Transcript (Auto-generated)

This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.

Good evening, everybody. It's good to see you. I'm not sure if you can hear me, but I can see you anyway. It's lovely to see you. I've got rather a lot on this lectern.

Oh, I've got an iPad. I'm going to put this down here.

It's amazing the things you find on a church lectern. And the advice is never drink water you find at the front church either, because it may have been there for a few months, I'm sure, when in this church it would have been freshly poured. I know. Here we go. Welcome to those of you who've come to join us tonight from St.

Matt's Nick. It's great to see you and everybody from St. Matt's. We have been praying for you already. It's lovely just to enjoy fellowship together as part of one church.

So here we are. And if you're here for the first time, but not from St. Matt's, you're welcome as well. My name is Steve. I'm the vicar here.

If you've got your bibles, do keep it open there. At Joshua, chapter one, it's page 216, church bibles. And we're going to pray, and then we're going to look at that passage together as we begin a new series. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word.

Thank you that we have it in our own language. Whenever we open the Bible, you are speaking. And we pray tonight that we would have ears to hear what you have to say to us as a church. Lord, help us to take to heart these words, this encouragement ourselves. Whatever our situation tonight, Lord, speak to us.

We pray and help us to trust in you. We ask in Jesus name. Amen.

Verse two. The Lord said to Joshua, son of nun, Moses assistant. Moses, my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people get ready to cross the river Jordan into the land I'm about to give you. I hate crossing borders, don't you?

I don't know if you've crossed the border recently at an airport or maybe you've gone over the land, or I went by ship once somewhere. And you get to the border, and I always feel guilty, like I've done something terrible. And there's the immigration official, but I know I haven't. And I know I've packed my own bags and I haven't got explosives or anything like that in theme. But still, eventually I get to the front of the queue and my heart is beating.

And then eventually the stamp, the visa comes and, oh, what a relief. I'm through. Well, our chapter tonight is about crossing a border. Crossing a border. And I don't know, maybe there is somebody here in church this evening and you are at a border.

A border of your own, a border in your life, a new chapter, a new challenge. Maybe it's a new school, maybe it's a new job, maybe it's a new chapter in your family, maybe it's a health concern. Whatever it is, you're standing at a border and the future is unknown. Well, tonight, as I say, we're beginning this new series in the book of Joshua. It's about 1400 BC, and the Israelites are standing at a border.

They're there on the east side of the river Jordan. They've been rescued from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, God's prophet and Lawgiver. They've wandered the wilderness for 40 years, wasted time, until that first generation has died. And now the Wilderness is behind them. They're at the border, and in front of them, it's all unknown.

We're with Joshua, Moses assistant and his successor. He was a former spy and soldier, now church leader, if you like. Probably in his sixties. Moses had always been there. But now Moses is gone and they're at a border.

And what's going to happen in the future?

When we first meet JOshua, he actually has another name. Perhaps you know this. He's not called Joshua. He's called Hoshea. Hoshea.

And when someone in the Bible gets their name changed, as Joshua does in numbers, chapter 13, that's a significant moment. So Hoshea, which means save me, becomes JOshua, which means the Lord saves, a or the Lord's salvation. So from that prayer, save me, comes the answer. Save me, the Lord saves. So here is a book of the Bible called Joshua.

The Lord saves. Do you know how it's translated in Greek to HebRew? Joshua. Do you know how it's translated in Greek? Jesus.

Jesus. There is a whole book of the Bible in the Old Testament called Jesus about a man full of the spirit who leads God's people across a border into their inheritance. I wonder what that could be about. We're going to explore it together over the next few weeks. This is a book for us.

It's a book about Jesus and how he leads his church safely through death into our eternal inheritance. And all that we read in the book of Joshua and all that happened all those centuries ago is a signpost. It really happened, of course, but it's a signpost pointing beyond the events themselves to something even more wonderful. And if you're a follower of Jesus, then you're on a journey, too. All of us as christians are heading towards an inheritance, the new heavens, the new earth.

And there is a border to cross one day, the border of death. But on the way, there may be lots of other boundaries and borders, and perhaps you're facing one tonight. Some challenges. Now, before we get into chapter one, I just thought, look, Joshua is full of battles. It's full of commands to put people to death.

And we're reading this chapter tonight in the context of weeks of violence in the Middle east. And as I've been preparing this, this sermon over the last few days, I've just been thinking, this is a sermon. This is a chapter about preparing for military operations on the west bank, the west bank of the River Jordan. How contemporary does that feel? We need to be praying, but it does send shivers down our spines, I think, as we read this.

So I just want us to be really clear about a few things as we set out. We need to understand what's going on in Joshua. Otherwise, we're going to mix up what we read in Joshua with what's going on in the Middle east today.

When we read Joshua, we might be anxious reading about the judgments that are coming on the Canaanites in the next few chapters. The Lord said that the Israelites mustn't show mercy to any of them, men, women or children. He said, you've got to put them to death. And that might make some of us think about the violence done in the Middle east right now, perhaps some of that violence done even by appealing to these scriptures. So some things, four things that we really need to keep in mind as we set out.

First thing, the Book of Joshua describes a unique situation, a unique time in God's plan of salvation. The Lord never again gave any leader in the Bible the kind of instructions that he was going to give to Joshua. So nobody today can take the Lord's instructions from this book and think that they are obeying God. That's the first thing. Second thing, when the Lord told Joshua to wipe out the Canaanites, it had nothing whatever to do with ethnicity or race or anything like that.

Israel always had room for other nations, and we're going to see that actually, in a couple of weeks time, Rahab, Rahab the prostitute, joined and threw her lot in with Israelites and became a member of Israel, the Gibeonites. In chapter nine, the whole people group, they all en masse, join Israel and become card carrying members of Israel with all the rights and privileges that go with that. And Rahab, after all, became one of Jesus ancestors. That's in the New Testament now. The Lord's judgement is never an ethnic thing.

Third thing, the Canaanites that we read about that will come across were not peace loving, innocent people. Their unbelief and sin that we read of in the Bible included rape, child sacrifice, occult practise, sexual immorality. And the list went on and on and on. And the Lord had been very patient with them. 500 years.

500 years. He'd given them time to repent, but they wouldn't. And so finally, the Lord judged them because those things matter. And that's a good thing. That's a good thing.

And then fourthly and finally, the Lord's judgments in Joshua. They are signposts and they point us to the day of judgement. Just as the promised land was a temporary signpost in Old Testament history, pointing to our final inheritance, so the judgments in Joshua are signpost judgments, pointing to the day when Jesus, the real Joshua, is going to step back into this earth and judge all sin and cleanse the earth and renew it and make it a fit home for his people forever. Joshua gives us a snapshot of that final judgement and it reassures us there will be a day of justice. All that is wrong is going to be punished.

It will be okay. Everything will be brought into the light. So we need to make sure that we find forgiveness for our sins and peace with God ourselves, because surely that day is coming. We'll come back to this in weeks to come. But look, just wanted to sketch out some of the big maybe objections that we might have, things that startle us as we read through Joshua.

But let's turn to chapter one with the remaining time we have. And I want to ask you as we begin, what do you think is the greatest temptation for a christian leader?

What's the greatest temptation a christian leader could face? I wonder how you would answer that. John Stott, who was a christian leader, a pastor, writer, died a few years ago. He said the greatest temptation for a leader can be summarised in one word, discouragement. Discouragement.

I'm not sure it's just christian leaders, though. I think that's probably all of us, isn't it? All of us are prone to discouragement. We all need encouragement if we're to keep going in the christian life. And Joshua one is a chapter stuffed full of encouragement and I want to share it with you tonight.

Be strong and courageous. It says that four times. Be strong and very courageous. Be strong and courageous. Be strong and courageous.

So Israel is facing this mammoth, mammoth task. They're standing at a border on the east side of the river Jordan. Moses is gone. Joshua needs encouragement. Maybe you do, too.

So here are four grounds for encouragement tonight from Joshua. One. Here's the first. The permanence of God's promises. The permanence of God's promises.

God keeps his promises. This is verses one to four centuries earlier in the book of Genesis, God made a promise to an iraqi nomad called Abraham that he would receive a land that he would father a nation, and that through one of his descendants, blessing and salvation would come to the whole world. And humanly, it wasn't possible. Abraham was an old man. He had no land, no children.

And even at the end of his life, all that there was to see was Isaac, the child of the promise, and a grave for his wife in the promised land, a son and a cave. That was it. It wasn't much to look at, but God had made a promise, and God's promises are permanent. And so now here are the Israelites 500 years later. Abraham's descendants, millions of them, millions of them, standing on the bank of the river Jordan, shouldering their packs, finishing their breakfast, sharpening their swords, waiting at the border.

And God is about to fulfil his promise. He says, I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses.

Now, why did that matter? Why did the land matter? Why did they have to live there? Why there? The land is mentioned 87 times in the book of Joshua.

It must be important.

It was part of God's promise to Abraham. We've seen that. But it was significant. It was important for a reason. The land stood for something.

It stood for something more. And there are things in life that are like that, aren't there, that stand for more than the thing there is themselves. I don't know if somebody has given you a gift token recently. I had a birthday recently. Somebody gave me a gift token.

You get a bit of plastic, it's not worth a lot, is it? It's just a piece of plastic. But it stands for something more.

It holds the promise of something bigger and better. And the land, the promised land that they were about to occupy was just that. It was a token. It was a signpost to something bigger and better, something more. God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 15 was of a land stretching from the river of Egypt, the Nile, to the river Euphrates in Iraq.

Today, that's a huge piece of land. That's more than they actually went in and occupied. Did you ever know that the promise is much bigger? And even in verse four of our chapter, the boundaries that are described are far wider than that little strip of land that they actually do go in and take. What they received, they should have known, was a token of something more.

It pointed to something bigger. Seen through the telescope of faith into the New Testament, it was through Abraham's descendant, Jesus. Jesus the Messiah, that God's promise would take in the whole world. The whole world is your inheritance if you're a Christian. Jesus said, blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

The earth, that's right. Two Peter 313 in keeping with his promise, we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earthen earth. God's promise, rightly understood, wasn't just for a little strip of land at the end of the Med. It took in the whole creation. And the amazing thing is that Abraham seems to have known it.

Have a look at Hebrews chapter eleven. We're just going to flip over to Hebrews eleven just for a moment. Page 1209. If you've got the church Bible, 1209, but I think it's good to read this ourselves so, you know, I'm not making it up. Hebrews chapter eleven and verse nine.

Abraham knew that this bit of land stood for so much more, and he showed it by the way he lived.

Have you got that? Verse nine. By faith, Abraham made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country. He lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

Abraham lived in a tent all his life. He was one of the richest men in the world. But he lived in a tent, not just because he liked camping, he deliberately lived in a tent. He didn't want to settle down in Canaan. He deliberately lived in a tent to show that he was looking forward to a great inheritance, the same one that we're waiting for, a city with foundations who's architect and builder is God.

And so, folks, we live in a beautiful part of the world here in Linfield in West Sussex. But this isn't it. Believe it or not, we've got a pond in Linfield, but it's going to get even better than that. There's an inheritance even more wonderful still to come. So we don't want to be building heaven on earth now.

We don't want to be settling down now. Spiritually, we need to be living in a tent of okay, and the Lord is going to get us to our inheritance, and it might be that for somebody here tonight. Life is very hard at the moment. And we're thinking, how am I going to get there? How am I going to cross this next border that I'm standing at now?

And Joshua tells us, well, the Lord gave them that as a token. And the Lord has guaranteed us our inheritance not only by that, but also as supremely by the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by the giving of his holy spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance. Nothing can stop him. Maybe there's somebody tonight, and you're saying to yourself, yeah, but I'm not a very good christian, and I'm going through something at the moment, and I feel I'm just hanging on.

Well, God's promise is that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion. He says that you're not going to miss out. There's an inheritance ahead. We're on a journey, and you and I are going to get there. Because of the permanence of God's promises, he keeps his promise.

Here's a second reason to be encouraged tonight. Not just the permanence of God's promise, but the assurance of God's presence. The assurance of God's presence.

Every now and again, Time magazine, I don't know if it still does, but he used to draw up a list of the hundred most influential people. I reckon Moses ought to be on that list, really. By any account, Moses was one of the greatest leaders in history. Surely to the generation they camped by the river Jordan, Moses had always been there. He'd always been part of their life under God.

He'd led their parents out of slavery in Egypt. He'd held out his staff and the Red Sea had parted. He'd given them water in the wilderness manner every morning. He defeated God's enemies. He prayed and preached for 40 years.

He led a whole nation through the desert and brought them to the border of the promised land, not once, but twice. And now he was gone. He was gone. They were without him for the first time ever.

But God wasn't gone as I was with Moses. He promises in verse five, so I will be with you. I will never leave you or forsake you. It's the same promise that God had made 40 years earlier at a burning bush to a very hesitant excuse making ask somebody else, but not me, sort of man called Moses. I will never leave you or forsake you.

I don't know how many times I've read that to people in their hospital beds or at the end of their lives. I wonder how many times I've read it to myself. And I wonder how many times you've read it to yourself. It's a precious promise. I will never, ever, ever leave you, the Lord says.

And I wonder, is that a message that somebody here needs to hear tonight? Are you facing that challenge? Giants ahead, a giant problem, giant situation. It's overwhelming. Or maybe a giant temptation, a temptation like discouragement or greed.

And I choose greed because the New Testament chooses that as a giant temptation when it quotes this verse in hebrews 13. Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, never will I leave you or forsake you. So we say with confidence, the Lord is my helper. I will not be afraid. What can man do to me if you have God and he's promised never to leave you, what's money for goodness sake?

The Lord has promised he would never leave us. It's a promise to learn and to cling to. So the permanence of God's promise, the assurance of God's presence. Here's the third one. The centrality of God's word.

I'm looking at verses seven and eight. The centrality of God's word, verse seven. Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you. And do not turn from it to the right or the left, that you may be successful wherever you go.

I was reading this week the story of an american missionary from the 18 hundreds. I should have read it by now, but I hadn't got around to reading it. The story of Adoniram Judson. Do you know the story of Adoniram Judson? He was a missionary, baptist missionary in the end to India and then to Burma, to Myanmar, Burma as it was called.

In those days, life there was brutal, constant battle against heat, malaria, cholera, dysentery, and Adoniram Judson and his wife worked in Burma for six years before they saw a single person become a Christian. Can you imagine six hard years before one person responded at one point? Adoniram Judson spent nearly 18 months in prison, tortured. His wife died, and all three of their children died in Burma. He buried them and he married again, and his second wife died.

And he was in Burma for 33 years before he went back on his first visit back to the United States. And he was asked once about how he kept going and what of the future of the church in Burma. And he said, and I thought this was amazing. The future is as bright as the promises of God. Isn't that a wonderful thing?

God's word stuffed full of his promises. The future is as bright as the promises of God. How could he say that? Well, God tells Joshua here to think about his promises every day. Joshua's Bible was probably only the law of Moses.

The first five books, Genesis to deuteronomy, plus some of the psalms and maybe job and the law of Moses set out how the Israelites should live once they got into the promised land. As they're waiting for the messiah to come, it set out how they would enjoy the Lord's blessings if they obeyed, if they turned away, how they would face his curses. But Joshua is told, meditate on it day and night. Think about it. We've had this series over the summer.

I've hidden your word in my heart. That's what Joshua is told to do. Hide your word in my heart. Meditate on it. Meditate literally means mutter it.

Talk to yourself about it, Joshua. Preach to yourself. And we have to do that sometimes. Talk it over to ourselves. Because encouragement from other people is important.

Important, but encouragement from God's word. You had that situation. You've had a hard day. You've been in a difficult meeting, a difficult situation, and then you open God's word and it's exactly, exactly what you need to hear, and you can go to bed and sleep. It's a wonderful thing.

So, daily Bible reading. A friend of mine calls it daily mind management. Talk to yourself. Let God's word set the agenda. Remind us of his love and his promises.

And the truth. Is your appetite small? Then start small. How about praying? Do you find that really hard to do?

Then start small. Start with the Lord's prayer. But let's start. So, grounds for encouragement we're thinking of for Joshua and for us today, the permanence of God's promise, the assurance of God's presence, the centrality of God's word. Here's the last.

The unity of God's people. This is verses twelve to 18, the unity of God's people.

So wind the clock back. Earlier in the story, in numbers 32, of the twelve tribes of Israel, two and a half of them, two and a half of them had said to Moses, we quite like the land on this side of the river Jordan. It's quite good for our animals. If it's all right with you, we're not going to cross over. We're just going to stay here.

This will be our inheritance. Don't make us cross the Jordan. We want this bit. Now, Moses knows what they're like. He suspects some monkey business.

So he makes them promise that when the time comes, they will cross over the Jordan with their brothers and sisters. And they agree to. In fact, they say, when the time comes and we get to the river Jordan, we'll go first. We'll go into battle first. We'll go ahead as we go across the river Jordan, and when everybody else has settled down, then we'll go back across the Jordan, back to our inheritance.

Does that make sense? Back to the east of the Jordan. And Joshua reminds them of it here in this chapter. And they say, we'll do it. Verse 16.

Whatever you've commanded us, we will do. Wherever you send us, we will go. Just as we obeyed Moses say, we will obey you.

These two and a half tribes, they're a model for us, of unity and of responsibility for one another.

One of the funerals that we had here last week, I was talking to the older brother of the gentleman whose service it was, and he said to me, my three brothers were all christians. I'm the oldest of. And now I've seen them all safely home. And now it's my turn. Lord, now let your servant depart in peace.

I thought that was a wonderful thing, such a moving thing, responsive responsibility. And it's a wonderful thing in a church. When we are aware of our responsibility for each other, when we feel a sense of responsibility, somebody's not there at church and we notice it, and we don't just think, oh, I wonder where they were. Will we get in touch tonight? We give them a ring or drop on WhatsApp, give them a call, or we chat to somebody after the service and we realise something's not quite right.

And instead of just kind of, well, I've got to get home and the conversation's moving on. We just stop and we say, is everything okay? Is there anything I pray for? It's a sense of responsibility. We take that risk.

New Testament says, if one part suffers, the whole body suffers. When one part is honoured, every part rejoices. So who are you responsible for? And who's responsible for you? Who do you know in church?

And who knows you? Because maybe at the start you come to church, it's okay just to come, and you want to be a bit anonymous and hide behind a pillar and so on, that's fine. But church has to go beyond just God and me. Church is family and we have responsibilities for one another. Titus women, the mentoring group.

Are you in that ladies?

Men do we have a prayer partner or a prayer triplet. Are we in a small group of some kind when we're going through it? Will somebody know and pray and put an arm around us? And will we do the same for somebody else? Or will they slip out without the encouragement and without the prayer and try and do it on their own?

We need one another. So here we go. Four grounds for encouragement for Joshua and for us. The permanence of God's promise, the assurance of God's and presence, the centrality of God's word and the unity of God's people. Moses had died.

Israel is at a border, and the Lord had not left her. And in the journey of your own christian life, on the way to your inheritance, you may find yourself at a border. Tonight, a new chapter in life is opening up for you, and you don't know what it holds. And you challenge feeling overwhelmed, maybe a trial that you are in right now.

I want to say to you that just as God never left Joshua and the Israelites, he will never leave you. I will never leave you or forsake you. We have his promise. We have his presence. We have his word.

And we have each other. We have his people. And that will be enough to carry you through whatever it is that you are facing tonight and in the days and weeks ahead, and eventually to carry you and me and all of us into our eternal inheritance with him.

So before we sing, let me pray for us. Heavenly Father, here we are tonight with our bibles open, Lord, metaphorically, with our arms around one another. And we want to pray for one another, for ourselves at the start of a new week. And whatever lies ahead, whatever border or boundary we find ourselves at on this journey through life. With you, Lord, strengthen us.

We pray. Your promise, your presence, your word, your people, we thank you for them. Go with us, we ask, Lord, into this new week and lead us home for Jesus sake. Amen.