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 a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: Joshua Chapter 11. None of us would disagree if I said that the gospel of Jesus Christ is glorious. We'd all say, "Amen." We'd all agree if I said the gospel is God's solution for every human problem. I've said that many times, and we'd all say, "Amen." The gospel is God's solution for every human situation, for every human dilemma.

I base that on the fact when God looked at the depravity of the human race and the effects of the depravity of the human race, and he has this, as we like to call in Acts 2:23, the determinate counsel of God, he came up with a plan to redeem the human race. He came up with a plan to reverse the effects of the fall, to reverse the effects of the Garden of Eden, to blow the lid off any hindrances in man's relationship with God so he could have equal, free, unlimited access to the Holy Spirit through the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16).

That's what the gospel did. It wrote our names in the Lamb's book of life, secured our place in eternity. At the moment we were justified, we were also glorified, put in the bank. We were glorified at the same time. And all of his plan for doing that was the cross. That was all the wisdom of God, all the love of God, and all the power of God. It's all in the cross.

When the Trinity got together and they said, "How are we going to buy back what Adam and Eve did? Well, what Adam let Eve do, but Eve started it. How are we going to buy that back?" They said, "Let's come up with a plan." Well, the plan is this: The Son will become a man, live 33 years on earth, a perfect life, very God, very man, die on a cross, shed perfect blood, and the effects of that death on the cross and the power of that for whosoever believes will have eternal life. If I was to say that, we'd all hear a great, hearty amen.

We agree with that. He takes on the job. He places us in right standing with himself. He imputes his own divine life in us through the Holy Spirit. He takes on the job of conforming us into his image. It's amazing how he does that. I'm just a learner; I feel like I'm in the first grade in understanding that part of it. He adopts us into his family and he loves us with such an intimacy that it goes beyond our understanding and beyond our comprehension.

And we all would say, "Amen." But now I ask the question: Why does a life of victory escape more people than embrace it? Let's close. Really, I mean, I just outlined this glorious gospel, didn't I? And we're all amening it. Then how come most of us, and I'll put myself in there, we live in more defeat than victory? We live in more challenge and struggling than we do in rest and peace. Why is that?

I'm not sure I'm going to answer that totally tonight, but I'm going to look into that question and at least maybe give us a little bit of direction on it. I'm not minimizing human pain. Trust me, I'm not. You know I don't. I have my own. I'm not humanizing struggles, real struggles, because real struggles are real struggles. I don't minimize people's struggles. I don't just say, "Oh, you just gotta." I'm not one of those Christians that's legalistic. "Oh, you just gotta do this, you just gotta do that, you just gotta do that." No, you probably don't have a clue what you're talking about, sir or ma'am, because it's not "just you gotta." It's different with everyone. Everyone has a different struggle, a different battle, and they're all on a different journey to the same destination.

So I'm not minimizing that. Those are real struggles because we're human. One of the things I noticed in losing my daughter, and this goes for all sorts of loss, people want it in a nice, tight little package of victory. "Just do this, this, and this, and you'll have peace, right?" No, because we're human. And in our case, something wounded us deeply, and we will remain wounded probably for the rest of our lives.

So I say what I say in the beginning, understanding that we're human beings and God made us like him to have emotions and a sense like him that's been corrupted obviously through the fall. And I'm not advocating some willy-nilly, goose-bumpy Christian life that's often based in unreality, self-deception, and hyper-spirituality. I'm not advocating that either. Now, let's close.

I'm pretty brass tacks. I'm pretty "eat the dirt, get down to grass level" here when we approach these things. Now with that in mind, though, can we live above the fray? Can we find a place of consistent emotional walk with God, a consistent moral walk with God, a consistent ethical walk with God? Can we do that? Can we find a life where we're not dominated by sin (singular, the sin nature) or sins (plural, things that affect us, whatever that would be, it'd be different for all of us)?

And I believe obviously the answer to that is absolutely yes. In studying Exchange Life counseling in college, one of the books that I read, it escapes me which one, I think it was the one by Needham, which made a statement that made me bristle a little bit until I really thought it through and saw where he was coming from. He says it's possible for the Christian to live a life without sin.

I thought, "Whoa, that guy's crackers. He's crackerjacks with no prize in the box. What do you mean?" But then he described when you walk in the Spirit. I'm not saying they're going to live a life without sin, but it's possible, he said, for a Christian who walks in the Spirit (not saying he's never sinned because he's not perfect), but he's in such a unity with the Father and walks in the victory of the exchanged life of Christ where sin is not a normal thing in his life anymore.

And when I say sin, I'm not just talking about doing bad stuff; I'm talking about being controlled by that old nature of sin. Now in Joshua Chapter 11, we just got back after the amazing Gibeonite victory. Remember a couple weeks ago we talked about the Gibeonites, when God personally fought for the pagan nation? Joshua's victories, he continues. I'm just picking up Chapter 11 now. He starts; other nations come against him. You can read the chapter; it's really good reading. The whole book of Joshua is a great read. And other nations aligned against him, all the kings, these other kings, one by one would come against him.

It's interesting because it said God hardened their hearts. You'd think they would have learned after Jericho. You'd think they would have learned after they saw God raining hailstones from heaven and stopping the sun. You'd think they would have learned, but they didn't learn nothing. God said God hardened their hearts because God wanted them out of his land. He didn't want them to repent, in a sense. He just said, "I want you to drive them out." So he hardened their hearts. They all got stiff-necked, arrogant, and proud. They said, "You're not going to get us out of here." And they all came against Joshua, and Joshua kicked their tails.

Now, as you get into verses 18 and 19, I'll read those for a moment. The book sort of takes a little bit of a step back from the present and starts looking into the future. And it begins to see Israel's continuing campaign to empty the land of the pagan inhabitants. Joshua made war a long time with those kings. There was not a city that made peace with the people of Israel except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon. They took them all in battle. So they did a pretty good job of eliminating the enemy.

Now I'm going to read two more verses that sort of give us the crux of where we want to get at here. Verse 15 says this: "Just as the Lord commanded Moses his servant, so Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did." He left nothing undone of all the Lord had commanded Moses. He left nothing undone. So Joshua didn't take on Moses' command and say, "Okay, hey, I have my own style. I'm the leader now. I'm going to do things my way." No, it says Joshua was pretty simple here. He says, "Okay, I don't have to do anything but do exactly what Moses told me to do because Moses has a face-to-face walk with God and God spoke to him directly and told him exactly what to do and Moses told me exactly what to do. I don't have to be smart here. I don't have to be full of wisdom here. I don't have to have great strategy here. I don't have to be anything. All I gotta be here is obedient."

Obedience is going to be my key to victory. It's in a sense what Joshua's saying. I don't have to be the best warriors, I don't have to have the best equipment, I don't have to have the best smarts, I don't have the best training. I just need obedience because if I just simply obey, God will fight for me. That sounds cool, doesn't it? I think you know where I'm going with this.

Verse 23: "And Joshua took the whole land according to all that the Lord had spoken to Moses, and Joshua gave it for an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments, and the land had rest from war." What we want to glean out of this, first of all, is number one, truth. Joshua had truth. Truth must be appropriated. Joshua had a roadmap to follow to drive the nations out, and he followed it. He didn't second-guess it; he just obeyed it.

It's true that the victory of the cross was decisive. We've seen that over and over for many years here. We've preached and taught about it. But it's also true that one will experience only as much of the victory as by faith he appropriates personally. In other words, I can say, and we use this picture, "The cross is true! Amen! Amen! Amen!" The whole work of the gospel is true. "Amen! Amen! Amen!" But if I don't appropriate the work of the cross in my life, I don't make it mine, I don't take ownership of it, if I keep it as a pretty picture on the wall, it doesn't mean it's any less truth. It's still truth. Every bit as much truth whether I appropriate it or not.

And positionally speaking, that never changes. So I'm talking really on an experiential level here. I always use that picture, that illustration of a pretty picture. It's a gorgeous picture, but it's one-dimensional. It's not true. Remember Mary Poppins? Some of you remember Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins? Remember when he drew the little picture on the sidewalk and they dove into the picture? I'm glad some of you remember that; some of you it's before your time. But that's, in a sense, what we want to do. I want that little pretty picture on the wall to be my reality, not something that I just admire.

"Yeah, Jesus did this for me and he did that for me and I believe this and I believe that," but I'm still racked by the old nature, I'm still racked by my own stuff, by my past, and there's never any progress in those things. That's because I don't take that truth, I don't own the truth. It doesn't mean the truth doesn't work. I may not be working with the truth, but it doesn't mean the truth is somehow weak and unable to impact my life. And this is where I think we all have to seek God and find out why it doesn't impact our lives in some places.

Truth will remain powerless in our lives unless we embrace it. We say, "I want that, that's what I want." Watch this: We rehearse it. I'm practicing this in my own life. We confess it, we verbalize it, outwardly to myself, to the wall, to my fish, anyone who wants to hear it. We confess it. Try your spouse, but they probably don't want to hear it. We practice it and we meditate on it. That's what we do with truth. I don't take the truth of the gospel and just set them on a shelf. I practice it. When I sense the gospel says I'm an adopted child of God but I feel like I'm alone in the wilderness, I say, "No, no, that's not truth. I'm practicing the truth. That's not who I am. I'm loved by God, appreciated by God, liked by God."

I'm accepting that as my truth. I may not feel that way about myself, but I'm not going to listen to how I feel. I'm going to listen to truth, and I'm going to appropriate this truth in my life. And you do that, my friends, long enough and consistently enough, you'll find it begins changing the way that you think. And it doesn't even take that long. It really doesn't. The problem is we never practice it. We never go there. We never take it off the shelf. We look at it and say, "That's pretty." No, take it off the shelf and make it your own.