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away those gods that your father served beyond the river and in Egypt.

My question there is why do they still have them? And serve the Lord. If it's evil in your eyes to serve the Lord then choose this day whom you will serve.

Make up your mind. Is it the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now dwell? As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Then the people answered, far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods.

Joshua said to the people, you are not able to serve the Lord. Talk about a dud ending. I mean imagine that at the end of a political rally. You know like in ESPN they take you into the coach's locker room at halftime? So you got Roy Williams in there with a team. He's like, guys, we got 20 minutes. We got 20 minutes in front of us. They're bigger, they're stronger, they're faster, they're better shooters which is why we're gonna lose because you guys ain't got it.

They're just better than you are so we might as well hang it up, go on out there and endure it and it'll be over soon. What kind of speech is that? That is exactly the way Joshua ends this book. Joshua, listen, like Moses, has been unable to lead the people to be courageous. This book of the Bible ends like every single book of the Old Testament. Another Joshua, another Joshua's gonna have to come. This Joshua is gonna give you the courage to actually obey all the way because this Joshua is gonna show you in even clearer ways that he was fighting for you because the real city that stood in our way was not Jericho, it was the city of our sin and the curse of death that was upon us and Jesus, by the way, which is just the Greek version of the name Joshua, Yeshua, Jesus. Jesus, when he shows up, he says, you can't lift a finger to take this city down. I gotta do it for you.

There's nothing you can do. I'll do it for you. And so he went to the cross and the Bible tells us that when he dies, he shouted with a loud voice. He lifted up his voice and he shouted and when he did so, he knocked down not walls of brick and mortar but he knocked down the wall of eternal separation from God, the sword of our judgment that he carried in his hands, he turned on himself and placed in his own heart. And then he said to us, just watch, just watch and believe and shout in worship. You see, that's what it means to be a Christian is you just shout, I believe. I believe that you did what you said you did when you knocked down these walls. I believe Jesus, when you died, you knocked out this wall of separation and when you shout, I believe, the walls of separation between you and God fall down immediately.

And then for the rest of your life, you just keep shouting, I believe. Listen, listen, you keep shouting, I believe that if you won that battle for me, then you will also give me the power to live the Christian life. You'll give me the power to be a good husband or to be a good dad or a good mom. You'll give me the power to accomplish your will in my career, to be a faithful witness, to overcome temptation, to face cancer victoriously, to endure this season with patience and joy and victory because if you knock down the biggest city of all, my condemnation, then surely you will take care of these lesser cities like cancer.

I'm sure that you'll do it because if you did the bigger, you'll do the lesser. The Christian life is not you for Jesus, it is Jesus for you and then Jesus in you and through you. We obtain victory in life not by superior battle techniques but by constantly declaring our belief that he overcame the greatest battle of all for us and that he will continue to do so through us as we let him fight for us. All it takes for you to succeed in this season of your life in any arena of your life is for you to surrender, for you to have the courage to obey and not give up and for you to have the patience to wait on God.

That's what it takes. In just a minute at all of our campuses, we're gonna end this message. We're gonna end this message by together participating in what is the greatest symbol of the God who fought for us. It is the bread and the cup.

It is what we call communion. And in just a minute, our teams are gonna come at all of our campuses and they're gonna distribute the bread and the cup and we're gonna hold in our hands the symbol that our greatest, our greatest enemy, Jesus overcame it for us. And those of you that are believers, I want you to think of it differently this time.

I want you to think of it, yes, as Jesus taking care of your sin, but I want you to think of it also as a promise that the Jesus who overcame your sin is also gonna give you the power to live victoriously wherever you feel like there's a Jericho, that Jesus is gonna give you the ability to either overcome it or walk through it successfully. That's what you're gonna believe. Our teams are gonna come right now, come right now. And as they're coming, let me explain one other thing to you. At all campuses, they're coming. If you're not a believer this weekend, I want you to understand that this symbol is not for you.

I'm not being an exclusive jerk when I say that. It's just that Jesus gave that to his people. It was a symbol for them.

I compare it to my wedding ring, which you put on after you get married. The symbol is for believers to remember when they trusted in Christ as Savior. If you've never trusted in Christ, the symbol doesn't belong to you. It's not a magic amulet that's gonna give you extra points with God.

But see, here's the good news. What is for you is what the symbol points to. And what the symbol points to is Jesus' blood that was shed for you and his resurrection, which was given on your behalf. And so while other people are taking these bread and the cup, just let them pass you by. But maybe for the first time in your life, as other people are taking the bread and cup, you could lift up your heart to God and say, Jesus, I received the real thing. I'll take you as my personal Lord and Savior right now. And while others are participating in the symbol, you experience the reality. So while the bread and cup are going by at all campuses, you receive Jesus for the first time if you never have. I want you to bow your heads at all of our campuses when you get the bread and the cup. I want you just to ponder, ponder anew what the Almighty can do, that if he did this for you at Calvary, this is how he'll take care of you for the rest of your days. You ponder that as our teams come, and then our campus pastors will come, and they'll lead us in the taking of the bread and the cup.