Joshua 8: Courageous Obedience (Covenant Renewal)

Welcome to Family Worship with the church family of Eastern Hills Baptist Church this morning, to those of you in the room and to those of you online! I’m Bill Connors, senior pastor, and today we are going to finish up our eight week look at the boldness, courage, and obedience of Joshua and the Israelites in the book of Joshua. If you missed any of these messages, you can find them on our website or on our new mobile app, which we will talk more about in a moment.

If you are a visitor or guest this morning, this church family is glad that you’re here. We would like the opportunity to personally thank you for joining us today, and so we’d like to ask for just a little bit of information so we can send you a card of welcome and thanks. You can find a printed guest card in the back of the pew in front of you, or you can text the word WELCOME to 505-339-2004 to get a link for our digital communication card. If you’re in the room today, whether you fill out the physical card, the digital card, or decide not to share your information with us, I’d like to invite you to come and introduce yourself immediately following service this morning, because I have a gift that I’d like to give you to express our appreciation for your visit with us.

I have a couple of announcements to make before we get into the Word this morning.

Announcements

Upcoming week of prayer for international missions

Dessert Prayer Fellowships Mon 11/27 7-830pm:

Willards

Cuneos

Deanna Chadwick

Day of Prayer in Prayer Room Weds 11/29 630-630:

Friday Prayer Brunch Fri 12/1 930-1130 am

Treeces

New app and text giving.

Endeavor update - new HVAC units are in town and will be lifted to the roof tomorrow, so there will be a crane on site, and we won’t have access to the doors, but this should only be for tomorrow.

Opening

As I mentioned earlier, this morning we are finishing up our look at the book of Joshua, and our connection between the boldness, courage, and obedience of Joshua and Israel and the boldness, courage, and obedience that we are called to as followers of Jesus to share the message of the Gospel. Today we will look at the last chapter of the book of Joshua as we consider the picture of courageous obedience shown in the covenant renewal of Israel to God at the close of the book.

So as you are willing and able, please stand in honor of the reading of holy Scripture as we look at our focal passage this morning, Joshua 24:14-28:

Joshua 24:14–28 CSB

14 “Therefore, fear the Lord and worship him in sincerity and truth. Get rid of the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and worship the Lord. 15 But if it doesn’t please you to worship the Lord, choose for yourselves today: Which will you worship—the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living? As for me and my family, we will worship the Lord.” 16 The people replied, “We will certainly not abandon the Lord to worship other gods! 17 For the Lord our God brought us and our ancestors out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery, and performed these great signs before our eyes. He also protected us all along the way we went and among all the peoples whose lands we traveled through. 18 The Lord drove out before us all the peoples, including the Amorites who lived in the land. We too will worship the Lord, because he is our God.” 19 But Joshua told the people, “You will not be able to worship the Lord, because he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions and sins. 20 If you abandon the Lord and worship foreign gods, he will turn against you, harm you, and completely destroy you, after he has been good to you.” 21 “No!” the people answered Joshua. “We will worship the Lord.” 22 Joshua then told the people, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you yourselves have chosen to worship the Lord.” “We are witnesses,” they said. 23 “Then get rid of the foreign gods that are among you and turn your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.” 24 So the people said to Joshua, “We will worship the Lord our God and obey him.” 25 On that day Joshua made a covenant for the people at Shechem and established a statute and ordinance for them. 26 Joshua recorded these things in the book of the law of God; he also took a large stone and set it up there under the oak at the sanctuary of the Lord. 27 And Joshua said to all the people, “You see this stone—it will be a witness against us, for it has heard all the words the Lord said to us, and it will be a witness against you, so that you will not deny your God.” 28 Then Joshua sent the people away, each to his own inheritance.

PRAYER (Israel; Metamorphi Church, Derek Witt)

Since the title of this message is “Courageous Obedience,” you might be wondering what makes obedience courageous. I mean, obedience is not normally the message the accompanies “courage” in our time, especially in our media. Think about it for a minute: how many movies have you seen where the courageous children or teens throw off the restraints of their authoritarian parents and forge their own path because their heart demands it? Doesn’t that make disobedience sound courageous?

Isn’t this (to some extent at least) the theme of many Disney movies? Just to name a few: Obedience was the obstacle to love in the The Little Mermaid; the antithesis of bravery in The Lion King; the barrier to freedom in Finding Nemo; the impediment to personal expression in Brave; the oppressor of power in Frozen; the stumbling block to answers and success in Moana; and the restriction to creativity in Coco.

Now don’t get me wrong: I like all of those stories. And in each of them, the authority figures (usually parents) aren’t bad guys (like in Tangled). They are just parents trying to do the best they can to protect their children from poor choices. But somehow, the children who are heroic, brave, and intrepid are the ones that go and do their own thing despite the warnings and restrictions of their parents.

But what if this message is tainted? What if there’s something to be said for courageous obedience? What we tend to forget about most of the movies I just listed is that the parents or other loved ones often had to pay a steep price when the child or teen had to be rescued from their disobedient choices. I’m not saying this to come down on you students or kids in the room—I’m trying to paint obedience in a different light for us all. I’m also not saying that all of us should blindly obey simply anyone in authority just because they are in authority. I’m saying that if we are being called to obedience by a good authority, a trusted authority, a responsible authority, maybe it’s most courageous to deny ourselves by practicing obedience.

Consider this:

The single greatest act of courage in all of history was also the single greatest act of obedience in all of history.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, the Lord Jesus Christ wrestled with what He knew would happen the next morning: that He would be crucified between two criminals in order to pay the penalty that humanity owes because of our sins. The righteous dying for the unrighteous. The perfect One dying for the imperfect. The king dying for the rebels in His kingdom.

And why? Because of the love of God, and the obedience of Jesus. Look at what Jesus said in His prayer in the Garden:

Matthew 26:39 CSB

39 Going a little farther, he fell facedown and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

Because of the Father’s love for us, Jesus came. Jesus’s obedient death made our salvation possible. He died an unimaginable death, taking an unfathomable weight of sin on Himself, receiving the punishment for that sin in our place. And then, as only He could, He overcame death and rose again according the Scriptures, and He ascended and now sits at the right hand of the throne of God as the Bible says. And He is going to return and judge the living and the dead, and give eternal life to those who belong to Him, to those who have believed in Him.

In order to save us from our sins, to save us from death, and to give us eternal life, Jesus chose to follow His Father. He responded to the Father’s will, and not His own. He offered to the Father His exclusive allegiance, and He did what was required to fulfill His calling and ministry. Without His courageous obedience, we would have no hope.

Here at the end of the book of Joshua, we see the same things borne out in the renewal of Israel’s covenant relationship with God.

First,

1) Courageous obedience to God is a choice.

Before we get too far into this point, I want to make something clear: Nothing that I say here this morning should be taken to mean that we in any way earn our salvation. We are saved, as I said, by faith in the work of Jesus Christ for us. It’s not something that we could ever deserve. It’s not something that we could possibly earn. Our salvation is a free gift from God merely by His grace because of His great love for us, His creation. The only thing that we bring to our salvation is our need for it and all we “do” is surrender in trust. We’re saved when we give up on saving ourselves and believe in what Jesus has already done to save us. My primary focus this morning is on those who are already saved—those who are already God’s people, like the Israelites.

And the first thing we see in our focal passage is that their obedience would be a choice that they would have to make:

Joshua 24:14–15 CSB

Up to this point in chapter 24, two things have happened: first, Joshua has assembled all of Israel at a place called Shechem. Shechem was about 25 miles north of Gibeon, which we heard about a couple of weeks ago, and was pretty much in the geographic center of Israel. It sat upon what is called Tel Balata in Israel’s West Bank area today. Shechem was important for several reasons. More on that in a moment.

The second thing that has taken place in chapter 24 is that the Lord has reminded Israel of their history. Remember that the Hebrew people come from Abraham. He was the one who received the calling and promise of God, but he didn’t originally come from a monotheistic family. As God recited Jewish history, He told about Abraham’s early pagan roots:

Joshua 24:2 CSB

2 Joshua said to all the people, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Long ago your ancestors, including Terah, the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River and worshiped other gods.

But when God called Abraham to leave his family and go where God showed him, Abraham (then Abram) went. And the first place that he stopped, and the place where God promised him the Promised Land, was Shechem.

Genesis 12:6–7 CSB

6 Abram passed through the land to the site of Shechem, at the oak of Moreh. (At that time the Canaanites were in the land.) 7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring, I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him.

So between 700 and 800 years had passed since this promise was made to Abraham at Shechem, and there Joshua and Israel stood, likely at the same oak tree, to acknowledge the receipt of all that God had promised, as well as to promise themselves to serving and worshiping Him. It was a very fitting location.

And Joshua calls the people to “fear” the Lord, to “worship” Him (or “serve”…the word combines both ideas), and to “get rid” of the false gods that they somehow still clung to from both their distant ancestors and from Egypt. This would not have been commanded if there wasn’t a reason to command it. Even through their slavery in Egypt, the desert wanderings, and the conquest of the Promised Land, the Hebrew people were still hanging on to old gods, old idols.

In our entire focal passage this morning, only verses 14, 15, and 23 have imperative statements: commands. And a command, while a very clear instruction to take action, always implies that there is a choice: obey or don’t. He specifically calls them to a choice: to worship the false gods that their ancestors worshiped, to worship the gods of the people they had just displaced, or to worship the Lord alone.

They had to make a decision. Who or what will they serve?

Joshua’s answer was simple and straightforward: “As for me and my family, we will worship the Lord.” (v 15) Side note for parents here, and particularly the dads. This is your declaration to make. Statistically speaking, you are the single greatest influence in the spiritual development of your children. You must lead, and do so decisively—like Joshua.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, today we are presented with the same choice as Israel was then. And we think, “No big deal. I don’t worship any false gods.” But this almost certainly not true. The great reformer John Calvin wrote that:

“The human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.”

—John Calvin (1509-1564)

We often don’t realize that we are constantly being presented with and even creating other “gods” to worship: the gods of popularity and fame, the gods of wealth and power, the gods of lust and sex, the gods of entertainment and distraction, the gods of work and achievement, the gods of politics and pundits, of teams and treasures, of kids and kingdoms, and the always present gods of me, myself, and I.

But we’re called to a courageous obedience like Jesus showed in the Garden—a call to lay down our own lives as we serve and follow Him.

Matthew 16:24 CSB

24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

In a world where we are told to look out for number one (ourselves), there is courageous obedience in choosing to put others’ needs before our own (Phil 2:3-4). In a culture where we are told that feelings determine what is true, there is courageous obedience in choosing to cling to the Word of God and allow the Spirit to tell us what is true through it (John 17:17). In a society that more and more refuses to acknowledge God’s authority or even His reality, there is courageous obedience in choosing to submit to Him in faith for His purposes and His glory (Heb 11:6).

If we are in Christ, we have a choice to make: Who or what are we going to worship or serve? The Lord, or false idols that we’ve manufactured out of something or someone else? The decision was, at first at least, an easy one for them, and it should be for us, because of our second point:

2) Courageous obedience to God is a response.

As the Lord reiterated through Joshua a very summary version of His history with the Hebrew people in the first 13 verses of this chapter, He was taking them mentally and emotionally to the importance of that moment: the possession of a land that had been completely and entirely a gift:

Joshua 24:13 CSB

13 I gave you a land you did not labor for, and cities you did not build, though you live in them; you are eating from vineyards and olive groves you did not plant.’

And then in verses 16-18, following Joshua’s call to choose, the people responded in the way that they should have. It was a no-brainer, which they summarized at the beginning and end of the passage:

Joshua 24:16&18b (CSB)

16 The people replied, “We will certainly not abandon the Lord to worship other gods! … We too will worship the Lord, because he is our God.”

Their response was exactly what it should be! They declared their intent to be faithful to the Lord, citing what He had done for them as part of the basis of their allegiance. Some of the psalms are an excellent source of this type of reminder designed to lead the reader to obedience.

Psalm 105 covers the history of the Jews in poetic form from the time of Abraham to the settling of the Promised Land. Look at how this psalm begins and ends:

Psalm 105:1–5 CSB

1 Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; proclaim his deeds among the peoples. 2 Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell about all his wondrous works! 3 Boast in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. 4 Seek the Lord and his strength; seek his face always. 5 Remember the wondrous works he has done, his wonders, and the judgments he has pronounced,

Psalm 105:45 CSB

45 All this happened so that they might keep his statutes and obey his instructions. Hallelujah!

The Hebrew people didn’t see it as a hardship to obey the Lord (at least not in this moment of time). They saw it as a logical, reasonable, rational response to who He is and what He had done in their history and in their lives.

How do we see obedience? Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like we tend to give it a negative connotation. As if we’re being forced into something, not that we’re giving a proper response to the grace, mercy, and kindness that we’ve been shown by the Lord. Paul even wrote about the intent of God’s kindness to us is to lead us to repentance and faith:

Romans 2:4 CSB

4 Or do you despise the riches of his kindness, restraint, and patience, not recognizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?

Have you ever sat down to recount the ways that God has worked in your life? It’s a good exercise to do. When I think back on what God did to bring me to Himself, to call me out of the darkness that I was in and into His light, I’m awe-stricken. He never quit chasing me, even though I wanted nothing to do with Him. He showed me grace upon grace upon grace in a million ways, including through this church family, after I came to faith, bringing me to where I am today.

Has it always been easy? No. Have I always been obedient? No. But that just shows how much MORE grace He gives! Paul’s explanation of this grace in his own life is found in 1 Timothy (I really identify with this passage):

1 Timothy 1:12–16 CSB

12 I give thanks to Christ Jesus our Lord who has strengthened me, because he considered me faithful, appointing me to the ministry—13 even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an arrogant man. But I received mercy because I acted out of ignorance in unbelief, 14 and the grace of our Lord overflowed, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. 15 This saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”—and I am the worst of them. 16 But I received mercy for this reason, so that in me, the worst of them, Christ Jesus might demonstrate his extraordinary patience as an example to those who would believe in him for eternal life.

Don’t miss this: Paul’s reasonable response to what God had done in his life through Christ was to be used to display the Gospel so that people would come to know Jesus.

This is how courageous obedience can and should look: Our grateful response to His work in our lives—taking the grace that God has shown us in Christ and pouring it out to others through what we do and what we say, so that they might see and hear about the beauty of the Gospel and experience the wonderful grace of God through faith in Jesus.

You’d think, considering all that God has done, that this should be a no-brainer for us, like it sounded to the people of Israel. But for some reason, it’s not. We don’t respond to His grace with courageous obedience. And Joshua knew the Jews wouldn’t either. Why is this the case? Because of the fact of our third point this morning:

3) Courageous obedience to God is exclusive.

When I say that courageous obedience to God is exclusive, I mean that God is to be worshiped, and no one or nothing else, as He had commanded in the first and second of the Ten Commandments. This is a serious commitment. The issue for Israel was that Joshua knew that the problem wasn’t in committing in the moment. The problem was going to be in the follow-through. So he responds to their declaration of commitment in a very surprising way:

Joshua 24:19–24 CSB

19 But Joshua told the people, “You will not be able to worship the Lord, because he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions and sins. 20 If you abandon the Lord and worship foreign gods, he will turn against you, harm you, and completely destroy you, after he has been good to you.” 21 “No!” the people answered Joshua. “We will worship the Lord.” 22 Joshua then told the people, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you yourselves have chosen to worship the Lord.” “We are witnesses,” they said. 23 “Then get rid of the foreign gods that are among you and turn your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.” 24 So the people said to Joshua, “We will worship the Lord our God and obey him.”

T.C. Butler called Joshua’s answer in verses 19 and 20, “perhaps the most shocking statement in the OT.” After calling the people to commitment and obedience, and their affirming both, Joshua tells them that they won’t succeed. And why won’t they succeed? Because God is holy and God is jealous.

When we speak of God’s holiness like this, we are saying that He is completely and totally other. He transcends our entire existence. He is all-powerful, and we are basically powerless. He knows everything, and we know next to nothing. He can be anywhere and everywhere at the same time, and we are fixed to a single point and moment. He is perfect and whole, and we are sinful and broken. He will not have anything to do with sin, and that’s often our go-to.

But not only is God holy, He is also jealous. And not jealous like we’re jealous. He’s jealous because of the perfection of His love: Not only does He want the best for us, but because of who He is, He actually is the best for us! So for us to go and chase other gods is to fly in the face of both His holiness AND His love. He deserves our absolute faithfulness, and it’s obvious that Israel has struggled with that up to this point (some of them were still worshiping false gods from 800 years ago!). He deserved their exclusive focus and worship.

Joshua knew exactly who he was talking to. He knew the truth about them. And so in an accusatory form, Joshua brings the indictment of what they are going to do: how they are going to abandon worshiping the Lord and chase after false idols, which Joshua has already told them to get rid of.

After Jacob (Abraham’s grandson) had been away from Canaan and had married and had lots of kids, he returned to the land, but he brought with him some of the false idols that Abraham’s family had worshiped. As they were on their way to Bethel at God’s command, they stopped in (you guessed it) Shechem, and there Jacob took the lead with his family (much like Joshua), and demanded that they get rid of their foreign idols:

Genesis 35:2–4 CSB

2 So Jacob said to his family and all who were with him, “Get rid of the foreign gods that are among you. Purify yourselves and change your clothes. 3 We must get up and go to Bethel. I will build an altar there to the God who answered me in my day of distress. He has been with me everywhere I have gone.” 4 Then they gave Jacob all their foreign gods and their earrings, and Jacob hid them under the oak near Shechem.

When Jacob called his family to get rid of their idols, he took them and got rid of them. That was some courageous obedience. But notice what happened with Israel which proves that Joshua was right to be concerned: while they said that they would worship the Lord and not turn to false gods, we don’t see them do what Jacob did in getting rid of them, and they were at the same place as Jacob. I doubt that the irony of the situation escaped them. Yes, they verbally assented, but it appears that they didn’t take action. And it took one generation to fall apart:

Judges 2:10–11 CSB

10 That whole generation was also gathered to their ancestors. After them another generation rose up who did not know the Lord or the works he had done for Israel. 11 The Israelites did what was evil in the Lord’s sight. They worshiped the Baals

They said several times that they would worship the Lord, but they refused to take the steps necessary to make the relationship exclusive. They wanted to keep their options open, wanted to wait to see if some of those other gods might be a little bit more their type. None of those other gods had provided for them what they actually needed. None of them ever could. They were fickle.

Jesus was the exact opposite, and He is of course a great example to us of the exclusivity of courageous obedience to the Father. When He was fasting in the desert for 40 days after His baptism, the devil came and tried to tempt Him. The second temptation that the devil through at the Lord was that if Jesus would just bow down and worship him, then he would give Jesus all the splendor and authority of all the kingdoms of the world. But Jesus answered clearly:

Luke 4:8 CSB

8 And Jesus answered him, “It is written: Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.”

Jesus was perfectly obedient, which is why He was able to be the perfect sacrifice to cover our imperfections. Everything He did pointed back to the Father, because He only did what the Father was doing:

John 5:19 CSB

19 Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, the Son is not able to do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, the Son likewise does these things.

Jesus’s service and worship was absolutely exclusive, and ours should be as well. If Jesus Christ is Lord, then that means that He alone deserves the highest allegiance and obedience. The fact that He is Lord is necessarily exclusive: He is either Lord or He is not Lord.

So in the case of Joshua, Israel’s disobedience sounds ridiculous, right? No, it actually doesn’t sound that ridiculous, because we’re not so good at exclusivity ourselves. Like Israel, we love God. We worship Him because of how great He is, and we are grateful for all that He’s done for us. And we want that relationship to continue. We just want to be able to serve those other gods when we want. Gods that aren’t so holy. Gods that aren’t so jealous. Gods that aren’t so, let’s just say it: demanding.

And this brings us to our last point:

4) Courageous obedience to God is required.

We tend to shy away from this point, because as soon as we hear that God “requires” something, then we kind of want to point and shout, “Law! Law! We’re saved by grace, not by Law!” You’re absolutely correct. Courageous obedience to God is not “required” in the sense that by it we earn our salvation. But make no mistake: there is no room in Scripture for what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” No, we cannot earn our salvation, but that salvation, once given, begins a process of making us more like Jesus. If we are going to be more like Jesus, then we are going to have to be courageously obedient, because Jesus was courageously obedient. Without obedience, we will never look like Jesus. That makes it a requirement.

In the last part of our focal passage this morning, Joshua renewed the covenant between God and Israel: but notice that he wasn’t renewing God’s covenant to Israel. He was renewing Israel’s covenant to God:

Joshua 24:25–27 CSB

25 On that day Joshua made a covenant for the people at Shechem and established a statute and ordinance for them. 26 Joshua recorded these things in the book of the law of God; he also took a large stone and set it up there under the oak at the sanctuary of the Lord. 27 And Joshua said to all the people, “You see this stone—it will be a witness against us, for it has heard all the words the Lord said to us, and it will be a witness against you, so that you will not deny your God.”

We don’t have this document that Joshua created on this day other than what is recorded here in Joshua. But he had brought them to a declaration of their complete allegiance to the Lord, and he had made them legally bound to that declaration by calling them as witnesses against themselves. And now, he created another witness: the memorial stone, which would be placed under the probably the same oak tree in Shechem where Abraham stopped, and where Jacob buried his family’s false idols. The stone had “heard” the whole thing, and so he set that stone up as a silent “witness,” so that when the people of Israel saw the stone there, they would remember the promises that they had made to the Lord that day.

And even though Joshua made a statute and an ordinance for Israel that day and put them in the book of the law of God, that doesn’t mean that when we read this that we should be concerned that we’re talking about salvation by works. These were already God’s chosen people. They weren’t talking about salvation. They were talking about living out the commitment that they had made to God not so that they could BE His, but because they were ALREADY His.

And we understand this in many of the relationships in our lives without resorting to being concerned that we’re being legalistic.

Joseph Coleson, in his commentary on Joshua, makes this point:

“As one reasonably expects this [loyalty, truthfulness, faithfulness over the long haul, without wavering or changing sides] of a human companion, such as a spouse or a business partner, so it is reasonable that God expects this of those He calls and redeems.”

— Joseph Coleson, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary: Joshua, Judges, Ruth

This shouldn’t be shocking to us, and it shouldn’t bother us to say that God demands, or even more strongly, requires our courageous obedience if we belong to Him. In fact, what Jesus said makes this fact perfectly clear:

John 14:15 CSB

“If you love me, you will keep my commands.

But Jesus goes on in this passage to show us that ihat was thet is not by our strength or our innate goodness that we will keep His commands, but that He will give us His Holy Spirit to empower us to do so:

John 14:16–17 CSB

16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever. 17 He is the Spirit of truth. The world is unable to receive him because it doesn’t see him or know him. But you do know him, because he remains with you and will be in you.

And it is in the power of the Holy Spirit that we go forth into the world in courageous obedience: living out our commitment to follow the Lord Jesus Christ and obey Him in everything. He commanded us to make disciples. He commanded us to testify to the truth. And in the little book of Jude, we are commanded to participate in His saving work:

Jude 20–23 CSB

20 But you, dear friends, as you build yourselves up in your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, 21 keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting expectantly for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life. 22 Have mercy on those who waver; 23 save others by snatching them from the fire; have mercy on others but with fear, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh.

This doesn’t mean that we actually save them, but that we are the ones who throw them the life line. If we are unwilling to share our faith, then we are unwilling to do something that the Lord requires of His children. Sharing our faith is not optional. It’s required. And it will take courage to be obedient in this command, but that doesn’t change that it is what God wants us to do.

Closing

Obedience gets a bad rap, but in many ways, it is courageous to be obedient. Courageous obedience to God is something that we choose as a response to what God has done. It comes from an exclusive allegiance to our Lord, and an understanding that that title gives Him the absolute right to make whatever demands of us that He sees fit to make. Jesus has modeled for us what courageous obedience is through His sacrifice on the cross for us.

And if you have never trusted in Christ’s sacrifice for us to save you, would you surrender today? Turn from your sins, believe the Gospel, and surrender to Jesus as Savior and Lord. Come and share that decision with us this morning. If you’re online, email me.

If you’re a follower of Jesus already, then this morning’s passage calls us to a commitment as well. Are we willing to commit to doing what the Lord asks of us: to be ministers of reconciliation, to be there to snatch people from the fire, to be like Jesus by joining in His mission to seek and to save the lost.

Joining the church

Prayer

Giving

PRAYER

Closing Remarks

Sign up to help serve our Thanksgiving meal. Sheets are in the foyer on the Get Connected table. Joke with 2 Thess 3:10: “If anyone isn’t willing to work, he should not eat.” Kidding.

Wanda Hiett memorial this Saturday 11/18 at 10:30am here.

Bible reading (Rev 3)

No Pastor’s Study for tonight or next week.

Prayer Meeting

Instructions for guests

Humphrey Family last day (pray for them)

Benediction

Philippians 2:1–4 CSB

1 If, then, there is any encouragement in Christ, if any consolation of love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, 2 make my joy complete by thinking the same way, having the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. 4 Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others.