11/3/19 Joshua 3:1-17 “He Will Carry You!”

01 Nov 11/3/19 Joshua 3:1-17 “He Will Carry You!”

11/3/19    Joshua 3:1-17     “He Will Carry You!”

Today we are going to look in the Old Testament and we will do this for a couple of more Sundays.  We will be looking at Joshua and Judges.  These are great books to study in a Bible study.  Anyway, when I was still going to school, I had to write a paper on these two books.  I suppose one could say that this is one of the fruits of my going to school.  I think that it is always interesting how the Old Testament relates to the New Testament.  There are some people who think that the Old Testament is not relevant.  That is not true.  Today we will look at a well-known passage in Joshua, find out how it relates to the New Testament and to our lives in Jesus Christ.

Keith Davis tells this wonderful story of a man named Jack who was out jogging one day.  He passed a cliff and got too close and fell.  On the way down, he grabbed onto a branch that stopped his fall.  But there was no way up and no way down.  He began to holler, “Hello up there can anyone hear me.”  He yelled for hours and was about to give up when he heard a voice.  It said, “Jack, can you hear me?”  “Yes, yes,” he replied.  “I can hear you.  I’m down here.”  The voice said, “I can see you, Jack, are you all right?”  “Yes, but…who are you and where are you?”  “I am the Lord, Jack, and I am everywhere.”  Jack said, “The Lord?  You mean God?”  “That’s me.” God answered.  “Oh God, help me, I promise that if you get me down from here, I’ll stop sinning.  I’ll be a really good person and serve you for the rest of my life.”  God replied “Easy on the promises, Jack.  First let’s get you down and then we can discuss those.”  Jack said, “I’ll do anything, Lord, just tell me what to do.”  God said, “Ok, let go of the branch.”  “What!” said Jack.  “I said, let go of the branch.  Just trust me and let go.”  There was a long pause before Jack started to holler again, “Hello, hello, is there anybody else up there?”

This is really a timeless story as it applies to us today and also to the Israelites in our reading.  These people had seen a lot.  Their ancestors had seen even more.  They had been freed from Egypt but complained and wanted to go back.  They had followed God’s cloud by day and the pillar of fire at night.  They had their backs to the Red Sea and it was parted so they could escape the Egyptian army.

They had received manna and quail to eat in the wilderness.  Just as a little side bar, what do you think it would be like to eat manna for forty years?  It had to get a little old.  There could be only so many ways to fix it.  Anyway, they had also seen water come from a rock. They had seen many, many miracles from God.  And here they are today, on the banks of the Jordan River.

There were about a million people waiting to cross the river.  But this was the wet and flood season and the river was over its banks.  Usually the Jordan was maybe 100 yards wide and now it was a mile.  It would be something like trying to cross the Red River when it is flooding.  I can remember back in my home town St. Vincent, Minn. where the Red River could 6-8 miles wide during the flood season.

There is no way that they can cross this river so they have to wait three days because God has told them to wait three days.  This is one of the things that we really struggle with in our lives.  We find it hard to wait.  We live in an instant society.  Everything is fast.  Some of you younger folks don’t know what it is like to live without a microwave oven.  And some of us, like me, don’t remember when we didn’t even have electricity.

And all of this ‘instantness’ has overflowed into our spiritual lives.  Many people get upset with God because they want their prayers answered right now.  But that is not the way of God.  We read today that they had to wait 3 days to cross the Jordan.  God had reasons for this, I am sure.  So they waited and got ready to make the crossing.  The day before the crossing they were told to purify or consecrate themselves.

So now they are ready to cross.  The first thing they have to do is to step into the water.  Notice that there isn’t much disobedience here.  These people are doing what they are supposed to do.  They know the power of God and they know the love of God.  So if God tells them to do something, they do it.

In our modern broken world, this is one of the behaviors that is the farthest from some people’s minds.  We are not obedient.  When we go to a restaurant, we seem to have some sort of permission from the devil to just go ahead and eat and not give thanks to God for the food.  When we have graduates from high school, Satan has given us permission to leave God out of the ceremonies.  And at the rate we are going, it won’t be long before they can have me arrested for hate speech because I read from the Bible, God’s word, that certain behaviors are wrong. These behaviors are called sin. This just blows my mind because we are on that road, that road the goes to hell and we don’t even realize it.  The best way to turn this whole country around is to start to be obedient to God and the Bible.

And this is what God has told the Israelites in our reading.  You have to step into the water before God will do something.  Do you remember the story about Peter walking on water?  Peter had to step out of the boat before he could walk on water.  God is not about to reward you for sitting on the couch.  God will not reward you for not doing anything.  First you have to make a move toward God, and then he will carry you.

Here is another area where our world doesn’t do very well and dictates that message to its people.  We train our children not to do things.  We have foolish laws that tell us that they cannot do basically anything until they are 18.  We are enabling them to sit on the couch.  As a result, we have a whole generation who are totally content to sit back and watch the world go by because it is none of their business.  We need to get these young people engaged at a much earlier age.  There is not one person in any youth group that I have led who is not smarter than me.  We read a wonderful book called Do Hard Things by two teenage boys where the whole premise was to take that first step into the water.

I don’t think that I have to go any further into this because it really isn’t too hard to see just about anywhere we look.  I don’t mean to pick on young people today because the generation before them was not much different.  It won’t be long before everyone who lived in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s are gone.  And when they are, all we will have left is a society where our individual rights are more important than God.  This is why we need revival so much in this country.  It is time to give it back to God.

So our choice is either to sit on the banks of the Jordan and not do anything or we can follow Jesus and cross to the other side.  Joshua, in this case, is a figure representing Jesus.  In Hebrew his name is pronounced the same as Jesus. He was about as faithful a servant as there could be found in those days.  That is why he was so successful.  And the people followed Joshua to the other side.  It is the same as ‘following Jesus or not following Him?”  That is the question you need to answer every day when you get up.

I am sure that there were people who came to that river that was a mile wide and said that there was no way to get across.  They didn’t have time to build a bridge, or build enough boats to get across or find another route.  But they had seen and heard enough by this time that they had faith in God.  They trusted God so they obeyed.

So my question to you today is this.  What is your Jordan River that you have to cross?  For some of the youngsters, it may be starting school.  For some it may be starting high school or college.  Maybe someone here is contemplating marriage and that is your Jordan River.  Or maybe it might be divorce.  For some people it may be retirement or illness.  We all face some sort of major change and challenge in our lives at one time or another.  And these things are our Jordan Rivers.

I would like you to now notice what happens in our text.  They step into the water with God who is represented in the Ark of the Covenant.  Then the water from this swollen, flooded river ceases to flow immediately.  They then take the ark out into the middle of the river and stand there on dry ground as the people of Israel pass by to the other side.  God has promised them the land on the other side of the Jordan, and God has delivered them.

As our country turns from a believing country into a non-believing country, this is worthwhile to note.  We have a seveal wars happening right now.  We have politcal chaos.  Even in the religious arena, we have so-called preachers spreading the word of a feel good gospel.  I will tell you right now that the gospel feels good only if you follow all that it says, even the hard stuff which they neglect to tell you.

Sharon raised an interesting question one day.  She said, “You’re always telling us that we come to church every Sunday so we can feel good.  And then you tell us that shouldn’t come to church to feel good but to worship God.  How can it be both ways?”  The answer to this lies in our passage.  First of all we have to step into the water.  We have to come to church and worship God.  Then God will help us to feel better.  If we come here to feel good first, then it will never happen or if it does happen, it will be a false feeling.  God will reward us in ways that he sees fit.  So we can come to church to feel good but this won’t happen unless we first surrender to God in worship.  So we have to step into Jordan River during worship.

We also have a very serious political situation in our country.  This is another Jordan River.  I really don’t know where this is all going to lead but I do know that if we follow Jesus, then it will eventually lead to good things.  We have also been having trouble getting our crops harvested.  We have trouble with our retirement investments.  We have trouble in the housing market.  We are in a recessions and recoveries all the time.  We have to know where to look in all of these situations.

I always enjoyed meeting with our youth groups and we had fun whenever we met.  And these young adults at that time were getting to know me well enough that they could tell when I was fishing for an answer.  Anyway, we were talking about home towns and families and why they are so important to us and why we miss them when we are far away.  And I kept asking them why this was so.  And they kept giving me some great answers but they were all horizontal answers like because we love them or we miss them or things are familiar.  I couldn’t make them get the vertical connection until I got obvious with my hints.  The answer to all the questions is that God loves us and that we are all gifts from God including family and friends.  Everything that we ever do, everything that we will ever be is related to God.  We cannot get away from God so my advice to you is to join God.

I also told them one evening that I wished someone had told me these things when I was their age so that I didn’t have to waste 20 years of my life until I found God, waiting for me in the middle of the Jordan.  So if you don’t know Jesus in a personal way, repent of your sins and ask Him to live in your heart.  Do this today.

And for those of you who know Jesus, we have to remember that He is in charge of everything in our lives including all of our crises.  He is our way out of problems including our economic crisis.  We have to break out of all this horizontal thinking that is dominating in our society and start thinking vertical.  If you think that I am exaggerating, look at any of our present day political campaigns.  They are all talking about dollars and cents, dollars and cents, and dollars and cents.  I would love it to happen just once in my life time that political candidates would run on a platform of what is right and what is wrong.  It would be nice to see candidates anchored in the Bible.  I pray that I should live so long.

In closing I think that how our local youth think goes hand in hand with how we think.  As soon as we leave these doors on Sunday, we go back to our horizontal thinking.  The last place we look for help is in the arms of Jesus Christ.  And we all have Jordan Rivers in our lives.  And there standing in the middle of your flooded river is Jesus Christ telling you. “Come.  The river bed is dry.  Come and follow me and I will get you to the other side.  I will carry you.”  That is the good news.  Years ago someone changed the words to Simon and Garfunkle’s song, Bridge Over Troubled Waters to this; (Sing) “When you’re weary; feeling small; when tears are in your eyes; He will dry them all.  He’s on your side; oh, when times get rough; and pain is all around; like a bridge through troubled waters; He will carry you.  (Everybody) Like a bridge through troubled waters; He will carry you.”

He will carry you.  Jesus Christ will carry you.  Let’s pray.