You Want Me to Do WHAT????

Have you ever had a time when you felt like God, or your pastor, or your boss, was asking you to do something and you were all like, "WHAAAAAAT?"

Well, I can just hear Joshua thinking that when God told him this in Joshua 6:

“See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men. March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of rams’ horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times, with the priests blowing the trumpets. When you hear them sound a long blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout; then the wall of the city will collapse and the army will go up, everyone straight in.”

First of all, he starts by saying, "Look, I have already done it --  I've already delivered them."  And Joshua I'm sure was thinking, "Ummmmm, nope.  Don't see it.  Looking at a walled city with the gates securely barred.  And God, you may not have noticed, but we are on the OUTSIDE of the city.  Outside the big walls,   Outside the securely barred gates."

After that I'm sure once he heard the instructions he was thinking, "You seriously expect me to go tell all those macho dudes in the army  that they are going to walk around the city seven days in a row and do nothing but march.    And I'm going to get priests to carry trumpets around for six days without blowing them?   You do know that the people of Jericho are going to taunt us and make fun of us, right?  And finally, that last day, you know they are going to tell me I’m crazy if I ask them to make fools of themselves after being mocked all week by being asked to blow trumpets and shout.  Last time I checked, blowing trumpets and shouting did not bring walls down."

But even though he was probably thinking those things, He didn't say them.  He just called the priests together and gave them their instructions.  He called the men of the army together and gave them their instructions.  And you gotta know they did not march around that wall without grumbling and murmuring -- after all the grumbled and murmured their way through half of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, so they were definitely grumblers.   But they did it, they marched, they carried the trumpets, they obeyed the instructions.

And we know the rest of the story -- the wall came down and they conquered the city.

Today I want you to think about the walls in your life, those things that are stopping you from being the person you want them to be.   What is God asking you to do in order to make the walls go down? is He speaking through someone else to get your attention or are you like Joshua in the story and God is asking you to bring people together to knock down walls.

Or maybe you aren’t facing personal walls but you can see walls in our society.  Maybe they are walls of injustice.  Maybe they are walls of hatred.  Are they walls of indifference?  Walls between you and someone you need to be reconciled with?  There are walls all around us.

But one of the most awesome things about serving a great God is that He has already delivered us.  Seeing things the way God sees them means that the walls are already down.  We just need to find out from Him what His plan is for delivering what is inside to us.

If we do our part, even if we don't understand the methodology, the walls--- they'll fall down.