SPEAKER_01: Hello everyone, I'm Dr.
SPEAKER_01: Steve Holt.
SPEAKER_01: I want to welcome you to the Road Church Podcast.
SPEAKER_01: Each week we go into God's Word.
SPEAKER_01: We teach chapter by chapter and verse by verse.
SPEAKER_01: And we are here to build the Kingdom of God revolution through empowering people to change the world.
SPEAKER_01: So we pray this will minister to you at your heart level and change your life.
SPEAKER_01: Today, be encouraged by our guest speaker.
SPEAKER_00: But before we jump in, I just kind of want to give a recap.
SPEAKER_00: Pastor Josh did a great job closing out chapter two and getting us through three last week.
SPEAKER_00: But where are we at with the nation of Israel in their journey, in their story, and where they're coming from and where they're headed into?
SPEAKER_00: So we picked this up, and right at the end of last week, they've just now crossed the Jordan.
SPEAKER_00: The nation of Israel, now three to four million strong.
SPEAKER_00: God was building his nation over the 400 years of captivity in Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: There's a 16-mile-wide passage that he cuts through the Jordan that day.
SPEAKER_00: Quite a noticeable feat from any of the onlookers that would have been nearby.
SPEAKER_00: It's not this narrow strip.
SPEAKER_00: He's got to cut a 16-mile-wide strip through so they can pass through and the whole nation can move, you know, in a few hours versus a few weeks.
SPEAKER_00: And we notice how God opens and closes this chapter and time of entry and exit from the wilderness with the same kind of miracle.
SPEAKER_00: They're leaving Egypt, right?
SPEAKER_00: And some 40 years prior, he cuts and parts the Red Sea.
SPEAKER_00: Well, now he's closing that time in the nation's history in the same, uh, in the same manner with the same kind of miracle.
SPEAKER_00: This chapter is going to give us pause to reflect God's covering, his care, and leading his people to remember his hand over them with memorials and altars to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: See, I think God is asking us all to come into what he wants with our lives.
SPEAKER_00: And this story is a model and representative of where some of us are in our journey.
SPEAKER_00: Some of us might still identify with being in a wilderness right now.
SPEAKER_00: Some of us are on the shores of our Jordan, and some of us have actually now then crossed over Jordan and are ready to receive and step into the inheritance and the full promises of what God has for us.
SPEAKER_00: So the challenge today, the challenge in every day is that we would leave our Egypts behind, our taskmasters, our slavery, the bondage where the enemy wants to tie us up, lock us down, and keep us held hostage.
SPEAKER_00: Where to leave the wilderness, this dry, dead, and infertile place, there is a life of abundance, there's a land of milk and honey, and there's promises that God wants us to walk into and experience.
SPEAKER_00: This is training for battle.
SPEAKER_00: God must lead them in this space.
SPEAKER_00: There are no barges, there are no boats, no pontoons.
SPEAKER_00: God is leading them supernaturally, so leading them.
SPEAKER_00: And so they're following the physical arc, but the manifest presence of the kingdom of heaven is there.
SPEAKER_00: And they're trusting in a different way.
SPEAKER_00: There's a different obedience that's happening.
SPEAKER_00: And I love this because we're seeing now it's second generation.
SPEAKER_00: The first, the generation that was led into the wilderness struggled with what their calling was, with what their inheritance could be.
SPEAKER_00: They're yoked with this mind of slavery and they're caught up.
SPEAKER_00: But it's their children who get to see the promises and the revelation and the real the realization of what God has promised to his sons and daughters, to his people, and they're gonna operate with a different level of obedience.
SPEAKER_00: Now, Moses set a great mantle of leadership, but we're gonna see Joshua take that leadership and he's gonna 5x it and he's going to go from victory to victory to victory as we move throughout the book of Joshua.
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be very exciting, it's gonna be bloody, and it's rated mature for mature audiences.
SPEAKER_00: Just a heads up.
SPEAKER_00: There we go.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: Um I think it's also interesting to note here for a minute.
SPEAKER_00: John the Baptist, we see this in John 1.28, um, at Bethabra, the house of passage, and it is this place where Joshua and Israel crossed the Jordan.
SPEAKER_00: This is the place that Jesus shows up and is exactly baptized.
SPEAKER_00: Super cool.
SPEAKER_00: It's a memorial pointing to the deliverer, a coming into Christ, the Messiah, thousands of years later, a deliverer has come.
SPEAKER_00: God is so intentional with his love story for us, he puts these Easter eggs in our story to remind us that all this is going somewhere, and there is a purpose and a point to all of it.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, our salvation.
SPEAKER_00: We're picking up uh last week with Pastor Josh talking about the scarlet thread and the beautiful story of Rahab and so on, and we see that God puts in Jesus' lineage the broken stories of humanity to say that he's not looking for perfection, he's just looking for our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: And so we can take whatever we have, whatever we feel that we're coming into church today with our sin and our shame and the things where we feel broken and bound with.
SPEAKER_00: We can place all that at the cross because of his family tree and his family line, and he's just got his hands outstretched and saying, It's all good and it's all welcome.
SPEAKER_00: And I love you and I see you, and I want to restore and redeem you.
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I have something so precious, so promised.
SPEAKER_00: I have a land of milk and honey for you to experience on the other side of your Jordan.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're seeing now the nation of Israel coming in with a full heart.
SPEAKER_00: And so we'll pick it up in chapter 4, verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: If you have your Bibles, please turn there, and I'll be teaching out of New King James today.
SPEAKER_00: And it came to pass when all the people had completely crossed over the Jordan, that the Lord spoke to Joshua, saying, Take for yourselves twelve men from the people, one from every tribe, and command them, saying, Take for yourselves twelve stones from here, out of the midst of the Jordan, from the place where the priest's feet stood firm.
SPEAKER_00: You shall carry them over with you, and leave them in the lodging place where you lodge tonight.
SPEAKER_00: So Joshua here is continuing to just put one foot in front of the other, hearing the voice of God, being steadfast in his obedience, and he's being led by the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: So he's not telling the people here in a minute, he's not telling the people, hey, I need you guys to do this.
SPEAKER_00: No, he's saying the Lord continues to direct us, the Lord continues to guide us, we're gonna trust this.
SPEAKER_00: We're heading into a new land.
SPEAKER_00: There's gotta be excitement in these guys' hearts, right?
SPEAKER_00: But there's also some tetiveness.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, think about as they moved through the river, you've got women, children, all your stuff that you have in life, all your possessions, and you're working down this bank through the river, and then up the other side.
SPEAKER_00: No doubt it's somewhat exhaustive.
SPEAKER_00: It's got to be somewhat laborsome, and you know, they're working through with their cattle, their sheep, all the stuff.
SPEAKER_00: So then Joshua chapter 4, then Joshua called the twelve men whom he had appointed from the children of Israel, one man from every tribe, and Joshua said to them, Cross over before the ark of the Lord your God into the midst of the Jordan, and each of you take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of tribes of the children of Israel, that this may be a sign among you when your children ask in time to come, saying, What do these stones mean to you?
SPEAKER_00: Now it's funny, any of you ever hiked in the woods or take your children out, there's people, right, where they stack these weird stones and stuff out there.
SPEAKER_00: And I remember when our little kids, we'd go on hikes and stuff, they'd be like, What is that?
SPEAKER_00: What's that about?
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, I don't really know.
SPEAKER_00: But like stones stacked up are unnatural, and somebody was intentional to make that.
SPEAKER_00: And there's purposes for that.
SPEAKER_00: Um, you guys go out to uh Garden of the Gods, balanced rock is pretty cool, right?
SPEAKER_00: We keep waiting for it to become unbalanced.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it'll happen in our lifetime.
SPEAKER_00: I hope it doesn't happen where there's tourists, but it's cool because you walk there and you're kind of like in awe and you're going, This is pretty awesome.
SPEAKER_00: But so too, then children notice things that are a little bit out of nature's ordinary, you know, place, and they have questions about that.
SPEAKER_00: It's not hard, and so their mind and their imagination begin to wander.
SPEAKER_00: And so he's saying here, children will ask in time coming, saying, What do these stones mean to you?
SPEAKER_00: And then the instruction here is that then you shall answer them, that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord, when it crossed over the Jordan.
SPEAKER_00: The waters of the Jordan were cut off, and these stones shall be a memorial for the children of Israel forever.
SPEAKER_00: This is a memorial to remember the day, to remind the generations that will come, that this was God's leading, this was his protection, this was his provision, and the presence of the Almighty King was with them in this moment, leading them, bringing them through and out of the wilderness that they had just exited from.
SPEAKER_00: And in verses 2 through 9, and then verses 21, what we're gonna see here is that Joshua gives instruction for two kinds of memorials.
SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna park here for just a second.
SPEAKER_00: The city that they're gonna step into, or the camp, or the town that they're gonna go park, is gonna be called Gilgal and twelve stones.
SPEAKER_00: This will be a public memorial.
SPEAKER_00: And then in the midst of the Jordan River, that will be a private memorial.
SPEAKER_00: It's private, it's for God.
SPEAKER_00: And in our lives, ladies and gentlemen, some memorials are public and some are to be private.
SPEAKER_00: One is for the people in remembering the work, and one is just for the Lord's honor.
SPEAKER_00: It is a memorial, like in the feasts of the Old Testament, we see.
SPEAKER_00: In the New Testament, we see baptism in the New Testament was a public memorial.
SPEAKER_00: There's no altar calls in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: You stood publicly at a baptism, and you publicly identified yourself as a disciple, a follower of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Communion that we get to engage in corporately here, even though we're doing it corporately, and then sometimes we're doing it privately in our own homes, but communion is meant to be a private memorial.
SPEAKER_00: It's a time of contemplation to examine our hearts and selves before the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Where are we in our alignment?
SPEAKER_00: Where are we with His Holy Spirit?
SPEAKER_00: Where are we living in this place of our walk, our sanctification, and this journey in our Christian lives?
SPEAKER_00: And so we take communion in that area, and it's a private memorial between us and God as we work out our daily sanctification.
SPEAKER_00: But why a memorial?
SPEAKER_00: Why is God instructing Joshua in this way?
SPEAKER_00: See, God is not content just to do a supernatural work, He is doing it for the next generation and the generation after that.
SPEAKER_00: All memorials are for the next generation.
SPEAKER_00: And there are memorials in our lives that we set up intentionally, unintentionally.
SPEAKER_00: We have memorial services as we remember a life well lived.
SPEAKER_00: We come and we do a celebration of life, and we contemplate our relationship to the deceased.
SPEAKER_00: What were they to us?
SPEAKER_00: How did they impact us?
SPEAKER_00: What did we give to them?
SPEAKER_00: And we con we reconcile our days together.
SPEAKER_00: And then there is oftentimes a memorial that's erected in a cemetery in our family.
SPEAKER_00: We have some family on my wife's side that we'll go back and visit in Idaho Falls.
SPEAKER_00: And my father-in-law is very intentional, and we'll go back and we'll we'll remember the people and their family, and we'll go and we'll visit the cemeteries.
SPEAKER_00: Not to live in the past necessarily, but to honor and remember the legacy that those men and women had passed on.
SPEAKER_00: And so, too, God is saying here, erect a memorial as a guidepost for when the days get hard and dark in the days ahead, and where your strength and your courage begin to fail you, you can look upon these stones and you can be reminded of my hand of provision.
SPEAKER_00: We all, ladies and gentlemen, men and women, we need to be setting up totems in our lives to remind us of the miracles of God, where he showed up in our lives and where he's leading us.
SPEAKER_00: Either he's led us out of a wilderness and he's brought us across to Jordan and where we've experienced his benevolence, his grace, his rescue, his salvation and restoration in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: Our children watch us and how we respond to the difficulty and pain that we experience in life.
SPEAKER_00: This is where we have the opportunity to impart our resilience.
SPEAKER_00: This is where we get a chance as parents to impart where we can pause and we can step back from our own understanding and our flesh, and we can say, you know what?
SPEAKER_00: I don't have the answers.
SPEAKER_00: I need wisdom, I need God's leading, and I need to just pause here.
SPEAKER_00: I need to be silent.
SPEAKER_00: I need to wait on the Lord, and I'll wait on the Lord all the day if it takes that way to get the answer that I need from Him, because the answers that I'm providing to the problem are not the solutions.
SPEAKER_00: In my own understanding, my own wisdom, I know where that ends, I know where that goes.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm willing to wait on the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And when I can look at those totems in my own life, the private memorials, these sacred passages where I've allowed God to father me as a beloved son and experience the full inheritance that he has.
SPEAKER_00: It's a place of rescue, it's a place of refuge.
SPEAKER_00: I can relate to David's word where he's taking us into the high tower, where he's hiding me in his tabernacle.
SPEAKER_00: And these are the promises that he gives every one of his children, his beloved.
SPEAKER_00: All of you today, in the sound of my voice, this is the same gift that you are offered, and many of you are experiencing that and have experienced it.
SPEAKER_00: And we all, with God's grace, will continue to experience that.
SPEAKER_00: Amen?
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: So there was this season in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: About six years ago, Mandy and I came into a wilderness, and we were trying to reconcile a passage forward.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was just, it was stark.
SPEAKER_00: We were in, we had just come from a beautiful trip.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the first trip we had been away from our family and our kids, it was just the two of us.
SPEAKER_00: We got to explore an adventure in Italy.
SPEAKER_00: It was amazing.
SPEAKER_00: But then on the heels of that, on the heels of that mountaintop, we went into a very hard and challenging wilderness in our family, and God was going to be doing in a powerful work, and I know that he was asking obedience from me first to lead and model what that was supposed to look like.
SPEAKER_00: But we sat our kids down, we brought them in the room, we sat them down, and we said, listen, mom and dad are about to enter or entered into a really hard and challenging place.
SPEAKER_00: Um, we don't know the duration, we don't know how this will go 100%.
SPEAKER_00: But here's what we do know: we know that we are stirres, you're stirres.
SPEAKER_00: We love you, we love God, we trust God, we love each other, and in this dry season, in this wilderness season, we're gonna come out of this and we're gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_00: And you guys are gonna be okay.
SPEAKER_00: And when you think about it, if you feel anything, just pray.
SPEAKER_00: Pray about it, pray for us, pray for our family.
SPEAKER_00: And in that journey, it was beautiful because my two girls at the time saw mom and dad going through a hard day, and they they they took our words, you know, sincerely, and they went in the bedroom, and uh Sophie and Sadie, they got together and they kind of put on some war paint, they put on some some dojo masks, and they went through, and it was like, you know, they were marching around Jericho and they were praying and they were seeking the face of God for us.
SPEAKER_00: And um, it was such a special moment in our in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: And Mandy and I were just so touched and blessed by that because they're like, Yeah, you know what?
SPEAKER_00: We we have resilience, we will endure this, and there will be light at the other side of this.
SPEAKER_00: We will come through this wilderness.
SPEAKER_00: And so that was a private memorial for our family that we got to erect at least some spiritual stones in our lives to say that this is a totem that we will go back through.
SPEAKER_00: We can we can pull back on the knowledge and the grace and the love and the mercy of God who will lead us through the hard times.
SPEAKER_00: Let me pick up in verse nine here.
SPEAKER_00: Then Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of the Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests who bore the Ark of the Covenant stood, and they are still there to this day.
SPEAKER_00: Now, it's I've read somewhere that um those stones might have been visible at lower tides.
SPEAKER_00: Keep in mind that we read last chapter that they're crossing at high tide.
SPEAKER_00: The river's very full.
SPEAKER_00: I grew up in the river of the banks of Mississippi, so I'm very familiar with flood season.
SPEAKER_00: Um and so, and low tides as well.
SPEAKER_00: Now, there's hardly any water in Colorado, so like we call ponds lakes around here.
SPEAKER_00: Cracks me up.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm good.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'll take whatever I can get.
SPEAKER_00: I love water.
SPEAKER_00: I'm drawn to it.
SPEAKER_00: I love to be around it.
SPEAKER_00: We were on vacation recently, and I think me and a couple of my kids were in some form of a body of water for every day that we were on vacation.
SPEAKER_00: So here's this raging river that when he erects this monument, this memorial to the Lord, and the water has come back, and the river is restored to its full tidal season, those stones are covered.
SPEAKER_00: But then at lower tides, when the water is decreased and it's less, maybe some of the tops of those stones were visible still as a memory, as a recall, and as a totem to what God had done for his people that day.
SPEAKER_00: What's interesting to me is that, I mean, there there is a memorial and there is the beautiful thing that Moses does on the other side of the Red Sea.
SPEAKER_00: But then Joshua 5X is that, right?
SPEAKER_00: He takes it and he's like, I'm gonna put one right in the middle of the river, and then we're gonna go and we're gonna consecrate this passage and this process that God has just taken us through, and we're gonna build another one and erect another one on the Lord's direction in Gilgal.
SPEAKER_00: So he's consecrating this passage of God's miracle for his people so that they will always remember the Jordan and in this generation and hopefully the generations to come.
SPEAKER_00: Now we'll learn later, we will learn later, it's not like a Debbie Downer moment, but how quickly the promises and the benevolence and the grace and the mercies of God fade in future generations.
SPEAKER_00: And even if you picked it up in Judges, you'll see that only two or three generations later that they have strayed from the path and they've forgotten some of the promises and some of the things that they should be walking in.
SPEAKER_00: But that's for a later time.
SPEAKER_00: Let's stay here today.
SPEAKER_00: And what God is calling us to in this generation and in this moment, as grandparents, as parents, as sons and daughters.
SPEAKER_00: See, Joshua here, he is walking in the footsteps of Abraham in this tradition.
SPEAKER_00: Abraham, when God called him to a place of obedience and said, I will make a great nation of you.
SPEAKER_00: Abraham went around in obedience and he started erecting altars all throughout the promised land.
SPEAKER_00: He was setting up guideposts, he was setting up lanterns that would be found later by the children of God some 400 years later.
SPEAKER_00: And so Abraham built many altars across a promised land for God's future nation.
SPEAKER_00: This moment was the reality of that promise to Abraham some 400 years prior.
SPEAKER_00: God made a twofold covenant to Abraham, right?
SPEAKER_00: We can go back into Genesis 18.
SPEAKER_00: He said, I will make you a great nation from your lineage.
SPEAKER_00: That's promise one.
SPEAKER_00: And so he takes this small tribe, they go into captivity, and then he builds them over 400 years into a great nation.
SPEAKER_00: So now this great nation sits on the east side of the river banks of Jordan.
SPEAKER_00: God's promise and revelation to Abraham, realizing that, they cross Jordan.
SPEAKER_00: The second part of that promise is that God promised Abraham a land to possess, a land to inherit.
SPEAKER_00: So it's coming into full fruition.
SPEAKER_00: Joshua and the nation of Israel were for the first time since their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that inhabited this land, standing on and preparing to receive their inheritance that had been promised.
SPEAKER_00: Pretty cool moment where we see four centuries that had passed, and now God's reality is coming into full fruition for the nation of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Picking up in verse 10.
SPEAKER_00: So the priest who bore the ark stood in the midst of the Jordan until everything was finished, that the Lord had commanded Joshua to speak to the people, according to all that Moses had commanded.
SPEAKER_00: Joshua and the people hurried and crossed over.
SPEAKER_00: And then it came to pass, when all the people had completely crossed over, that the ark of the Lord and the priests crossed over in the presence of the people.
SPEAKER_00: And the men of Reuben, the men of Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh crossed over, armed before the children of Israel, as Moses had spoken to them.
SPEAKER_00: About forty thousand prepared for war, crossed over before the Lord for battle to the plains of Jericho.
SPEAKER_00: This generation had watched their parents squander their potential and miss the entry into God's promised land for them.
SPEAKER_00: They had seen where mom and dad had done it wrong.
SPEAKER_00: They had witnessed death by snake bites.
SPEAKER_00: They had witnessed death by like literally the land opening up and swallowing up, you know, their relatives.
SPEAKER_00: And so there's a different level of fear and obedience, I believe, that this generation had.
SPEAKER_00: See, I believe, church, that, and I'm not the first to say this, and I'm not even the first to experience it.
SPEAKER_00: I know that for me, I'll just make this an I statement, that I have spent sometimes a longer season in a wilderness than what God had intended for me.
SPEAKER_00: It's when that I could pivot from that place, get realignment, recalibrate my spirit with his spirit, that then I got refreshment and he brought me out of that wilderness.
SPEAKER_00: This was always his plan for his children.
SPEAKER_00: But we see this generation that's prior to Joshua, Moses' generation, it's sad to see how long it takes them, and we can lament there with them.
SPEAKER_00: But I just say, as a testament to ourselves, as we do reflection, where might we be in our wildernesses today?
SPEAKER_00: And are we staying longer than is necessary?
SPEAKER_00: Could be a place to ponder.
SPEAKER_00: Could be that God's spirit has been nudging you, but from a place of fear, perhaps, lack of obedience, whatever the equation might look in your own hearts, there's something that's kept you from stepping up.
SPEAKER_00: And through and over the Jordan into the promises that he has for us.
SPEAKER_00: Joshua's generation is ready for what's next, and they are preparing their hearts to receive God's promise for them.
SPEAKER_00: They enter the land armed and ready for battle.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 14 On that day the Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel, and they feared him as they had feared Moses all the days of his life.
SPEAKER_00: Joshua in Hebrew is pronounced Jehoshua, meaning the Lord is salvation.
SPEAKER_00: And as we follow that crimson strand of the story of Jesus through the Old and New Testament, we see God showing up in Joshua as a promise to the future generations, to his future people, to all his beloved children.
SPEAKER_00: Joshua will be the leader that takes them through with great courage, with great strength.
SPEAKER_00: He's going to be tenacious and he's going to be obedient.
SPEAKER_00: He got his mandate in chapter one, and now he's executing and walking it out, walking out his daily work with the Lord, whatever fear that comes up with him in this season of life, the battles, the kings, the cities that he's going to undertake and take over and conquer in the name of the and the conquer the name of the king and the Lord of Lords, he's working that out in his secret place.
SPEAKER_00: He's probably built some secret memorials in his own life that he can reach back to and touch to bring deliverance in those moments.
SPEAKER_00: He is an exceptional leader, and we're going to see that as his leadership is manifest throughout the book of Joshua.
SPEAKER_00: He's stepping into his full calling and he's realizing the promises of God over his leadership.
SPEAKER_00: He has just received the mantle of Moses to carry God's people into this next season.
SPEAKER_00: And he will lead with courage, discipline, and most of all, what he models so beautifully is obedience to the Lord to bring God's people into those promises.
SPEAKER_00: We only have to churn, you know, a few chapters in our Bible to the right, pick it up in Kings, and see how Saul operates.
SPEAKER_00: King Saul operates in his own understanding, in his own arrogance, without humility.
SPEAKER_00: But Joshua is laying out the footprint of how, if you want to experience all that God has to offer, you do so one step at a time in one act of obedience at a time.
SPEAKER_00: And then you can see the glory of the Lord manifest in your lives.
SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord spoke to Joshua, verse 15, saying, Command the priests who bear the ark of the testimony to come up from the Jordan.
SPEAKER_00: Joshua therefore commanded the priests, saying, Come up from the Jordan.
SPEAKER_00: And it came to pass when the priests who bore the ark, the presence of the Lord, and the covenant of the Lord had come up from the midst of the Jordan, and the souls of the priest, the bottom of their feet, touched dry land, that the waters of the Jordan returned to their place and overflowed all its banks as before, returning back to full tide, flood tide, overflowing the banks.
SPEAKER_00: God seals up the exit from the wilderness and river returns to its full capacity.
SPEAKER_00: He is sealing up what they had left behind.
SPEAKER_00: He ushers them into the next season, recovering what he has promises for them.
SPEAKER_00: This is something to be forgotten now.
SPEAKER_00: I've taken you here, you've got my instruction, you've seen my hand work, you've watched your leader Moses bring you through many trials and struggles.
SPEAKER_00: I've led you by fire at night and the cloud by day, and now I've given you manna and quail, which translates today into Dunkin' Donuts and Chick-fil-A.
SPEAKER_00: But these what these guys are getting, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's like, but now that's gonna kind of cease because I'm taking you into a land that's gonna produce for you.
SPEAKER_00: And there's gonna be one more offering of manna that we'll see here in the coming chapters.
SPEAKER_00: But he's essentially shutting off the Krispy Kreme and the Chick-fil-A, and it's gonna be like the land will produce for you guys.
SPEAKER_00: So he seals this up.
SPEAKER_00: 19.
SPEAKER_00: Now the people came up from Jordan on the tenth day of the first month.
SPEAKER_00: That's important, and I'll share that in just a minute why.
SPEAKER_00: And the value of that.
SPEAKER_00: And they camped in Gilgal on the east border of Jericho.
SPEAKER_00: And those twelve stones, which they had taken out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal.
SPEAKER_00: Now Gilgal is beautiful, and I want to park here for a minute on what Gilgal.
SPEAKER_00: Gilgal will be a base camp for Israel.
SPEAKER_00: It will be a place of preparation for what's to come.
SPEAKER_00: Their first siege of the mighty stronghold of Jericho, the military tactics to take the city will be very unconventional, non-conventional warfare from what they probably would have predicted.
SPEAKER_00: But again, Joshua's not there yet.
SPEAKER_00: He's just saying one step at a time.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to cross the Jordan.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to continue to follow the presence of the gods leading, and we know what's in front of us is exciting.
SPEAKER_00: It's meant for us.
SPEAKER_00: We're ready to receive this.
SPEAKER_00: What's next?
SPEAKER_00: We're going to erect this memorial.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to erect an altar on behalf of the Lord, and we're going to do it in Gilgal.
SPEAKER_00: So here's a little bit of a spoiler alert in a couple chapters in the coming weeks.
SPEAKER_00: But Gilgal will be a sacred place for the nation of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: It will, first, Gilgal will come to become a place of remembering.
SPEAKER_00: This is where they place those twelve stones.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, Gilgal will be a place of consecration back to the Lord's covenant with them.
SPEAKER_00: See, before conquest, there must be consecration.
SPEAKER_00: God has kept his covenant with the nation of Israel, but now there's going to be consecration.
SPEAKER_00: And next week, Pastor Steve's going to unfurl kind of what that looks like and the consecration, basically what's owed from the nation of Israel back to God to honor this relationship and covenant.
SPEAKER_00: He's going to stay steadfast in his commitment to them, but he's going to look for a little bit of skin in the game, literally, right?
SPEAKER_00: So the generation or this generation of Israel will be circumcised for the second time.
SPEAKER_00: In the wilderness, this generation that's just crossed the Jordan has not been circumcised.
SPEAKER_00: And so God says, We need to seal this covenant together, and you guys are going to bring your portion to me in this way.
SPEAKER_00: And before there can be conquest, there has to be consecration.
SPEAKER_00: And so this will be a place of consecration back to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, Gilgal will be a place of removing the reproach of Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: And this is huge for all of us, church.
SPEAKER_00: We have to think about this for a minute because so too, so often the enemy wants to hold us hostage where we're at, and we can't recognize or realize what's in front of us because we're consumed with the rear view mirror.
SPEAKER_00: And so in chapter 5, verse 9, literally, God says to them, Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: The identity of 400 years of slavery under the Egyptians had to be removed by the living God for them to step out to receive and accept and experience all that God had for them.
SPEAKER_00: You can't walk into battle feeling like I deserve this land.
SPEAKER_00: That's my city, that's my kingdom, this is my land.
SPEAKER_00: If you got a slavery mentality, if you're operating in a slavery mentality today, God wants to heal that.
SPEAKER_00: He wants to remove that reproach in your life, and that's what Christ went to the cross to do for all of us.
SPEAKER_00: And so if we're any of you are struggling there with that narrative today, God wants to completely heal that and remove that reproach.
SPEAKER_00: Gilgal, fourthly, will be a place of rejoicing.
SPEAKER_00: See, on the tenth day of what they were heading into, and this is pretty awesome, they're heading into the celebration of Passover.
SPEAKER_00: Some 40 years prior, the first Passover takes place.
SPEAKER_00: Israel exits Egypt during the first Passover.
SPEAKER_00: They will exit the wilderness and enter the promised land during this Passover season.
SPEAKER_00: So before they go into conquest, before they do anything else, they're going to erect a memorial, they're going to go into the celebration of Passover, and there's going to be a time of rejoicing.
SPEAKER_00: They're taking their praise, their exhortation, and they're giving their hearts and their celebration to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Israel is stepping into their true identity as God's chosen.
SPEAKER_00: They are no longer under the condemnation and the stigma of slavery.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus through Calvary removes our old sinful past in the same ways.
SPEAKER_00: And we are redeemed through his blood, and he rolls away the reproach of sin in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: Gilgal literally means to roll away.
SPEAKER_00: So I would say that for me, there's been moments of the Gilgalls in my life where God has walked me through the revelation.
SPEAKER_00: The other side of the miracles in my life, where I've conquered the shame and the fear and the sin and the death of the things that I've done, right?
SPEAKER_00: The broken parts of my story, the broken parts that we were to sit down, and everybody has a story to share where they needed God's restoration and redemption.
SPEAKER_00: But how do we come into the promised land?
SPEAKER_00: We consecrate now back our minds and our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: We recalibrate our souls to Him so that we can be fully effective for what He wants for His beloved children.
SPEAKER_00: And it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful place, and it's a beautiful place where some of you, I would just encourage, if you guys haven't started to put together even just kind of this existence of memorials in your own mind and heart for sure to be consecrated to God, but then even there's some physical memorials maybe that you could be erecting in your life, places of totem that you can reach back to and touch, where you've seen God's hand deliver you, restore you, answer prayers in places of great desperation.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 21, picking up the end of the story here.
SPEAKER_00: Then he spoke to the children of Israel, saying, When your children ask their fathers, and if you're in your physical books or you're online in your phones, I would just highlight this one as dads, men.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna speak to the men in the room.
SPEAKER_00: If you're a granddad, if you are a father, I want you to highlight this because he's speaking specifically here to a mantle that we possess as men that we have to honor.
SPEAKER_00: We have to be obedient to this.
SPEAKER_00: This is critical for us.
SPEAKER_00: And women, there's many blessings as moms and grandmothers too, and you have a beautiful calling on your lives and what you pour into and build in your children.
SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't do it without my bride for sure.
SPEAKER_00: But this is specifically something that he's giving an instruction and a mandate to the fathers.
SPEAKER_00: When your children ask their fathers in the time to come, saying, What are these stones?
SPEAKER_00: Then you shall let your children know, saying, Israel crossed over this Jordan on a dry land.
SPEAKER_00: See, we are given instruction, men, to live a life that is consistent with both public and private memorials, which give testament to our life, our devotion to a living God in Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: A Father's work is to leave a legacy of love, faithfulness, and endurance unto the mission of our lives call.
SPEAKER_00: We seek God's kingdom first, living from a whole heart and conquering the sin and fear in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: I'll share this.
SPEAKER_00: My heart was in a bad space this week, towards the end of the week.
SPEAKER_00: I entered in good space.
SPEAKER_00: I was I was good.
SPEAKER_00: I was like good.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know what happened.
SPEAKER_00: Like coming into the weekend, I was just kind of getting sour and I was leaking on my family in not a positive way.
SPEAKER_00: And so I had this moment where I would just found myself in my car by myself on a drive to go pick up.
SPEAKER_00: I had some family visiting and I was gonna go pick them up last night.
SPEAKER_00: And it was about a 25-minute drive by myself, and I started taking my heart to God.
SPEAKER_00: I knew because I'd gotten some warning signals on the dashboard from my family, right?
SPEAKER_00: They're kind of like, you're pinging, dude, and you might need some space or figure out what's going on with you.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, what is going on with me?
SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know what's going on with me.
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm sitting in my car, I'm just driving, and God's working on my heart, and I'm realizing that you know, there's things that I'm I'm in a season of that I'm working through that I have confliction about, unknowns for me, and I'm going, what is all this adding up to?
SPEAKER_00: And I took my heart to God and I was just kind of like, I'm anxious today, Lord, know me, search me, and what do I need to bring back to you?
SPEAKER_00: And and in that space, he brought peace, he brought understanding, and he's like, just today is your daily bread.
SPEAKER_00: Don't worry about tomorrow, don't even worry about the day after.
SPEAKER_00: Don't worry about what you're gonna say on Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: Just give me your heart now in this moment.
SPEAKER_00: Let me father you, let me heal this concern in you, and and then you can take your anxiousness.
SPEAKER_00: I'll take that from you.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, oh, okay, well, I mean, I've said that to people before.
SPEAKER_00: You actually want me to do that now, okay?
SPEAKER_00: All right, all right, I'll live that out.
SPEAKER_00: But then from that place, I realized that I had to go back because I had kind of was a, I was publicly kind of a jerk, I also had to publicly restore some hearts.
SPEAKER_00: And so before uh I brought dinner back with my relative to the family that night, and I kind of put it at the dinner table, and I said, Hey, can everybody come in the room?
SPEAKER_00: And just from a place of humility, after God had dealt with my fear and my sadness, I I had to give repentance and a public apology to my family who I had hurt over the course of the last couple days, um, in a place of sincerity and honesty.
SPEAKER_00: And and these are the moments where I share only with you just from a place of example only, because it's not a place of pride.
SPEAKER_00: I'm actually pretty ashamed of why I couldn't figure it out sooner.
SPEAKER_00: But really, my heart was man, I would love to have those 72 hours back.
SPEAKER_00: I would love to redo some of those moments for some great memories, and I had lost those.
SPEAKER_00: I had wasted that time being stuck in kind of like just spinning my wheels in the mud.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, man, I that is not how I want to live, and that is not the model I want for my kids.
SPEAKER_00: And so there's been times where Mandy and I have had to model that where we come back to our children and say, listen, you know, we're mom and dad.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we will set down kind of the operating procedure, the boundaries where we want you to live from, but we make mistakes.
SPEAKER_00: We're humans too, and I can honestly admit, like, I made a mistake here, and I'm I'm genuinely sorry.
SPEAKER_00: Please forgive me.
SPEAKER_00: And it was great.
SPEAKER_00: We were able to move forward, we had a lot of fun that night.
SPEAKER_00: There was laughing back in the house, but I realized the atmosphere that I was bringing with me in my funk.
SPEAKER_00: And I just I had to get rid of it, and God was so gracious to do that.
SPEAKER_00: So, my question right now is what are you modeling in your home for your children?
SPEAKER_00: Man, are you modeling humility, repentance, and trusting God with the hard things in your life?
SPEAKER_00: Are you modeling the fear of the Lord in your life?
SPEAKER_00: Fear of the Lord is a profound sense of awe, reverence, and respect for God's supreme power and authority, trusting Him to lead you over through beyond the Jordan into the great promises that he has for you.
SPEAKER_00: What will be your memorial unto the Lord with your life that they may ask you one day about?
SPEAKER_00: Dad, remember that time when you said, when you did?
SPEAKER_00: What was that about?
SPEAKER_00: What were you going through?
SPEAKER_00: How did you recover from that?
SPEAKER_00: How did you overcome that?
SPEAKER_00: Because if all we are leaving our kids is something you need a lawyer to settle, how sad.
SPEAKER_00: But if we leave them a genuine faith in Jesus Christ and we don't have much else to leave in the way of material possessions, we have given them everything.
SPEAKER_00: And I know as men we put our hand to the plow and we're storing up for the next generation, and that's good, and we should be doing that too.
SPEAKER_00: But if that's not your story, but at the end of the day, they can look at dad's life and they can say, you know what?
SPEAKER_00: My dad loved God.
SPEAKER_00: He worked hard and he loved us.
SPEAKER_00: And he showed me the way of the cross, and he showed me the way through the wilderness, and he did it with grace, and he did it with humility, and he did it with obedience.
SPEAKER_00: Then that's a gift, that is a treasure.
SPEAKER_00: Lastly, as we wrap it up, the chapter, verse 23, for the Lord your God, this is what he's saying, the memorials for, and this is what he will instruct these generations of children to come.
SPEAKER_00: For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan before you until you had crossed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, twofold miracle, which he dried up before us until we had crossed over, that all the peoples of the earth may know the hand of the Lord that is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever.
SPEAKER_00: If we were to look back at the last verses, last two verses of chapter two.
SPEAKER_00: So the two men returned, descended from the mountain, crossed over, and they came to Joshua, the son of Nun, and told him all that they had befallen them, all that had befallen them.
SPEAKER_00: And they said to Joshua, Truly, the Lord has delivered all the land into our hands, for indeed all the inhabitants of the country are faint-hearted because of us.
SPEAKER_00: They fear us.
SPEAKER_00: As sons and daughters of the living God, we are to give him our fear.
SPEAKER_00: When we pivot from the fears of this world, and we live in the holy fear of the awesome power of God's love and providence, we will overcome the impassable Jordan rivers and the perceivably impenetrable walls of the Jerichos in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: Proverbs 9:10 says this to us The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that we would operate in this same capacity.
SPEAKER_00: We have a choice today, men and women, with our fear.
SPEAKER_00: We can flee everything and run, or we can pivot, give our fear to God, fear him in his great benevolence and love and protection over us, and we can face everything and rise.
SPEAKER_00: That is my desire for my family.
SPEAKER_00: That's my desire for this church.
SPEAKER_00: It is a joy to be your pastor, to be able to lead and teach occasionally.
SPEAKER_00: I see God's hand moving in the cities of Colorado Springs across our nation, but I also see the enemy at work trying to consistently overtake us and our hearts in fear.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that we would just be obedient.
SPEAKER_00: Take some of the moves here in the playbook from Joshua, where God's leading his people so lovingly, so faithfully.
SPEAKER_00: And then as he leads you in the days ahead, what are the memorials?
SPEAKER_00: What are the totens that he's leading you to set up?
SPEAKER_00: And what's the legacy that you're leaving behind for your children, for the next generation?
SPEAKER_00: What memorials will they revisit when they come to hard places that they can get restored and remember the beauty in God's hand of deliverance over you and your situations?
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to the Road Church Podcast.
SPEAKER_00: We pray today's message has empowered you to make a difference in your world.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about The Road Church and to find more content like this, go to theroad.org.
SPEAKER_00: That's theroad.org.