Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching the clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: I'll be in Joshua 13. A casual reader of the book of Joshua—and this is my own temptation—I read the Bible from cover to cover repetitively. I just finish it and start over again. It usually takes me about a year. Last year I did it in ten months, but it will probably be a little over a year this time. What I find when I get into these chapters like Joshua 12 and 13, or other chapters in the scriptures that bog down with genealogies, is I do my very best to read them. I don't just skim read them. I really try to read them, and I ask God to show me things through the Holy Spirit in the word of God.

I would just encourage you that when you read the scriptures, pray before you read them and ask the Spirit of God to reveal things to you in the scriptures. Things that you didn't know or didn't understand about the Lord, about yourself, about others, or about life situations. Maybe it is just a little bit of information. That's all part of our spiritual formation. That's all part of us practicing the spiritual disciplines: knowing how to read the scriptures. I'm going to talk a little bit about that later on in this particular message.

When you look in here, you'll find some pretty cool things, especially in the first few verses of this chapter. Again, when you slow yourself down, the Lord will reveal things to you. Let me read you Joshua 13, verses 1 and 6. That's all we'll really read in the chapter. I recommend you read along with me as we go through the book. "Now Joshua was old and advanced in years." He's about 99 years old at this point. "And the Lord said to him, 'You are old and advanced in years, and there remains yet very much land to possess.'" That's a very important sentence. The future of Israel is in that sentence.

The next generations of Jewish history are in that sentence: "There remains yet very much land to possess." They weren't done yet. God had promised them that land, and they had faithfully gone into that land and cleared it. They had a few snafus at Ai and places like that. Yet at this stage, they'd been there for 20 to 30 years. I didn't really research that, but they'd been there for a while, and there was still much land to possess.

Verse 6: "And all the inhabitants of the hill country from Lebanon to Mizrephoth-maim, even all the Sidonians. I myself will drive them out from before the people of Israel. Only allot the land to Israel for an inheritance as I have commanded you." So God said, "I'm going to drive these people out," but he says, "only allot the land for an inheritance as I have commanded you."

Equating going into the Promised Land and clearing it out has a New Testament application from the book of Ephesians. Remember in the very first service we did, we compared Joshua and the book of Ephesians because it talks about our spiritual advancement. Ephesians 3:20 says, "Unto him who can do exceedingly and abundantly above all we have ever asked or think in us." Now, this is the picture of Joshua. He said, "If you go in and conquer the land, I'll go with you."

Take that into my New Testament life. The land is my spiritual advancement. It's the ceilingless, bottomless relationship that I have with God. In other words, there is no limit to where I can go in my walk with God. There is no ceiling point where I maxed out the Spirit of God. I can draw near to God every day of my life and never begin to even scratch the surface of his fathomlessness.

That's the picture that we want to take from Joshua to our New Testament experience. Just like God said you can drive these pagan nations out of the land, you can drive out these things that keep us from Christ, that keep us from experiencing his glory, his joy, and his peace. You can drive these things out because I've promised you and given you that land. Ephesians 3:20 is a promise.

It's not a promise that we're going to win the lottery. It's not a promise if I give $10, I'm going to get $100 back. It's not a promise that if I pray about getting healed from a sickness, I'm going to get healed from that sickness. It's not a promise that if I ask anything with enough faith, I'm going to get whatever it is that I'm asking for. That's not the promise. The promise is that God will use everything in our life, and all that he is is available to all of us all the time. That's the promise.

It is above and beyond what we could ever conceive, ask, or think. When I look at my life now and I look at my life 30 years ago, there are some slight differences. I think it is a good thing to look over your shoulder sometimes and look at where Christ has brought you from.

I know who I was, and I know who I am. I know who I was when I first met Christ. I know the insecurities, the fears, the manipulations, the lies, and the games I would play with myself, others, and God. I know all those things were really the only way I knew how to survive in the world and survive in a relationship. I was a plastic person. You could mold me any way that you wanted to, and I would mold like that guy in Terminator 2. I just morphed into whatever I needed to be at the moment.

That's who I was. Then through the years, through trials, through reading the Word, through experiencing disciplines, disappointments, mountaintop experiences, and valley experiences, God chips away and chips away. He hones you down, smoothes you out, and makes you somebody you never thought you could be. I used to worry about things 20 years ago that I don't worry about anymore. I used to have an issue in an area of my flesh 15 years ago, and I don't have that problem anymore. It's not because I'm too old in most cases.

I'm not boasting in anything but the Lord. When you grow, you grow. It's good to look over your shoulders every now and then and say, "God, look at where you've taken me from." With that said, there is a manna principle. You have to pick it every day. The manna wasn't good overnight. Yesterday's manna couldn't be eaten today. It had to be picked fresh every morning, just like God's mercies need to be picked fresh every day.

We need to conquer what God has given us every day. It's not something where we can just rest on yesterday's victories. I couldn't be Israel and say, "Remember when we took out Ai? Remember when we took out Jericho? Those were the days. We were on top of it. Those walls came down. We just marched seven times and blew the trumpets. That was amazing." No, that was yesterday. That was yesterday's victory.

We have much more to conquer out there. There are more cities waiting for us. There are more destinations we have to go to. Yesterday's victory does nothing for us today. We can look back on that and say, "Praise be to God," but yesterday's victories need to be realized in today's victories and today's advancement.

Taking down Jericho won't do anything for me today. What I was 10 years ago—going to Bible college, the things I learned—none of those things are good for me today. I may have some knowledge from those things, but if I'm not dipping into the Spirit of God and drawing near with a pure heart, I'm not quite sure I can take on a city as big as Jericho. You know what I'm saying?

Let me give you this one quote. I think this is Alan Redpath: "The mountains of heavenly vision; the valleys, at first seeming to be valleys of despair, but which turn out to be valleys of infinite blessing; the pasture lands of rest and quiet; the cities which must be conquered; the foes which must be overthrown." It's true for every one of us. There is much land to possess. Our inheritance in Christ is not part of Christ, but it's all of Christ.

I ask myself a question: Am I satisfied with less than God's perfect will for me? Not even talking about a plan, but his very best for me. Will I ever reach the stage of Christian experience where I think I've exhausted all my possibilities in Christ? I hope not. I hope I haven't grown to a place where I have a moral consistency, an ethical consistency, and maybe a little bit of a practice of the disciplines where I'm just resting on Jericho's victory now.

I'm just resting on what I conquered yesterday. I don't battle that sin anymore. I don't battle this anymore. I don't struggle there anymore, and I have a pretty good resume back there. I took out some good cities, crossed the Jordan, and my sword's been in the sheath for a little while. I don't have to draw near. I don't have to really go to battle or struggle with anything. I hope that's not my legacy.

Redpath said this about this very subject: "Are we to be satisfied with less than God's will for us? We never reach a stage of Christian experience in which we exhaust all the possibilities of life in Jesus." That's a great quote. Not one of us has won every battle that he's fought. As we go back over our experience, we cannot help but to admit that our lives bear the scars of many a defeat. And we have not fought every battle that we should have fought.

For there have been many times in our Christian living that we have evaded the enemy and chosen an easier path. That is what I'm afraid of for my life. I find it's an experience of defeat followed by the thrill of picking one's self up again and finding Christ that keeps me pressing towards the goal. I don't want my life to resemble that of a Pharisee, not in the sense of judgmentalism, but in a sense that I make it so external that I don't need any internal fire anymore, that I'm not moved anymore.

Here's a challenge for all of us and those watching: Have you been convicted in the last month of your life? Has the Spirit of God knocked on the door of your heart and said, "No, there's a little passivity in here, a little apathy, a little anger, a little judgmentalism, a little self-righteousness, a little victimhood." Have you been convicted by the Spirit in the last month or couple weeks of your life? If you haven't, there's a spiritual disease going on in your body, in your spirit. Something's missing.

I wish I could go a day or two without getting convicted. If I've never been moved, if the Spirit hasn't knocked on the door of my heart and said, "Tim, there's an issue here. There's an attitude here. You're feeling sorry for yourself here. You're looking to be loved instead of simply loving. You're looking to get and not give. You're looking to be served and not be a servant." If I don't see those things every day, I know I'm not walking in the Spirit, because they're there every day of my life.

But God knocks on the door of my heart and says, "No, there's a lot more land in here to possess. There's a lot more places for me to go in Jesus' name and become more like Christ." So at some point, hopefully 20 years from now, I really won't even think about being served; I will just want to serve. I won't see myself as a victim. I will just see myself as somebody who wants to serve others and lay down my life. But right now, that's still a battle. There are still a few cities in my life I'm battling with.