Follow the Promises: Full Surrender

The moment that changes everything isn’t usually dramatic, it’s decisive. We open with an NFL draft picture of commitment, then Joshua 24 takes us to Shechem where an entire nation “presents themselves before the Lord” and Joshua refuses to offer soft options. No backup plans. No crossed fingers. Choose today.

From there, we slow down and read what we call God’s resume of faithfulness: Abraham chosen out of idol worship, a family sustained through impossibility, deliverance through Moses, the Red Sea, the wilderness, protection from curses, and victories Israel didn’t earn. We also notice what’s missing, God doesn’t rehearse Israel’s failures. That omission points straight to grace, to the promise that God forgives and remembers sin no more. Trust grows when we remember what God has done, and surrender stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like sanity.

Then we get honest about what “full surrender” means. Joshua warns the people not to take vows lightly, and Jesus does the same in Luke 14: count the cost, carry the cross, forsake all. We talk Christian discipleship, the Holy Spirit as the power to actually follow through, and the modern “foreign gods” we keep within arm’s reach. If surrender is real, it gets practical fast: what needs to be put away, deleted, or laid at Jesus’ feet?

If this challenged you, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs clarity, and leave a review. What’s one area where you’re ready to stop negotiating and go fully surrendered?

Transcript

Presenting Yourself Before God

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Alright, today Follow the Promises Full Surrender. Full surrender. That's the name of today's sermon. Do you guys know the NFL draft was this weekend? It was. It was. You know where they all get dressed up in their fanciest clothes and all their drip and their, you know, ice, what do you call it? The diamonds and everything. Get all iced up. And uh they the the commissioner calls their name and they go out, you know, thousands of hours of studying the film, and I'm a big football fan. Any other football fans in here? Okay. Well, go Broncos, okay. You know, so you have all these all these meetings and all this study, just just investigating you to uh all leading to this one moment where the commissioner gets booed and then he calls your name. And then this young man comes out on the stage and and he uh shakes his hand, he puts on the hat, and right then it's done, right? He's he doesn't get to play a few games for the the Raiders and then get born again and play for the Broncos after that. He you don't get to do that, you just have to play for the team you get drafted to. Like you have you're you're committed, you're all in. That was a diss on the Raiders. I don't know if you got that, but um, it's it's all in, it's one team. It's you you have to totally surrender your other options. Joshua in our book, he he didn't do, he didn't like lead a focus group when he gathers the entire nation, right? He's 110 years old, he's about to kick the bucket. Okay, he knows he's about to die. He got he gathers the whole country together to say bye, and he doesn't do a focus group. He he says, serve the Lord. He says, be all in, be totally surrendered. Not serve the Lord, but maybe keep some of the other gods on the side, like Baal or or Molech or whatever the other gods are, just keep some of those on the side in case things get tough. He he called the people onto the stage and he said, put on the hat. Right? We're team Yahweh, we're team Jesus. And uh he he's basically saying, you guys have to choose. You get the choice, you have to choose. Are you in or are you out? No second thoughts, no crossed fingers, no backup plans, you have to choose today, Joshua says. Choose today. What are you gonna choose today? Chapter 24, verse 1. So Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem and called for the elders of Israel, for their heads, their judges, their officers, and they presented themselves before the Lord. Shechem is in a really cool geographic location. You have the city and then a hill here, a hill here, and a hill here. And so it makes like a natural amphitheater. You can still go there today, where your voice, the voice can carry a long way. So they they gather the entire nation. And I thought a lot about this phrase, they presented themselves before the Lord, uh, before God. And I thought about it as I thought about more and more, I was really drawn to it because I think it takes a lot of courage to present yourself before God, doesn't it? Um, you know, you have to you have to the the enemy is gonna put these thoughts like, is God just judging you? Is is he safe? Is it safe to present yourself before God? Uh is he just gonna reject you? Is he like got a microscope like looking at what all the things you've done wrong? What is it what it why am I presenting myself before God? You know, someone someone comes up to you and says, Hey, let's have a conversation.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

For a lot of us, that's like, okay, creepy, I don't want to have a conversation with you because that's scary.

God’s Resume Of Faithfulness

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Like it's weird, it's scary. That's a that can be a terrifying phrase for us unless we're convinced of his heart for us, or the person asking you to have a conversation. If you know that they love you, then you're willing to have a conversation with them. How do we get convinced of God's heart for us? How does that happen? You just wake up one day and be like, I think God loves me. It doesn't happen that way. It's through his word which gives us a recounting of the actual deeds, the actual works of God, what he's actually done to prove himself to us. You could call this a resume of God's faithfulness. And we find this resume in God's word. A resume of God. And you can also find this resume in your own life. If you began to tell your testimony, if you began to share your life and you really thought about it, I bet you would see times where God showed up and he did something. He showed up in your life and he was faithful. He's faithful to be trusted. Why does he do that? Because God can be trusted. And why does he want us to trust him? He wants us to fully surrender. Because in full surrender, you will find full peace. You will find that he is trustworthy, you will find that he is enough and he is faithful to you. But you will only really be able to experience it with full surrender to him. That's that's how this works. So look at verse 2. Joshua said to all the people, thus says the Lord God of Israel. So Joshua takes off his leader hat and he's putting on his prophet hat. So he's gonna kind of prophesy and speak for the Lord. He says, Your fathers, including Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, dwelt on the other side of the river in old times, and they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from the other side of the river, and led him throughout all the land of Canaan, and multiplied his descendants, and gave him Isaac. So Joshua begins to write this resume of God's faithfulness in their life. And he so he begins with their ancient history. Now, Terah and Nahor would have been 500 years before these events. So, what was happening in our planet 500 years ago? Yeah. Everyone was speaking gibberish. It was or was that gun fire? Okay. 500 years ago. I mean, it was like the Catholic Church and the Protestant, like Reformation. That was 500 years ago. We it's like they didn't have planes or cars, barely had horses, I think.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

I don't know, but barely. They were only donkeys.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Um, no, this is not true science. Okay. Abraham, 500 years earlier, was the son of this guy named Terah, who was some idol worshiper from Babylon. Like he worshipped idols. That's what I said. He he didn't know God. So, what is God saying by bringing this up? He's saying, Guys, I took you, I came and found you. I chose you, I searched you out. Your father Abraham, the first one of the Jews, uh, he didn't know me from nobody. I showed up to him. God chose him. Before he knew God before he knew God was a good choice, God chose him. You know, God never makes good choices with people.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

That just came to my brain. I like that.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

Lightning struck my brain. God, then God led him, it says, through Canaan, and God would constantly show up and appear to him, and he led him, and then God blessed him with kids, even though he was that was impossible, he was too old to have kids. Abraham never deserved any of this, and that's what God is is highlighting in this resume. What did you do? Nothing. You just I loved you, I chose you, I led you, I blessed you and made you fruitful. Okay, so we're we're seeing God's resume. In God's resume, who gets the glory? God does. Who's taking care of everything? God is. And that's what you're gonna see in this story and in your life. And then he says, To Isaac, I gave Jacob and Esau. So to Isaac, he blessed him with twins, right? But they were very different twins. One was very strong in the flesh, Esau. His name meant hairy, red and hairy. He was hairy all over from head to foot. Girls love that. And uh, so he was really a man's man. He he was strong in the flesh. So he had this propensity to never trust in God. And all of his descendants, Esau's descendants, were called the Edomites, and they also refused to trust in God. They don't like trusting God. Why? Because they're self-sufficient. Jacob, the other twin, was uh weak and conniving and deceitful, and he liked cooking in the kitchen and stealing people's birthrights. So he also not a good guy until he he was fully convinced that he couldn't do it himself and he wrestled with God and he s ended up broken and surrendered to God, which is what God is looking for. So these two uh illustrate the two the thing God blesses. What does God bless? Self-sufficiency and strength, self-sufficiency and strength? No, he blesses surrender. What kind of surrender? Full surrender. And Jacob, after he's fully surrendered, what do they change his name to? Israel! Three Jesus points because you whispered. You would have got like 20, but it was a whisper. You weren't very confident in your answer. So Esau lived for himself. One ended up, Jacob ended up broken and surrendered to God. What is God highlighting? What what kind what am I looking for? I bless surrender. To Esau, he says, I gave the mountains of Seir to possess. That's the Edomites. They live in the mountains of Seir. But to Jacob and his children, they went down to Egypt. So God was faithful to each one, even the selfish and the surrendered. Like he he still gave a land to the selfish part of the family, but the surrendered part, Jacob had a much more difficult time. And if you were looking at it from the outside, you'd be like, why did God just give Esau a peaceful place? But Jacob had to go down into Egypt and become slaves for 400 years. Does that mean God was blessing based blessings based on that? What is going on here? Jacob definitely had a more difficult 400 years during this time. And then it says, and also I sent Moses and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt according to what I did among them. So now the family of Jacob, or Israel we call them now, you know, they've grown to two and a half million people possibly, and they were enslaved. And so God sent this deliverer named Moses. Look at how well taught you guys are. 50 Jesus points for all of you. And ten plagues later, he says, Afterward, I brought you out, and I brought your fathers out of Egypt, and you came to the sea, and the Egyptians pursued you and your fathers with chariots and horsemen to the Red Sea. The actual Red Sea. And so they cried out to the Lord, and he put darkness between you and the Egyptians, and brought the sea upon them and covered them, and your eyes saw what I did to Egypt. So then, even when all hope was lost, God delivered them again and again and again, even with supernatural miracles, right? And so he parted the Red Sea. So pause, pause, pause, pause. What is the point of all this history again? Why is God giving us this resume? To build a case for them to fully surrender to God today, which is also the application for us. Then it says, Then you dwelt in the wilderness a long time. Yeah, that's an understatement, right? Forty years they wandered around the wilderness living in the desert. God provided manna from heaven and water from a rock, shade during the day, and fire at night. It was crazy times. They should make a show about it. Most of these people who he's talking to today saw that firsthand. This was their first maybe 40, 30 years of life. They were maybe born in that desert. And so I want you to notice one thing God has not brought up in any of this resume. What's the one thing that's missing? All of their failures. All of their failures. All of their sins. Where are those? We have Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy that are full of explaining all of the horrible choices that they made all during this time. I mean, they couldn't go two days without finding another idol to worship and getting bitten by snakes and killing people. I mean, just it was a mess. There's four books. Go read it. But what God does not bring up any of those things in this entire discourse. Why is that? I think it reminds us of how God deals with us in the new covenant of grace. In Jeremiah 31, 31, it says this, when he's prophesying, when he's talking about what Jesus would bring eventually. 500 years before Jesus, God told us this is what Jesus is going to do. He says, No more shall every man teach his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more. So we have this little foreshadow of what a relationship with God is going to look like when Jesus comes. And what's it gonna look like? God is really forgetful.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

God is really forgetful. You know what? The forgetfulness of God is something we really need to remember. That was a good one too. We could make that one a tattoo. That one just came to me too.

Fear The Lord And Choose

SPEAKER_00 16:28

Alright. God is when it says he forgets our sin, that doesn't mean he's literally just like an old man that forgets things, right? Where's my keys? It means he has a reason that he's forgiven them and he washes it so clean he can treat us as if it never happened before. That's the forgetfulness of God. He truly can lay it aside and treat you as if you never did the stupid thing that you did, because it truly is washed away. And then he says, he goes on, he says, This, I brought you into the land of the Amorites, who dwelt on the other side of the Jordan, and they fought with you, but I gave them into your hand that you might possess their land, and I destroyed them before you. Then Balak, the son of Zippor, the king of Moab, arose to make war against Israel, and sent and called Balaam, the son of Baor, to curse you. But I would not listen to Balaam, therefore he continued to bless you. So this was a major moment in the recent history of Israel, where right before they came into the promised land, uh it was kind of like this test that proved that God's commitment was to bless them, even though they didn't deserve it. Okay, even though they were still falling and failing all the time, he was gonna do what was best for them. He was gonna get them into the promised land, kicking or screaming almost. You ever feel like God was pulling you somewhere, kicking or screaming? Maybe you didn't really even want to go. It happens sometimes, right? And even the enemy will try to mess up God's plans. Here, the enemy tried to hire this prophet to supernaturally, somehow spiritually curse the people of Israel, turn God against them. Read about it in Numbers chapter 22 through 25. Balaam ends up talking to his donkey. It's a wild story, but I'll let you figure that one out. So I delivered you out of his hand, God says. And then you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho, and the men of Jericho fought against you, and then the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Gergeshites and the Hivites and the Jebusites. See, it's a resume of all, right? But I delivered them into your hand. And then it says this I sent the hornets before you, which drove them out before you. That's cool. Also the two kings of the Amorites, but not with your sword or with your bow. I have given you a land which you did not labor, and cities that you didn't build, and you dwell in them. You eat of the vineyards and the olive groves which you did not plant. And though, so that kind of summarizes everything we've studied in the book of Joshua for the past 25 weeks. Kind of just summarizes it, right? Each victory was a gift. It was not earned. And that is the language of grace, right? It's always a free gift of grace. God's victories in our lives are always free gifts of grace. They're always won by faith. God is never asking you to produce victory, He's asking you to trust Him to give you the victory. And that goes against our flesh and our idea of like what it means to be a man and what it means to be an American. You gotta earn your victory, you gotta, you gotta deserve the best. But that is not the way that God works. He has removed us from that whole system. And that is the way that the world works, right? You work hard in your job, you work hard in school, you get a degree, you get a promotion, you that's how the world works. But that's not how God works. He refuses to work that way. It's never because of my strength, my commitment, or my effort that God blesses me. So everything, if you he describes everything in their life, their cities, their vineyards, their plants, everything. He said, everything in your life pointed to God as the giver and the supplier of grace for them. Everything around them, he's like, look around. Everything points to God. So what is the point? What is the point? Why are you saying this, Joshua? Why do we have this resume? What are we even talking about? Joshua's like, listen up right here. Now, therefore, fear the Lord. Ooh, he gives him something to do. Fear the Lord. How do I do that? Humility. Then he says, serve him in sincerity and truth, and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the river and in Egypt. Serve the Lord. Oh, I knew there was something I was gonna have to do. I knew they were gonna pass the offering plate or something was gonna happen, that they were gonna ask something of me, right? Yeah. Everything. Full surrender. He's saying here, put your faith, if you if you believe all these things that you've seen, all these things that I've talked about, put your faith into action. Full action. What is the action? Full surrender is the action. Well, how do I do surrender? That's the question. Fear the Lord is the first part. That means humility. Well, how do I do humility? Humility is a heartborn attitude. It's a relational reality. It is not something you can you can read your Bible with humility, saying, God, I'm I'm I love you and I I want to hear from you. Or you can read your Bible, same thing, but with pride, saying, I'm gonna earn God's blessings today. Watch me go. You can serve God with humility. I'm so grateful and I I love the Lord because he loved me. Or you can serve him in pride. God, look at me. Aren't you impressed with me? Am I earning some more blessings? Are you gonna give me money? Are you gonna give me peace? All these things that he's already promised to give us for free. Then he says, so that's fear the Lord. Secondly, part of surrender, serve him. What's your purpose? Is your purpose serve self or serve him? That's what full surrender is. Why do you wake up in the morning? Why do you love your spouse? Why do you love your kids? Why do you go to work? Is it to serve those people? If it is, you're gonna fail. If it's to serve God by serving those people, by loving those people, that's how to have real purpose for your life. What is your purpose? That's what he's asking them. Then he says, do it in sincerity and truth. That's the method. All right? Okay, so I'm gonna walk with humility. I'm gonna consider God more important than me, others more important than me. Humility. And then I'm gonna have a purpose. What's my purpose? To love other people, love God. How, what's my method? Sincerity and truth. You mean I can't just pretend to love people? I have to actually love them. Yeah, you can't pretend to love them and talk bad about them. You can't think bad about them. You have to truly love them with your that's what sincerity and truth is. God is asking full your whole heart to love the people of this world and to love him. Sincerity and truth. That that's the full in the full surrender part. And then he says, put away the gods, put away the other gods. There's a choice to be made. What's it gonna be? You have to choose. You have to choose. Verse 15. And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose. You choose. Choose for yourselves this day whom you will choose, whether the gods of your fathers who you served on the other side of the river, or the gods of the Amorites, or in the lands you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Someone should make like a like a bumper sticker about that, or like a doormat. Yeah, that would make a good doormat, right? I'm kidding, they're everywhere, right?

SPEAKER_01 24:53

But what does it mean? It means God will never force you to choose him. God will never force you. Jesus never invites.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

He gives you the chance to walk away.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

With nothing holding you back except his love. I love you. I ask everything from you. I ask you to surrender fully to me. But I will give you all of my love. And you have to choose. If that seems evil to you, walk away. Don't come back.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Because I love you. And this will never be based on rules, and it will never be based on your performance. I am freely offering to love you. And I'll never take it back. And I'll never force you to do anything. But I'm gonna ask you to respond, and I'm gonna invite you to respond to my love with your love. Fully surrendered to me. You're like, Jesus would never do that. Let's look at John chapter 66. John chapter 6, verse 66. I know it sounds evil, but from that time many of his disciples went back and walked with him no more. Oh, sad. And Jesus said to the twelve, Do you also want to go away? You're free, guys. Right? And Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. That's the exact same thing as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Just the New Testament version of it. And he when he says, We I we will serve the Lord, in English, that's future tense, right? But in Hebrew, the tense has a is is more fuller. It's a continuous action, it involves the future, but it can also point to the past. So Joshua is basically saying, I have chosen, I choose now, and I will keep choosing to serve the Lord. It's a full life commitment. Joshua could make this statement because he always chose the Lord. If you remember, he chose to fight against the Amalekites. That would he chose to the Lord when it cost him everything. He chose to reject the golden calf. He chose when the flesh might have been satisfied. He could have like worshiped the golden calf with the people, but he chose not to. He chose to serve the Lord by serving Moses. He chose humility. He chose to believe God's promises about the promised land when he was sent as a spy to go in there. He chose against what was popular, because the popular said, let's not do it. He chose to recognize the angel who was the captain of the Lord's army, choosing to surrender to God. He chose to take the leadership of Israel, choosing to lead by faith and not even by his own strength or his own wisdom. He made all kinds of choices. I heard last night in something we were watching that each person makes 30,000 choices a day. Your brain can make 30,000 choices a day. But only one choice matters. And it will govern every other choice. God gives you choices because God's a choosing God and He made us in His image, so He loves that we can choose. And that true choice thing is called love.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

You choose your spouse. Why? Because a shotgun was no, because love. You get the choice because of love. God chooses to love you, and he asks you to choose to love him.

Count The Cost Of Discipleship

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Now, can you love your spouse 99% and then love other spouses 1%? No. We know that's not how it works. When you get married, you have to love 100% faithfully. Fully. This it means fully surrendered. And that's what God says. He asks of you full commitment, fully surrendered. Look at verse back in Joshua 24. So the people answered and said, Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods. For the Lord is our God, is he who brought us and our fathers up out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage, who did who did these great signs in our sight and preserved us in all the way that we went among all the people through whom we passed. And the Lord drove out from before us all the people, including the Amorites who dwelt in the land. We also will serve the Lord who uh for it is our God. But Joshua said to the people, You cannot serve the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God, he will not forgive your transgressions nor your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, and he will turn and do you harm and consume you after the good you done to you, he has done to you. Jesus said this same thing. What is Joshua doing here? He's giving them a warning. He's not trying to convince them not to serve the Lord, he's giving them a warning saying, do not take this decision lightly. And that's exactly what I'm telling you guys here today, too. Full surrender is worth it, but don't just say, oh yeah, I'm fully surrendered. Because look what Jesus does, right? Jesus, he gives the same warning in Luke chapter 14, verse uh 25. Um, and it wasn't that Jesus didn't want any followers, he just didn't want any any uh anyone to take it lightly what he was asking of them. So let's read this in in Luke chapter 14. He does the same thing. Now the great multitudes went with him, and he turned and said to them, If anyone comes after me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. Whoa. And whoever does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Whoa. For which of you intending to build a tower does not sit down first and count the cost whether he has enough to finish it? Lest after he has laid the foundation he's not able to finish, and all who see it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build and was not able to finish. Or what king going uh to make war against another king does not sit down first to consider whether he's able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else when the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace. So likewise, whomever of you who does not forsake all he has cannot be my disciple. Wow, Jesus. Okay, so it starts out great multitudes of people are following Jesus. Jesus' PR people were super excited. Look at this. We have all the people following us, and Jesus is like, let's fix that.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

Because not everyone was fully surrendered, who was following him. Does that remind you of anything? Lots of people show up at church, lots of people are not fully surrendered.

SPEAKER_00 33:31

So what what does it look like? What is God looking for? He says, with the whole you gotta hate your father and mother thing, right? You gotta love God so much, you gotta choose God so much that even your most loved relationships look like hate in comparison to your faithfulness to God, your choosing of God. That's what that means. He's not saying hate everybody, obviously, that's dumb. He's saying make it look like, by how committed you are to God, that everything else is a distant second for you. You gotta choose God so much that your own life doesn't even matter to you. In other words, you would die for him, you would give everything for him. That's what he's asking for. And then what and then he gives those two stories about counting the cost, counting up the cost. So full surrender will cost you. This is not a used car salesman saying, this is basically gonna be free. You're losing money if you don't buy this car. Jesus is saying, no, it's gonna cost you absolutely everything. What's it gonna cost you? Everything. Am I being as clear as I can possibly be?

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Full surrender of everything. And he's saying if that if that's not what you're if that's not how you feel about me, there's the door. Whoa, Jesus. Full surrender means all of your life, all of your death, all your dreams, and your hopes, and your possessions, and your relationships, and your future, and your expectations, and your time, and all your talents, all your rights, all your ideas, all your thoughts, all your thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

Every minute, every hour, every second, all the things you think you control.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

He demands that you surrender all of it. Full surrender means you hold nothing to give you back. Someone wrote a song about this. You guys probably heard it, right? All to Jesus, I surrender.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

All to him I freely give. I will ever love and trust him and in his presence I daily live. I surrender all. I surrender all. All to thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all. All to Jesus, I surrender. Make me Savior wholly thine.

SPEAKER_01 37:01

Let me feel thy Holy Spirit truly know that thou art mine. I surrender all. I surrender all.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

All to thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all. Verse three. I surrender All to Jesus, I surrender.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Lord, I give myself to thee. Fill me with thy love and power. Let thy blessing fall on me. That's a good song. Right?

Spirit-Powered Surrender And The Cross

SPEAKER_00 37:44

So verse 21 All the people said to Joshua, No, but we will serve the Lord. So Joshua said, You are witnesses against yourselves, that you have chosen the Lord for yourselves to serve him. And they said, We are witnesses. And therefore he said, Put away the foreign gods which are among you. Incline your heart to the Lord God of Israel. And the people said to Joshua, The Lord our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey. So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day and made them a statute and an ordinance in Shechem. So they choose the Lord. Hooray, good. The only problem is they completely suck at doing this. They are never gonna follow through with this. I mean, rarely. It's gonna be a one great disaster story. Why? Because they will utterly fail to love him. Why?

SPEAKER_01 38:48

Because they don't have the spirit of God.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

It's also called the spirit of love. And that spirit is not inside them, indwelling them. They're filled right now with the same spirit that Adam, all of Adam's descendants have with a spirit of self-centeredness. And even though God is working with them, their entire existence proves you cannot love God without the Holy Spirit transforming your heart. This is what Jesus gives us. This is why we live in the New Testament. This is why we have a million times better situation than what they had. We can fully surrender with pure hearts fully to God. You can do this because of the power of the Holy Spirit. All you have to say is, God, I can't do this in my flesh, but give me your spirit. And God's response is, here you go. That's humility, and you trust in me, that's faith. So you get the spirit and you can live for me. We can succeed where they always failed. And that's the gospel. That's what's so incredible about what we talk about. Great. So what do I do today? He says, Therefore, put away the foreign gods that are among you and incline your heart to the God of Israel, he told them. They said they were willing to enter into this covenant and obey God. And Joshua immediately asks them, he calls them to put actions to their faith. What are the gods in your life that you need to take up to Mount Doom and cast into the fires from which they came?

SPEAKER_01 40:30

Lord of the Rings. What does that mean? Look at your phone. What apps need to be deleted? All of them. What phone numbers need to be deleted? You just want to hold on to a little bit of that foreign God.

SPEAKER_00 40:59

I'll just keep them for when things get tough. Just keep it, keep it for when I'm sad. And I like to just reach out.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

No. Delete it. What needs to be laid at the feet of Jesus today?

SPEAKER_00 41:14

Is he your Lord and master or not? Are you still want to be the Lord of this little part of your life? And whatever that little part is, will you fully surrender or not? So Joshua wrote these words in a book of the law of God, and he took a large stone, and he set it up under the oak that was by the sanctuary of the Lord. This is really cool. And Joshua said to all the people, Behold, this stone shall be a witness to us, for it has heard all the words which the Lord has spoken to us. It shall therefore be a witness to you, lest you deny your God. So Joshua let all the people depart, each to his own inheritance. So he sets up a stone as a witness. What does this make you think of? That's right. The Ten Commandments were written on stone. The law written on stone. And the law is a witness against you. Because the law says all the things that we fail in. The law is absolutely a witness to your life, saying, You are a bad person. You have broken every one of these commandments. You should not be allowed to even know God, nonetheless, be in his presence. It's a witness against you of all your failings.

SPEAKER_01 42:48

But what is the other witness that he snuck in there? Did you see it? There was a tree. There's a second witness. And it's a tree. And the tree that Jesus died on, the cross is also a witness that all of your failures are nailed to that cross in the body of Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_00 43:20

Every single thing that the stone could witness against you is washed completely clean in the blood of Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_01 43:33

Praise him forever. Praise him forever.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

We love the standard that the law reveals to us and God's character that it that it witnesses to us. But we love the God of love that sets us free by the blood of the Lamb and the blood that trickles down the tree. And it's because of that love that we fully surrender, not because the law tells you you have to. Israel had to and they didn't.

SPEAKER_01 44:06

They said they did, but they didn't. You have the love. And God says, just fully surrender. In your mind. It's done. You'll be alright.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

We're not law driven obedience. We are loving, surrender, and surviving. Submission to Jesus Christ as the Lord and King of our lives.

SPEAKER_01 44:32

Jesus, we give you everything. I give you everything.

SPEAKER_00 44:41

I give it all to you. I hold nothing back.

SPEAKER_01 44:45

I am yours from my heart, my body, my soul, my words, my mind, my thoughts, my expectations. My pleasure, my pain, I give it all to you.

SPEAKER_00 45:12

Jesus, you have earned our trust with your resume of faithfulness, and we now choose to fully surrender to the love that you have displayed to us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.