1. One person�s sin can affect the whole church

It hardly needs to be said, but it must be said - one person�s sin affacts all the people of God. That is why none of us, brothers and sisters, has the right to say �what I do with my life is my business and nobody elses.�
If you commit a sin it affects the church, it affects the reputation of the body of Christ and that is of immense importance. Even though it may be a hidden sin and even though the rest, the crowd, may not know about it yet, you can be the cause of defeat in the local church - in NCBC.
And therefore none of us lives �unto himself� as it were. We are not independent little organisms who live ion our own self-contained little world. No. We are designed by God to be inter-dependent. That is why he puts us in relationships with one another.
And as a church we are made up of inter-dependent relationships, of people living under the Lordhsip of Christ, who is the head of the body. If one of us malfunctions, we all suffer as a consequence.
Achan sinned and the whole people of God suffered as a consequence.

2. The defeat of God�s church can be caused by one person.

Again, one person - even one who does not seem to be all that important to our way of seeing things, like Achan here, one person who committed a secret sin and kept it under cover, provoked the defeat of the whole peopel of God. It is serious. We underestimate its impotance.

But that would not have been necessary if the leaders of the community - Joshua and others, had gone before the Lord and said �how shall we take Ai? Shall we march around it? Shall we jump up and down and turn around? Shall we attack it with stones? How are we to take Ai?
But because they didn�t bother to take time with the LORD, they were not aware of the hidden sin.
And you may say to me, this is not a reality today, how can hidden sin defeat a church and how can going to God in prayer reveal a hidden sin anyway?

Let me tell you this. God gets terrible angry if his name is dishonoured publically or privately. We looked at that last time. If we are not bering fruitful, look to see if we are all being faithful.
And let me tell you that in a previous church God revealed to me as a church leader that another leader was in sin. I didn�t want to believe it, and to be honest was rather scared about the prospect of confronting the person. Within a few weeks this hidden sin was confronted and the leader had to step out of leadership whilst the whole messy issue was dealt with.
The principles in Joshua 7 apply clearly to us today.

If Joshua dn the the rest had gone before God befoe rushing off to Ai, the Lord would have told them what to do before rather than after they had fallen on their face.