Courage and Faith in God's Vision

If you'd open your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 31, verse 23 of chapter 31 is sort of a transition verse between two long paragraphs, and it's kind of a repeat in the first part of chapter 31, Deuteronomy chapter 31, in verse 7 of that same chapter, it says, In Moses summoned Joshua and said to him in the presence of all Israel, Be strong and courageous, for you must go with this people into the land that the Lord swore to their forefathers to give them, and you must divide it among them as their inheritance. And now in verse 23, the Lord gave this command directly to Joshua, son of Nun, Be strong and courageous, for you will bring the Israelites into the land I promised them on oath, and I myself will be with you. The command to the leadership of Joshua that God had plans for the people of Israel, and that the plans He'd given for the people of Israel, He would Himself personally be sure that they were accomplished. What's really important for us, you know, people sit down when they look at the church and decide, you know, what the church is going to be. It's kind of a popular thing now for a church to have a vision statement and say, OK, we're going to in 10 years, we're going to have 500 people or a thousand people or whatever that is. And then their goal is, you know, try to accomplish that. The issue that is at stake is finding what it is that God's vision is for us. What does He want to have happen? Oftentimes His vision is not necessarily a vision that's numerical. Oftentimes it's a vision that has spiritual qualities about it. Proclamation of the gospel, a congregation that learns how to live together with trusting each other and caring for each other. But whatever it is that God does, the church, the primary ingredient for churches say, what do you want us to be? That's the most important thing for God, for us to be a godly people. What are the things that we need to do for you in this community? Not just the church itself for each one of us. Those are the visions God has for us. It doesn't matter how big they are or how powerful they might seem. God's promise is always the same. God will be with you. What He needs you to do is have the courage to do what He tells you and to have strength not to be overwhelmed. And whenever you start trying to do the work of God, these two qualities are essential. You have to be strong enough to resist the temptations that would lead you astray. You have to be strong enough to take the risk to do what you know God wants you to do. And you have to have the courage to believe that no matter what people say about what you know God wants you to do, that you're determined to go ahead and do it. Many of the instances in the story, in the scripture, are about people who were asked to do things by God that were absolutely ridiculous. When Jesus went to feed the five thousand, He had a little food, blessed it, broke the bread and the fish, and He called His disciples to Him and He said, I want you to go and take this and feed those five thousand people. Now we had in here, was it Easter day? We had, what, a hundred twenty people or so? If I had asked you, Sharon, and said, here's one slice of bread, I want you to go feed all these people this bread, how foolish would you have seemed if you went to a table and said, everybody break off a piece of bread and pass it back to me and I'll take it to the rest of the people here? Yeah. Can you imagine what the disciples felt like? There's five thousand guys out there and they got this, He takes it and breaks it and gives it to them and said, now go and feed all those five thousand people. You're walking over there toward those people. It's a miracle that God did that. But it took courage for the disciples to even risk doing it. I would imagine if this was normal people, yeah, I would imagine that some people as He went over and handed it to them and said, take a little bit and pass it down, that they would have said, this is stupid. A lot of things God asks us to do appear to be stupid to people around us. But what God wants to show us is that He's with us and He asks us to have the courage to do it. And you know, it's difficult sometimes to get churches to do things that don't seem, in our own mind, can be accomplished by our human ability. Actually, it's hard to get them to do sometimes things that can be accomplished by human ability. When I was a pastor in college, I had a church I drove up to and I thought it would be a great thing. I had a toilet out behind, you know, you had to go out and back down the path and go to the little house where the toilet was. And I thought, you know, I bet you everybody in this church wishes that we had a toilet inside the church where it was warm. Now, wouldn't you think that would be? So I brought it up. I never got so much resistance to anything in my life as I did with those people. They had 50,000 reasons why this wouldn't work, you know. And why anybody didn't. Of course, some of them didn't have one either outside in their house. So you know, that was an issue too, but it's just hard sometimes to get people to break out of the idea of what they're doing. But what God asks us to do is to be so sensitive to him that we really know what he wants. You can't develop that sensitivity unless you have the kind of relationship that you know the Lord gives the command. And a lot of times what churches do is they strike off with something that they want. It's important to them without having God say, this is what I want. But if we do have some idea of what God wants, we must be courageous, bold. We must be determined to be faithful to see that we do what we know God wants us to do. Not everything that we do that we know God wants us to do is a particular success in the way we think about it. Because sometimes what we do when God wants us to is to set the stage for his next step. But that's where the courage comes in, because you don't know what's going to happen. And you know what God wants you to do, but you start out knowing that you've heard him and you're going to do it. Sometimes it's exactly what you thought was going to happen. Sometimes something different happens. But it's always successful in God's eyes. Because even if it fails in that first instance, it sets the stage for God's next step. So we don't ever regret what we do. If you have someone you're supposed to go talk to and you talk to them and they don't accept Christ, you don't worry about that. You say, I've done the job that I'm supposed to do. God is using this in some way down the road. So he starts off with Joshua saying, I'm trusting you Joshua. You're going into this land of promise and you're going to divide the land up and give it to people. I just ask you to have the courage to do whatever I tell you whenever I tell you to do it. His first test for Joshua was the battle at Jericho. I want you to walk around the city with your troops and go sit down and spend the night. The next day go around it again. Final day, seven times around it and break the glass and shout. And no one in their right minds would try to conquer a city that way. It took courage to trust what God said to do and strength to do it. So that's what he asks of Joshua in the beginning. Leadership needs to have that quality. To know God has talked to you. Have the strength to do it and the courage to keep on doing it. Now Moses has been asked, this is Joshua's requirement, Moses has been asked in verse 24 to write this song. It's all of chapter 32. We're going to get to that later, but all of chapter 32. The scripture says after Moses finished writing in the book the words of the law from the beginning to the end, he gave his command to the Levites who carried the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, take this book of the law and place it beside the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God. There it will remain as a witness against you. Now what he's told Moses to do is to write the book of the law, which is a part of this book of Deuteronomy that we're talking about, I think, and probably from chapter 10 to chapter 30, maybe. I want you to write that, and this is, remember all the things he said, these are the blessings that will come to you if you do what I tell you, and the curses that will come to you if you fail to do what I tell you. Here's what I tell you to do, here are the curses that will come if you don't do it, and here are the blessings that will come if you do. Now I want you to take this book after you've written it, and I want you to place it by the Ark of the Covenant, which was in the Ark of the Covenant box, which was the original law from Mount Sinai. What he was saying about this items of curses and blessings are kind of like Old Testament treaties were made, and if a country made a treaty with another country, it had all the details about what you would do, like we'll stop at this border, these are the borders of the land, and we'll support you if your enemies attack you, and you'll support us. All those details of a treaty that would be given would be placed in their temple by their gods, and that would be a way of saying this treaty that we've made with you, we're going to keep. It is like a sacred object for us. So now the laws that he's given to Moses are given by the mouth of God, and they are sacred. So he wants them to be placed as a treaty would be placed beside the Ark of the Covenant. It doesn't replace what was done at Mount Sinai, but it enforces or reinforces that these words that are inside that book are authorized or approved of by the people of Israel. It's like you accepted it. It's like you signed the contract. This now says that these rules are binding on us, and we agree that if we don't keep these commandments that you've given us, that the curses you've given will come to us. We agree that if we do keep them, that the promises you've made to us will come to us. So now he makes his instructions sort of a contract with them, where there's a promise of blessings if they do what he says, and a promise of curses if they don't. So Moses' words now are placed beside the Ark of the Covenant, he says, as a witness against them. And the treaties that were made between nations back then, the treaty had items of responsibility. So if you didn't do those, there would be certain consequences that come. God is saying, this is the contract I'm making with you, and when you go into the land, if you do the things I've promised, this is my obligation to you. If you don't, then this is how I will turn against you. So these are placed there as a way of affirming the promise of all the nation of Israel to do the things that Moses has already written in this book. Verse 27, he says, For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. If you've been rebellious against the Lord while I'm still alive with you, how much more will you rebel after I die? Now the Bible is letting us know, through Moses, that God understands the people of Israel and who they are. He knows them better than they know themselves. They're going to make a promise, and they've already done this before in their travels, but they're going to make a promise before they go in to affirm this covenant promise with God. We are going to keep our word to you. Even though they make that promise, God knows what they're like on the inside. And he knows that their nature is a nature of rebellion against authority. There are some people more rebellious than others. You have kids, sometimes you'll have one that's real compliant, does everything you tell them. You'll have another child that you tell them, you're really thirsty, get a drink of water, and they say, no, I don't want to. Even though they're thirsty and they want to drink water bad, because you've asked them to do it, they just will not do it. Moses knew the people of Israel because he'd been with them. He saw their rebellious nature. It seems like as soon as God would say to the people, this is what I want you to do, some of them would say, no, we're not going to do that, or we've got a better idea. God made the covenant with them knowing that they were not perfect in obedience and knowing that they had in their nature a spirit and strength of rebellion. Why is that spirit among us? I don't really know anybody that wants somebody to tell them what to do. Now, there may be circumstances in which we get ourselves in, in which we want somebody to tell us what to do, but for the most part, we don't want to do that. People can even ask us to do sometimes something that we know we want to do, but when we get right down to it, we don't want somebody to control our lives. That nature of rebellion is in every person, I think, in some way, some time, some place. The people of Israel had a great difficulty for some reason accepting the authority of God over themselves. They didn't want to believe that they had to do everything He told them. And they didn't have to do everything He told them. They just had to be prepared for the consequences if they didn't. They never liked those, but it never stopped them as a people from this rebellious nature. I know, Moses said, what you're going to do. I've watched you all my life, and every time we come to a place where things are not the way you want them, you get your back up in the air and you say, we're not going to do it. Why doesn't God do it this way? So I know what's going to happen to you. You're going to get in the land of promise, and there you're going to turn into this rebellious person that you've always had. It's going to show. I know that God is faced with that, and I know that you're faced with it. Verse 28, assemble before me all the elders of your tribes and all the officials so that I can speak these words in their hearing and call heaven and earth to testify against them. Moses moves in a way different than maybe many of the ways that we think of in God addressing us. We often think of God in the biblical language as a father, and a father who responds to his children as a father would. We think of God sometimes in the Bible as a king, and people respond to him as a king, a servant of a king. But in this situation, he chooses to describe his relationship with people in terms of a court, in terms of someone who has made a contract with another person, and they have violated the contract. Now I've never been in court where someone was suing me or accusing me of doing something that was illegal. And I would imagine it would be a frightening experience. But what he has now addressed the people of Israel with is, when you go into the land of promise, I know you're going to rebel against God. You're going to break this contract that we've agreed to. I want to tell you that God will assemble all the elders before you, the leaders of the nation, and I want you to know that God is going to speak these words before heaven and earth, before all the world, to say, if you don't keep the contract, I will turn against you. Assemble before me all the elders of your tribes and all your officials so that I can speak these words in their hearing, and call heaven and earth, that's the jury, to testify against them. I want everyone now to see and tell what you've seen about the people who are my people who are rebellious against me. For I know that after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt and to turn from the way I've commanded you. In the days to come, disaster will fall upon you because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord and provoke him to anger by what your hands have made. God is prepared in this situation to bring his people to a court trial, to accuse them. Oftentimes you'll see in the prophets this same idea that's brought. God has a charge against his people. I want to call you to court. I want to testify against you how many times you have violated the contract that you agreed to keep with me. And usually when he does that, he asks that heaven and earth be the sometimes testifiers, people that say, yes, I'll agree with you that these people have not kept your word. Sometimes he asks for them to be the judge and the jury in this case as he brings his charge against his people. What he brings the charge about has to do with what you have made with your hands. His anger is that they have done something that distracts from him making an idol using something physically in this world that takes the place of God in their lives. The great enemy of God is generally not spiritual things, it's generally material things. The people of Israel got caught up in the pagan worship of Baal. They got caught up in being distracted by the things that the world had around them, the material things of the world. Sometimes they got caught up because there were things taking place where they trusted people instead of God. Something that is human, humanly constructed, that attacks or takes away the authority or the place that God ought to have in the life of a person. What is it that causes people to turn from God? What is it that we trust? Generally we find ourselves attracted to things we can see, they're material. Sometimes it's a job or a house or something that we actually can touch. Sometimes it's other people around us. Sometimes it's a career. What God is concerned about is, what shapes the choices you make day by day? What causes you to make the decisions in your life that you make? What is it that attracts you to make in your life choices, reactions to people? Why do you get angry? Why do you get depressed? Why do you think the future is going to be bad, have loss of confidence in God? Why do people get in those circumstances? They see things around them with their eyes and they look at those things around them and they think those things are going to control my future. Oh, if they have a series of events that are not what they want to have take place, they think these things are going to control my future. Why? Well, because I've had some bad things happen to me in the past and now when I look ahead of me I assume that bad things are going to happen to me in the future. One time Steve's in school class, they were talking about, people started talking about the fact that they were negative. One person in the class said, I just have trouble with the negative spirit. People around the class said, yeah, I do too, I do too, I do too, why do we have that? Why would you have it? If the Lord of heaven and earth who created the world with all power and authority, you place your life in that person's hands and they say to you, I'm going to guide you, provide for you, protect you and make your life a blessing to the world, how could you look at the future and be negative, regardless of the circumstances in which you find yourself? The only reason you can is because you don't have confidence that God keeps His promise. If you believe that God keeps His promise, He has both the ability to do it and He's told you He's going to do it. If you believe those two things, then you can look at every circumstance in the world with confidence it's going to take place. But there are so many people who when they look at the future, they're overwhelmed with despair. The physical things around them create a sense these things are bigger than God. They're more powerful than God. Sometimes people despair over themselves. I try my very best and I can't seem to make things work like I want to. I don't have the ability to make things take place. I'm limited. Well, all of us are. But all God says is I want you to do the things I tell you to do and if you do those, I will give you the ability to accomplish them. And why do we get afraid to witness? Why do we get afraid to take the step God wants us to? Our fear comes because we look at our ability and we look at the task God has given us and we decide we cannot do it. What's the problem? We don't have confidence that if God has asked us to do something, that He will actually give us the ability to do it. And when we have this in the congregation, we generate to each other and to the world around us that we don't have anything more going for us than any other human beings in the rest of the world. The Bible is filled with stories where God says to His people, here's what I want you to do. They did them. They couldn't do them in their own ability, but they did them through the power of God and all the world was in awe and amazement of God. God wants the world around us to know who He is, His power. And so He picks people that necessarily the world wouldn't look at and say these are the best people in the world, the brightest people in the world, the richest people in the world, the most talented people in the world. And He says, I'm going to ask them to do this and you are going to be amazed at what happens to them as a result of it. But when we're afraid and discouraged and can't try, then God cannot show His power. What God charged His people with is you've learned to trust the things you make with your hands instead of me. That's why you're so messed up. Because when you trust what you've made with your hands, you're never going to be able to be more than what a human being can do. But what I want for my people is to be able to do the things that I can do through them. I want to change your nature and your character. I want to make you know who I am so that you will know that I'm alive and real to you. And I want you to experience starting something and being amazed that the outcome is far greater than you ever thought you could do. God doesn't do that apart from us. I try to describe this to people saying, it's like you get in a car with power steering and say it takes 10 foot pounds to turn the front wheels if you have no power steering. But you get in the car and maybe it's a big truck and you couldn't ever turn the wheels. Some of those big trucks, you can't turn them. But you get in there and you're small and you try to turn that big truck around. And when you do pull it, miraculously it turns. You put two foot pounds of pressure and God adds 20 and it's done. And when it's over, you know you didn't do it. And yet you look and see it's done. God wants to do that through us. But if you stand on the ground and you look at that truck and say, I can't do that. He can't do through you what he wants to do. This is our witness to the world. God lives through us. So don't be afraid when you have the call of God in your life. Recognize your need for something more than yourself to be able to do it, but God wants to be able to realize that you trust him and not what your hands or human effort has made. I will hold you to account because you learn to trust the things that you alone can do instead of the things that I tell you I want to do through you. Would you bow your heads, please, for a moment? This story is an old one, isn't it? All the way back in the Old Testament, but it's a new one too. Has God told you things that he wants you to do, that you have looked at your abilities and you've said no about? Do you look at the things around you that God's asked you to do and you're pessimistic? You're quite sure it'll never take place. You look at the things God is asking you to do and you're terrified so that you won't even try? What God wants us to do is quit rebelling against his instructions and say yes to him. I ask for myself, Father, that there would never be anything you would tell me to do that I would believe for a moment that I shouldn't try. I ask, Father, that all of us in this church would be conscious that you ask things of us that are beyond our ability and capacity to do them, that they're certainly within your capacity. Make us a people where others see us and are astonished at the power you have because they know we can't do this. We don't want to be the people who are charged before the whole world of living according to human strength, wisdom, and ability. We want to be people that the world is amazed at because they know that what happens here can only be done by you. Show yourself to the world through your people. In the name of Christ, we ask this, amen.