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Over the past few months we have majored on the fact, on the biblical truth that there is a time for prayer and a time for action for the people of God. Get these elements right and God leads us into spiritual victory where we can truly experience victory in the Christian life.
If you remember right back at the beginning of the series, God had given the land of Canaan into the hands of the Israelites years ago. He had told them to cross the Jordan River and enter that land and take. The Lord said GO but the people said NO! They had sent spies into the land and they had come back and said there are giants there, we can’t defeat them! So for lack of faith and lack of trust in God and lack of obedience to God’s word, they went round in circles wasting time for 40 years or thereabouts.
Of course, spiritual victory requires spiritual discipline in much the same way that military victory requires military discipline and moral purity requires moral discipline.
And if we look at the church in this country today we can see that spiritual victories are few and far between and that this is a symptom of the fact that spiritual discipline is pretty unpopular as is most forms of discipline in this day and age. Often God says Go and we say NO WAY. It is living in unbelief, in faithlessness and it is the way of defeat. We may spend lots of time in prayer, or what passes for prayer but little or no time taking action. There is a time for prayer and a time for action.
The opposite error we are introduced to as the story unfolds. Joshua 7 tells the story of Achan who disobeyed God in something relatively small and took the wrong action and that action affected the whole community in a detrimental way. But he wasn’t alone for Joshua and the leaders of the community, flush with success at Jericho didn’t bother to go back and pray, and listen to God before setting off to take on a little town called Ai. They experienced a humiliating defeat because they took action ahead of God, without ascertaining his will and his word on the matter; they didn’t do it his way, they weren’t dependant on him, they were self-confident and tried to do it their way and fell flat on their faces.
And again we are so good at devising our own programmes and strategies that we pay little attention to what God really wants, we don’t ask how would should go about it, we don’t wait for his timing. And we wonder why we struggle and suffer defeat in terms of lack of victory or success in our endeavours.
It is into this context that the biblical story of Joshua speaks loud and clear to us again.
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