Grace Thoughts

Tim Kelley: 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.

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. It usually takes me about a year. I think last year I did it in 10 months, but it will probably be a little over a year this time. What I find myself doing when I get into these chapters like Joshua 12 and 13, and other chapters in the scriptures that bog down with genealogies, I do my very best to 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. 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's just a little bit of information. That's all part of our spiritual formation. It is all part of 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 to 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 is 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 is a very important sentence right there. 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 had cleared that land. They had a few snafus, Ai and places like that, yet at this stage—and they had probably been there for 20 to 30 years—there was still much land to possess.

In verse 6, "All the inhabitants of the hill country from Lebanon to Misrephoth-maim, and 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." Once again, equating going into the Promised Land and clearing out the Promised Land has a New Testament application, really in the book of Ephesians. Remember in the very first service we did, we compared Joshua and the book of Ephesians because it talks really about our spiritual advancement.

Ephesians 3:20 is in play here: "Unto Him who can do exceedingly and abundantly above all we ask or think" according to the power that works in us. Now, this is the picture of Joshua. He says if you'll 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 relationship that I have with God. It's a 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 have maxed out the Spirit of God.

I can draw near to God every day of my life and never even begin to scratch the surface of His fathomlessness. And 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 these things that keep us from Christ, that keep us from experiencing His glory, keep us from experiencing His joy, and keep us from experiencing 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 that if I give $10, I'm going to get $100 back. It's not a promise that I'm going to pray about getting healed from a sickness and 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 that is that I'm asking by faith. That's not the promise there. 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, 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 do want to say this, and I think this is a good thing to do, depending on your history. It's good 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, with others, and with God. I know all those things which 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 anyway that you wanted to mold me, and I would mold any way, just like that guy on Terminator 2. I would just morph into whatever I needed to be at the moment. Then through the years, God, through trials, through reading the Word, through experiencing disciplines, through disappointments, through mountaintop experiences and valley experiences, 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. See what I'm saying? I'm not boasting anything; I'm boasting in 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's 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. We need to conquer what God has given us every day. It's not something we can just rest on yesterday's victories. We couldn't be Israel and say, "Hey, remember when we took out Ai? Remember when we took out Jericho? Those were the days. We're on top of it. Those walls came down, we just marched seven times, we blew the trumpets. That was amazing."

No, that was yesterday's victory. We have much more things that we have to conquer out there. There are more cities waiting for us. There are more destinations we have to go. That was yesterday. That does nothing for us today. We can look back on that and say, "Praise be to God, look at yesterday's victories," but yesterday's victories need to be realized in today's victories and today's advancement. My taking down Jericho won't do anything for me today.

What I was 10 years ago, going to Bible college, how many things I've learned, whatever it was—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.

Let me give you this one quote. Redpath says, "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? I'm not even talking about in the way of 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 even a little bit of a practice of the disciplines in my life 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. I have a pretty good resume back there, 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, 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. Not one of us has won every battle that he's fought. As we go back over our experience, we cannot help but 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's what I'm afraid of for my life. I find it's an experience of defeat followed by the thrill of picking oneself up again and finding Christ that keeps me pressing toward the goal. I don't want my life to resemble that of a Pharisee, not in the sense of judgmentalism, but in the 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, "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 six months, month, or couple of weeks of your life? If you haven't, there's a spiritual disease going on in your spirit. If you haven't, 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, an attitude here, you're feeling sorry for yourself here, you're expecting to be loved instead of simply loving here, you're looking to get and not give here, you're looking to be served and not be a servant"—if I don't see those things every day of my life, 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 are 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 don't want to be served; I want to serve. I don't even think about being served; I want to serve. I don't even see myself as a victim; I just see myself as somebody who just wants to go serve others and lay down my life for others. Right now, that's still a battle. There are still a few cities in my life where I'm battling with those things.