Faithful In The Waiting
God said to Joshua, “I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses.” (Joshua 1:3)
Forty years earlier, Joshua had been one of the twelve spies sent to explore the Promised Land. He had seen the land for himself and believed that God intended to give it to the Israelites. But the people became overwhelmed by the obstacles they saw ahead of them. They decided the challenges were too great and turned away from the gift God had offered.
So Joshua waited.
For the next forty years, he served faithfully under Moses and continued to lead in the wilderness. Then Moses died. And almost immediately, God spoke to Joshua:
Now is the time. Move forward. I am giving this land to the people. Go where I lead you, stay within the boundaries I have given you, and remain faithful to Me.
That is my paraphrase of God’s words to Joshua in Joshua 1:1–5.
God promised Joshua that He would be with him and that He would give him the authority he needed to lead the people. Joshua h...
Standing Through
We tend to do whatever we can to get out of the way of adversity. We may try to think our way out of the mess, to look for help from others or to pray that God will get us out or make it stop. We also receive continual input and advertising that offer us products that will stop our troubles and give us access to the good life to which we are all entitled. If your difficulty is weight, muscle tone, sickness, finance, loneliness, depression or erectile dysfunction – “We have a product that will take care of that for you.”
However, God’s ways are often very different from ours. He uses the hurdles and stubborn obstacles of life to deepen us and produce lasting fruit in our lives. Wisdom and character are grown through adversity, not through escape. There is no product that you can buy that will give you the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22) or understanding of the ways of God. These are only forged through a mixture of God’s truth and the kinds of adversity from which we usually seek...
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