Sidelines: Joshua

When we take a look at the life of Joshua, we see someone who was second in command behind Moses, then became the leader of the Israelites and led them into the promised land.

We also see a great military leader, and we can lose focus of why he was great if we focus on his skills and not what God did through Him.

Joshua was who he was because he let God work through him.  This fact is evident in his life.

One of the qualities we see in Joshua that we need to exhibit in our own lives, to get off the sidelines, is his Rock Solid Faith in God...

We first see that in one of the earliest Joshua episodes in Numbers 13 and 14.

The Israelites are on the edge of the promised land and sent 12 spies in to investigate the land.  10 of the 12 come back with negative reports, but Joshua and his friend Caleb have a different perspective in Numbers 14:6-9

“And Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had spied out the land, tore their clothes and said to all the congregation of the people of Israel, "The land, which we passed through to spy it out, is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land that flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not fear the people of the land, for they are bread for us. Their protection is removed from them, and the Lord is with us; do not fear them."”
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The people thought Joshua and Caleb had lost it!  They talked about stoning them.

There may be something for you today, maybe you're sitting back and thinking, "oh man, this is going to be difficult, I don't know if I can make it."  That's where the nation of Israel was in Numbers 13 and 14.  They were lacking faith, luckily Joshua and his boy Caleb reminded them of the promises God had made.

So fast forward with me, Moses dies...Joshua leads the people into the Promised Land...for 7 years, Joshua led the people in conquest of their new promised home...when God was over the battle, the nation saw victory...At the Battle of Ai, God had turned away because of the disobedience of a man named Achan, causing defeat, but the Lord continued to prevail...Joshua leaned on the Lord...he faltered in his faith at Jericho because he sent in spies even after God had assured victory...but Joshua didn't allow that one hiccup to define his whole life...

Joshua had gone from back up QB to starter...its rare, in sports, that a second stringer come in and make waves...this year, until last night, Dak Prescott did that for the Cowboys...the Ohio State Buckeyes won a national championship with a 3rd string QB...so it's not impossible, but it's rare

My point is, Joshua leaned on the Lord.  We see it from the earliest portion of his life to the end...

“"Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."”
‭‭Joshua‬ ‭24:14-15‬ ‭ESV‬‬


So, Joshua puts it out there, point blank.  No matter what you guys, Israel, decide to do, me and my house, we are going to serve God.

If we could go back and look, that's how he was his entire life.

So what can we pull from Joshua's life that can be meaningful to us?

No matter who we become, or what we accomplish.  We don't get there apart from God.  God can give you victory after victory, but when He knows you need to learn, He'll hand you defeat.  Do you wishy washy yourself like the nation of Israel, or do you choose to be solid like Joshua?

Commit today that you're going to follow God, no matter how unpopular or ridiculed that makes you.  Don't just give lip-service to it either, but your faith in God and see where He takes you!

You may have to do it from the bench for a while, but sooner or later, God's going to call you in, will you be ready?!?

Sidelines: Abraham

I'm going to try to begin to input some of my Bible study topics from our Monday night, Merge, bible studies into my blog life.  Over the past three weeks we looked at some Biblical characters that we know now, as legit men of the faith, but who started off in obscurity.

Abraham, Joshua, and David all spent time on the sideline, but when God called their number, they stepped out in faith, and even through mistakes and shortcomings still managed to live their life chasing after God.

We can be the same way today.  You may be feeling like your life is trivial and small compared to the other people on “God’s team,” but in the grand scheme of things, we are all important to the Cause of Christ and the furthering of God’s kingdom.

Let’s take a look at our first player, Abraham…

There are three distinct things Abraham did throughout his life to get in the game and get off the sidelines.

 Answer the Call

We first encounter Abraham aka Abram in Genesis 11.  He’s the son of a man named Terah, and we are told he has a wife named Sarai who is unable to have children.  He was headed to the land of Canaan from Ur of the Chaldeans, but his family, his entire family settled in a pl

So, a pretty normal, everyday dude.  Not a king or principality or anything like that.  Just a guy that God tells to get up and move.

Let’s start our story in Genesis 12:1

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

The Bible tells us that Abram got up and went.  He followed the instructions the Lord had given him.
So he heads out to the Land of Canaan and when they get there, God makes a promise to Abram.
In verse 7, God tells Abram:
    “To your offspring I will give this land.”
Canaan was inhabited, so Abram pitched his tent in Bethel.
The story goes on, Abram and Sarai get into some trouble in Egypt.  Abram makes some mistakes along the way.
He even gets discouraged.
It is how Abraham reacts in his discouragement that we see his next quality that gets him off the sideline…

B.  Fight through Discouragement

In the opening of Chapter 15, we see his discouragement reach a point where he voices it to God.

After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”  2 But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” 4 And behold, the word of the Lord came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son[b] shall be your heir.” 5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” 6 And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.
Finally, we see a third way that Abraham got off the sidelines and into the game by his
C.  Willingness to Sacrifice for the Cause
God’s promise to Abraham came true.  He was blessed with a son born to him by his wife Sarai.  Side note, he was also blessed with a son by a servant, but that’s another part of the story.
When it came to his relationship with his son, Abraham still followed the call of God on his life.
So, in Chapter 22, God tells Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice.

here’s where the record would skip, for someone who wasn’t on mission with what God wanted.
Abraham has waited and waited for God’s promise to come through, and now God wants it back?
The good thing, for Abraham, is he sought God’s will for his life at this point.
Abraham did what God said.  He took Isaac up on a mountain and began building an altar.  Isaac thought it was fishy that there was no lamb or animal for the sacrifice, but Abraham assured him God would provide.  He binds Isaac up and lays him on the altar, and as he is about to plunge the knife into his son, the angel of the Lord appears and beckons him to stop.  God provides a ram to replace Isaac as the sacrifice and then reassures his covenant with Abraham.

Take a look at verse 16…
“By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his[d] enemies, 18 and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”
So what do we learn from our first character about getting ourselves off the sideline and into the game?

First, Answer the Call.  When God puts a call on our lives, we need to answer it immediately.  Don’t wait around.  God will prepare you, and has probably already prepared you for what He has for you.  Get out there and get to it.

Second, you have to fight through discouragement.  One of Satan’s greatest weapons against Christ-followers is discouragement.  Especially today, we don’t see immediate results, we get discouraged.  We have to know God’s plan in our lives is on His time.  His time is way different than ours.  He sees the whole picture, He sees the end.  We see a minute detail of our lives, we don’t see what is best for us.  Trust Him!

Lastly,  we must have a willingness to sacrifice.   God’s going to ask for some things along the way, and we must be willing to part with them.  Like Abraham, who was willing to part with the thing he’d waited for his entire adult life, we must have a willingness to give God whatever He asks from us.

If he hasn’t already, God is going to call you into the game.  You must be prepared.  There are going to be tough times, when you don’t think you’re qualified, and you may be asked to give up some things, but all that compared to the blessing and glory that is coming your way outshines the issues you may have!

Sinking the Boat Part 1: 6 Days

It is a scary thought to me to hear that Christ-followers don't believe their whole Bible as 100% true.  Adding to that, many believe that the Bible is to be seen as a book of theoretical things and myths.  

Many Christians, seem to take the word of textbooks over the Bible.  I think we have seen in our modern-day, that textbooks, news, websites, and other outlets can be extremely skewed and can be used to give us what the author is trying to tell us rather than tell us the facts.  

We won't believe the Word of the Almighty God, but we will believe what Anderson Cooper, Megyn Kelly, Shawn Hannity, and/or Bill O'Reilly tells us.  We listen to college professors and scientists who use a science to tell us our earth is millions upon millions of years old, and we scoff at scientists in the same fields who tell us our earth is around 6,000 years old and use the Bible to back it up.  We laugh when our pastors or friends tell us something about the Bible that we don't see as important to our faith, but we are the first to retweet "prosperity pastors"  who tells us everything's gonna be okay and God's gonna give us money.
What's got me motivated?

Answers in Genesis

My church, FBC-Henderson, hosted a Creation Conference this weekend put on by Dr. Tommy Mitchell from Answers in Genesis, based out of Kentucky.  Last spring, our church had a 7-week discipleship class over the same subject of Creation.  These are not just "let's look at our Bible and see the cute artist's renderings of Genesis," these are "let's take our Bible and let's take Science and apply it to what we read in the Bible, and what others are saying, and let's use it to prove the Bible is 100% truth."

For years, the church, as a whole, has taken themselves out of the science conversation.  Oh, yeah, we post random articles on Facebook about how Noah's Ark has been found or things like that, but we don't get to the meat and potatoes of our faith.  

What I mean is, we are okay with the Bible when it leaves us in the status quo, but we are afraid of the Bible when it pushes us out of the line.  People may think we are crazy.  We might make someone upset.  

Jesus talked to us about that when he told us in Matthew 10 that we would be hated for His name's sake, or maybe if you don't believe the Bible is 100% true, you don't believe Jesus meant what He said. I know one thing He didn't say, "Hey guys, do everything you can to stay out of the line of fire.  Don't do anything to rock the boat."

That's how we live our lives in today's society.  We are scared to ruffle feathers, we don't want to rock the boat.  Well, to borrow from the rapper KB...

So here's the thing.  This subject I'm discussing, I feel, is paramount to your faith.  

You cannot take the Bible and pick and choose what you think is true, and what you think is myth.  You have to take the whole Bible as 100% true or not.    

I think what has happened to us is, we have taken the Old Testament and put it away.  By that I mean, we ignore it.  The only exception to that rule is for Sunday School classes for kids under the age of 10.  We teach them all the little Bible stories (mind you, without equipping them) and we ignore them after we get into youth group.  

The Bible has to be taken as 100% truth by every Christ-follower, or it has to be thrown out.  If you see the story of Adam as a myth, then you may as well call the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ a myth as well.  

I hear many adults ask "What happened to the truth?"  Well, I would venture to say, the truth you're looking for is left back in the "good ole days" and wasn't much of the truth at all if we cannot assume that you take the entire Bible to be literal.  

When the Bible says that God created the world in six days (in Hebrew "yom" יְוֹם), take that for what it means six literal days.  Before you come with the multiple meanings of yom in Hebrew, the specific way it is mentioned in Genesis in the Creation narrative points us to the literal meaning of a day.  Not an age, not a million years, not a time period...one day!

Besides that fact, if you trend towards believing the Million years theory (that each day in Genesis represents a million or more years), which was something I trended towards through high school and college, then help me understand this:

God created the world.  On the first day, He created the Earth, space, time, and light.  I don't think anyone would disagree with me.  The second day, He created the vast expanse, the atmosphere.  On the third day, He brought the dry land from the water and created the plants that grew there.  On day 4, He created the sun, moon, and stars.  Day 5, the creatures of the sea and the bird of the air.  Then Day 6, the land animals and man.  On Day 7, He rested. After each day, God looked back on what He created and called it bad...NO, he called it GOOD!  Right?  Tracking with me?


Now if you ascribe to the million years theory and thereby agree that's how we got what is now our fossil record (the exact thing I believed as a high school and college student), then explain to me how there was death in the midst of those six days in order to create those fossils.  We could all agree that death was not in God's plan, therefore that would make death something that is not good.  Right?  Aside from the fact that land animals and man were all made on the same day.  And if you roll with that, you're saying death occurred between the creation of land animals and man, and so why would God call that good?

Death does not occur until Genesis 3:21 when God makes Adam and Eve garments of skin and clothes them.  The only way for that to occur is for something to die. Death arrived on earth because of sin.  Therefore, sin is something that goes against the will of God and can therefore be labeled as bad, or something God would not call "good."  

This conclusion should lead us away from the theory that the 6 days of Creation actually stretched out over millions of years, leading us to the fossil record we have.  This can't be because death would have to be present in God's perfect creation, and we know that it was not until the Fall of Man that death reared it's ugly head. 

So, what about the fossil record?  

Tune in next time.