Joshua 11:10–23

Hi, my name is George Sinclair. I'm the lead pastor of Church of the Messiah.

! It is wonderful that you would like to check out some of the sermons done by Church of the Messiah, either by myself or some of the others. Listen, just a couple of things. First of all, would you pray for us that we will open God's Word well to His glory and for the good of people like yourself?

The second thing is, if you aren't connected to a church and if you are a Christian, we really, I would really like to encourage you to find a good local church where they believe the Bible, they preach the gospel, and if you have some trouble finding that, send us an email. We will do what we can to help connect you with a good local church wherever you are. And if you're a non-Christian, checking us out, we're really, really, really glad you're doing that. Don't hesitate to send us questions. It helps me actually to know, as I'm preaching, how to deal with the types of things that you're really struggling with. So God bless.

Let's bow our heads in prayer. Father, we give you thanks and praise that you know us perfectly and still you love us. And you know, Father, how even your people, we often forget your promises promises and therefore don't live by them. And we know, Father, that you know that we often don't like your warnings. And not only do we forget them, Father, but we actually try to act or talk or live as if your warnings don't even exist. And so, Father, we ask that you would do a very powerful and blessed work in each of our lives this morning. May your Holy Spirit so move and work within us that we might know and remember and live by your promises and that we might know and remember and live by your warnings, knowing that they both come, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, from your love. And we ask this in the name of Jesus, your Son and our Savior. Amen. Please be seated.

Amen. So one of the things about having conversations with people who are outside the Christian faith is that sometimes I come across people for a variety of reasons who've been reading the Bible for themselves and they have different things that they'd like to talk to me about. And I mean, sometimes maybe to stump me, sometimes just because they know that I'm quite easy going about these conversations just to really express their puzzlement and sometimes even the revulsion with the Bible.

And the text that we're looking at today is a text that just a little while ago somebody shared their revulsion of the text with me. How is it they had read the book of Joshua? How is it that the book of Joshua seems to so gleefully almost talk about the killing and slaughter of people, men and women, in the land that used to be called Canaan? How is it that they can almost celebrate killing 12,000 men and women? Like, how is it that they do that? And how could you believe a book which talks about that?

It's interesting because just a few days after I had that conversation with somebody in a coffee shop, I had a conversation with a very different person who's also Christian curious, by the way. And I mentioned that I was going to be talking about genocide and war and violence in the Bible and how what it means in the Bible for how we live. And he said, wow, like, that's like, that's like a really big topic. That's really important. There's so much horrible things going on. Like, that's sort of interesting you guys would actually look at it. So there are two reactions and we are going to look at it. And one of the reasons we're going to look at it is because I think modern Christians, I'm going to show you how older Christians thought about this at the end of the sermon. But because we get so intimidated by the at least surface horrendous aspect of this text, and some of you are already saying, George, George, not just surface if 12,000 people die. That's not surface. Yes, I'm going to get to that. And I understand that. I'm very Canadian.

But it's because we get intimidated by these texts, as I've said several other times, we miss the things which are profoundly important. And in this text, there's something very profoundly important about meaning and identity and also how to deal with anxiety and fear. And I think we would all acknowledge that anxiety and fear is a very, very big problem in Canada. And this text that we're going to look at talks about that in a way which is very helpful and very wise and very beautiful.

So pick up your Bibles. I'm using this journal Bible. And turn to the book of Joshua, chapter 11, verses 10 and following. And we've been preaching through the book of Joshua. We're almost finished.

There's two sermons after this. And you're thinking, wow, we've just gone to the chapter 11. And basically, what I'm going to read to you is the summary of all of the battles that have gone on in the book of Joshua. And then from chapter 12 sort of just finishes the summary. And then 13 to 22 or 21 or something is about how the land is divided up. And I'm not going to talk about that very much, other than in the last two chapters, a couple of very important lessons in terms of how the book ends.

So that's sort of where we are and why we're reading this particular text. And I made sure that I picked a text that didn't avoid the hard questions, because it's important for us as a people to walk towards problems and pray into problems rather than pretend that they don't exist. And so here's how the text goes, just to refresh your memory.

And to see why one of my friends was sort of repulsed, found it revolting. And Joshua, chapter 11, verse 10, And Joshua turned back at that time and captured Hazar and struck its king with the sword.

For Hazar, formerly, was the head of all those kingdoms. And they struck, that's the Jewish people, with the Jewish army. And they struck with the sword all who were in it, devoting them to destruction.

There was none left that breathed. And he burned Hazar with fire. And all the cities of those kings and all their kings, Joshua captured and struck them with the edge of the sword, devoting them to destruction.

Just as Moses, the servant of the Lord, had commanded. But none of the cities that stood on mounds did Israel burn, except Hazar alone, that Joshua burned.

And all the spoil of these cities and the livestock the people of Israel took for their plunder. But every person they struck with the edge of the sword until they had destroyed them.

And they did not leave any who breathed. Just as the Lord had commanded Moses his servant, so Moses commanded Joshua. And so Joshua did.

He left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses. So Joshua took all that land, the hill country and all the Negev and all the land of Goshen and the lowland and the lowland and the hill country of Israel and its lowland.

And this long list of places, it's sort of showing you that he's giving a summary of all the battles. That's what he's doing. The writer. From Mount Halak, verse 17, which rises towards Seir, as far as Baal, God, in the valley of Lebanon, below Mount Hermon.

And he, that's Joshua, captured all their kings and struck them and put them to death. Joshua made war a long time with all those kings.

It's summarized quite quickly in the book, but scholars say it was a five to seven years of war. There was not a city that made peace with the people of Israel except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon.

They took them all in battle. That's the others. For it was the Lord's doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle in order that they should be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy but be destroyed just as the Lord commanded Moses.

It's a very sobering text. And the last bit, a bit of an aside about mighty warriors descended from giants. But you get the basic idea.

So, I mean, this is partly what I said to my friend. And it's part of the big message. If after this you start to get spaced out about different issues, which I understand can happen, pray that I'm interesting enough or the Bible's interesting enough or the Holy Spirit's at work so that doesn't happen too often.

Pray because unless the Lord does it, it's just going to happen. The way you have to think about this text and about all of the book of Joshua is think harbinger, big word, harbinger of God's final judgment.

If you don't understand that idea, the book of Joshua will seem odd. Harbinger is a picture or a sign or an omen or a warning of something that's going to happen in the future.

And that's how you have to understand the text. That it's a text warning us of something that will happen to every human being.

The average Canadian thinks that they go about their life. I shared this a couple of weeks ago. They go about their life. They have good times. They have bad times. They have some success. They have some failure.

And then they die. And there's, in a sense, no consequences for any of the bad things they've done. Nor, at the end, any real reward for what they've done other than the reward they have on this side of the grave.

And that's how the average Canadian thinks. But the Bible says that that is actually a fable. It's an illusion. That what really happens is you live your life day by day, good times, bad times, success, failure, happiness, sadness.

And then you die. And then you appear before God face to face. That that's the real world. And it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

To see that this story is ultimately really about, primarily about the judgment on Canaan. And only secondarily about giving the promised land to the Jewish people.

I don't have time to read it because there's a lot to go through. And if you, by the way, if you'd like to get these scripture references, you can listen to the sermon because it's recorded and left online. Or you can just email the office. But if you read Genesis 15, verse 6, you'll see that when God is making his covenant with Abraham and the generations that come after him.

And when he's promising a deliverer, he says to Abraham about what's going to happen. And he says that you're not going to get the promised land yet. Because the sins of the people who live in Canaan have not reached their full fruition or terror.

And then if you go and read Deuteronomy chapter 9, verses 4 to 5, you'll see that it's very clearly said that it's not because the Jewish people are more righteous or more intelligent or more anything.

It's a sign of God's promise and favor towards them. In a sense, it's a way how God takes the weak and the foolish of the world to shame the wise. And it's because of the evil in the land that they are going to take it and that God is giving them to land to be a very, very different type of people.

I might talk about this a bit more later on. But one of the themes in the Bible that goes right from Genesis chapter 1 to Revelation chapter 22, I've said it before, it's a really important idea to get your mind around, is that it's a story of the Lord's people in the Lord's place, in the Lord's presence, under the Lord's saving rule.

And so that's what Earth has made, the universe has made to be human beings' home, the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden was to become, in a sense, the galaxy, the universe. Human beings rebelled.

And then there's the promises. And at the end of the Bible, you see God amidst his people. And in Matthew 28, up until Matthew, the Gospel, we, you know, that being in the Lord's place is connected to the promised land.

Although you see some other hints of more than that. And then with Matthew 28, you see that it's still the same idea. But now we're all over the people who are the Lord's people are all over the planet.

The Lord isn't finished with the Jewish people. There's still an important part for the Jewish people to play. But now we are the Lord's people in Ottawa. This is the place he has called us to be for a season.

And we are to be here in his presence as his people, under his saving rule. And that's a big idea of the Bible. And so what we see then is this story is, on one hand, about the Lord having a people.

But it's primarily about a matter of judgment. A judgment. Now, some of you might say, well, George, that's very, very interesting. But, George, this story, surely it's a terrible story.

And doesn't it justify slaughter? And doesn't it justify genocide? And, well, no, it doesn't. Which I'll explain very briefly in a couple of things.

So, first of all, there's a little thing about the numbers. And this is just an important thing to know, especially about the early part of the Old Testament. Whenever you see the word thousand, it could mean thousand.

But it also can mean military unit or clan. So, for instance, if you go back and read the beginning of Judges, and you'll see that they send 3,000 men.

And they get defeated by AI. And they say that 36 people die. And that's, like, really puzzling. Like, really? 3,000 people are intimidated by 36 people dying? But if you understand that it was actually translated as military unit, and a military unit has 10 to 20 people.

Then if you have 45 people going and 36 of them die, you can see why they fled. And the other word for it is clan or family unit. And that would be between 20 to 50 people.

So, the numbers are far smaller. That doesn't mean, by the way, that it's all right, that the deaths don't matter. But the number is vastly smaller. The other thing is that whenever you see these words cities, don't think Ottawa.

Don't think Toronto. Don't think the GTA. Think fortress. Think fortress. So, what the cities were was really what they would call a city then was basically a fortress where the military-aged males and the senior advisors and the support staff are located.

And that's what's killed. There would have been farmland and land and all these other things that would go on, depending on how big the city was, for miles and miles, kilometers and kilometers around.

But when it describes killing the king and killing the city, they're killing the fortress. An example I use at the 8 o'clock service is don't think Pembroke and Petawawa.

Think CFB Petawawa. Don't think all of Kingston. Think the Royal Military College. That's what's being killed. It's a very, very different type of idea.

It's still judgment. It's still sad. The other thing to understand about these languages, about everybody who breathed, is it's exaggerated language. And I don't say that just to get out of a problem.

I say that because if you read the text carefully, you realize that it's exaggerated language. So, for instance, sorry for all of you Leaf fans.

I apologize for a moment. But let's say the next time the Leafs play the Senators, and let's say it's even in Toronto, and the Senators win the game 9-0.

And the sportscasters would say the Senators annihilated the Leafs. Blood all over the place. Nothing for them to stand on.

The whole city is completely and utterly just destroyed by this battle of the Leafs and the Senators winning 9-0. And then, if that maybe was recorded, and then you read it a thousand years later in a very literal type of way, and then you find out that there was another Leaf game the next night, you'd wonder, what?

Like, no, no, it's exaggerated language. And why do we say that is if you read all of Joshua, and then you read Judges, and then you read the rest of the Old Testament, the Jebusites are still there.

The Hittites are still there. The Canaanites are still there. They keep going back and taking over the cities. It isn't a matter of them killing every single person.

What it's a matter of is that they break the back of the political power, which I'll explain while I'm in, and the cultic and social power. It's broken.

The fortresses no longer are centers to send power and authority and fear and terror and war and bloodshed and enforce things. The back of the army and the command structure and the cultic center is completely and utterly dealt with.

And that's why, if you look at the ESV very carefully, you'll often see that they use the word take, because in Hebrew, there's a difference between take and possess. And possess means, it would be, possess means that everybody in Ottawa has moved out and new people come and move in.

But take would just mean that the control of the city is taken. It doesn't mean that people have necessarily left. And that's the word which is used regularly. The control and power of the kings and the priests are completely and utterly broken.

And the other thing about this story, which is very, very important, is at no point in time does it say, go and do likewise. You don't see that in the rest of the story that it's telling you, or in the story, that you should go and do this to all of the cities in the world and do it repeatedly.

No, no, the story is a harbinger of God's judgment on people, which is a very sobering thought, something Canadians don't like to think about. But there's never any command to go and do likewise.

It's not like the commands that you see in the Bible about how, when you have an escaped slave that has come into your people, you treat them as a person, not as a slave.

There's no commands like that connected to the text. But so you might say, but George, okay, okay. It's all about judgment and, okay.

I mean, I know, George, you're not saying that, okay, if 12,000 people die, that might actually only be 12 times 15 or 12 times 25. But, you know, George, and I know you're not saying that it's all right then, because it's a smaller number.

I know you're not pulling a Stalin on me, a death of a million. You know, a death of one person is a tragedy, a death of a million is a statistic. But why go after the kings and everything like that?

Why go after their power? Well, chapter 7, you need to understand that what would happen if they were to make a covenant or a treaty with any of those people isn't that they then live completely separate lives, but in a sense it would become a multicultural society, and they would live amongst each other.

They would marry, intermarry. They would just become one type of people mixing this with that. And that's what's warned against in Deuteronomy 7, that they're not to do that.

They have to be completely different from the people they're going in, which also sounds very, very shocking. But when you read about the Canaanites, those of you who know the Lord of the Rings, don't think, when you're thinking of the Canaanites, don't think the Shire, think where orcs live.

Could orcs and the Shire, could orcs and hobbits inhabit the same place? Or think of a nation of vampires and the Amish.

Could they coexist as one people? Could they be a man of the people? Could they be a man of the people? Now, you might say that's really, really hard, and I know there might be some children here, and you might want to block their ears.

If you read Leviticus 18 and other parts of the Bible and some other anthropological studies, the bloodthirstiness and the evil of this land at this time was something quite repulsive.

Don't think of anything to do with husbands and wives or families or any of the types of barriers that we have, their understanding of sexuality was there's penetrators and there's penetrated.

And if you're strong enough to be a penetrator, you can penetrate whatever you happen to want, whether it's your mother, your aunt, your sister, your daughter, your son, your dad, your uncle, your neighbor, if you're strong enough to be the penetrator, go ahead and penetrate whatever you want.

That's what their mythology and cults and political system taught and reinforced. They were a culture that regularly sought what we would now understand, and the Bible understands, as demons for advice.

It was a culture where people would generally even penetrate animals or force women to be penetrated by animals, where children were sacrificed to demons.

And the king was a god in the making who had to be obeyed. And their entire culture is one.

There's no sense of separation of church and state. It's a complete unit between political power, religious power, the stories you live by, the way families and businesses are organized.

It's one structure. And so it came under God's judgment. But you might say, George, if that's all that God judges, then I'm pretty safe and all.

And even that, George, didn't the part you just read talk about God hardening people's hearts and withholding mercy? Like George, that's just horrific. But here's the problem with our natural human response to hearing those things, about God hardening their hearts so they wouldn't...

How did it go again? How it said something... But they should be devoted to destruction, for it was the Lord's doing, verse 20, to harden their hearts, that they should come against Israel and battle in order that they should be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy but be to destroy.

So the problem we have with this is that we tend to think of it in very, very similar ways. It's as if... So, by the way, I... You know, because I'm a Canadian, I would never say out loud that I'm a good person, not normally, unless people are threatening it.

But, you know, by Canadian standards, I'm a good person. You know, like, you know, I'm an all-right neighbour. You know, I'm sort of more or less all-right boss. And, I don't know, like, I talk to...

Visit sick people and shut-ins. And, like, I'm a good person, right? And so the image for most Canadians is that I'm a good person. And this text sounds as if one day, here I am, good person, just wandering along.

And all of a sudden, a ray from God comes and hits my head and hits my heart and turns my heart hard. So all of a sudden now, I'm in complete rebellion against God, and I'm going to go fight his people and do all sorts of heretical things and horrible things.

And that's how we tend to think of when we hear this language of the Lord hardening our hearts. But that's not the way to understand what's being said in the Bible. And that's if you look at Exodus with the Pharaoh, and if you look into the New Testament, you look and see the whole context.

And that's not how things work. In fact, the fact that we automatically tend to think of it in those terms is partly why we need a saviour. Not just people like in Canaan who are really bad, but every human being needs a saviour because we can't save ourselves because the natural inclination of our heart is to view God as a threat and view God as, at best, a clumsy oath and as one that we have to be careful of.

And we need to keep him at a distance because he's liable to do terrible things like that and be angry and judgmental, unlike me, who is good. But what actually the Bible describes as a hardening heart is this, that God's common grace is at work in every human being.

And in my heart of hearts, if I was just to left, if you were to see George with no grace, special grace or no common grace, and you were to see George in all of George's full desire, none of those desires being restrained, you would definitely not want because my tendency to want to lie, to possess, for greed, for envy, for gluttony, for lust, for all of those types of things, for pride, for putting people down, for being judgmental, for all of those types of things.

God's common grace is at work in me to restrain these pressures and drifts and currents of George.

God's common grace restrains that and still keeps within me a conscience and a desire for the good and the true and the beautiful and justice and mercy. And so there's always part of God's common grace which is going on within us.

But at some point in time, in the New Testament, the equivalent idea in the New Testament is the sin against the Holy Spirit. That's the New Testament equivalent. And what happens is at some point in time in the mystery of God, there is a tipping point that is reached.

And that tipping point has come here in this battle. The idea of the battles going on five to seven years means that those people had five to seven years to repent.

Five to seven years. God could have just destroyed all of them in a second, but five to seven years to repent. And we know from the book that Rahab repented, the Gibeonites repented, and we'll see at the end of the giving up of the land that sojourners, in other words, Canaanites did actually throw themselves on the mercy of the Lord.

But there comes a point in time when I say, I don't want your mercy. Keep your mercy to yourself. I don't need your mercy. I'm a good person. And if I need to say, if I need to be saved, I'm going to save myself.

I don't need your mercy. I don't need your grace. I don't need your savior. I don't need you telling me what to do. I want to live my own life in my own terms. Just stay away from me. Let me be.

Just stay away. I don't want your mercy. And at some point in time, the Lord says, You have always resisted me and turned your back on me and desired no salvation, no mercy, and to be completely and utterly by your own devices.

And that is what you will get. It's not a matter of the Lord taking the good me and turning me into a bad thing. It's a withdrawing of his common grace.

And I just want to tell you, if you're here today, that means you have not reached that point. And I urge you to turn to Christ.

That's how it works. There's a tipping point. Okay, but George, devoted to destruction? Devoted to destruction?

Well, remember I told you that this whole story is a harbinger, a picture of the end. And even this word devoted to destruction is a picture of the first end before the final end.

Because, you see, if you continue to read the story, you'll see there is one who famously is devoted to destruction. And we bear his name.

I am a Christian. I am in Christ. Because Christ was devoted to destruction. The very first encounter that's recorded in the Bible of Jesus as an adult is when John the Baptist, the last and the greatest of the prophets, sees Jesus coming and points to him and says, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

The story of the Bible is ultimately about when we could no longer save ourselves, that we were in danger of becoming orcs, so to speak, or vampires. And God's common grace is grace enough to show us that we should pursue the good, the true, the beautiful, and the just, but we can't save ourselves.

We need God to do something we cannot do. And God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, in perfect love and unity, acted together for the redemption of the human race to deliver us out of slavery and under, in a sense, the direction of God the Father and in the power of the Holy Spirit, God the Son of God sets aside his appearance as God, his divine prerogatives and his power, takes into himself a complete human nature and lives amongst us and he comes, he is completely and utterly devoted to one cause, which is to die on the cross as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

That means George's sin and Jono's sin and Deborah's sin and Andrew's sin and Shannon and Owen's and on and on and on and on.

That is why he came. The last words on the cross are it is finished and it's a telos word. It could also be translated as it is accomplished.

The whole divine rescue mission that comes out of the love of God to bring us back in union with the love of God is accomplished as Jesus dies on the cross.

He was devoted to destruction and because he was devoted to destruction when I am in him, I will not experience the wrath of God because it fell on him and I will have the life and favor in union with him that is proper to him.

He takes my sin. I receive his life when I am in him. That is the most beautiful story in the world and we cannot be formed enough by it.

So what is this text? Just in inclusion, you might have noticed in my prayer, I said that Christians often forget God's promises and they forget God's warnings. But we need to really be gripped by both, by his promises and his warnings.

This story is a promise of the one who would come, who is devoted to destruction. It is a promise that when we put our faith and trust in Christ, we get a complete new identity and we begin to have a meaning in life that is not just good for us day by day, but is also transcendent and eternal.

I am to understand myself not as a first generation Canadian born of lower working class Irish immigrants who came to this country. I am not to identify myself by my academic degrees or by my financial situation which is just like so-so or anything like that or the color of my skin or the party that I vote for or the nation that I belong to.

I, in union with Christ, I am now part of the Lord's people in the Lord's place. He's called me to be in Ottawa. If I had gone to Regent College to do a year or two of graduate study there before pursuing my PhD in sociology, which was my original exam, I would never have left the lower mainland of British Columbia.

I loved it. But the Lord, in his mercy and his humor, called me to this place. I am one of the Lord's people in this place, part of this congregation.

I am to be in his presence with you and I am to be under his saving rule. And I am here to not only let people know about the Savior, but to seek the good of this city and the good of this nation and the good of all other people groups through our support of missionaries and evangelists at home and abroad.

I have a new identity in Christ, an identity which begins and gets furthered and deepened here, an identity centered around Christ, which is to grow and go into all eternity and there's a meaning and a purpose and a common life and that's what we have.

So these stories, why are they important? Not just that we have a new meaning identity in Christ. One, if you understand that every human being you meet will appear before the judgment seat of God and will be judged and will fail that judgment, that is to be a profound incentive for us to pray for those who are not yet Christians to give their lives to Jesus.

And if you are here and you have not given your life to Jesus, you're not sure you have, there is no better time than right now to call out to Jesus and say, Jesus, I am terrified of my hard heart.

I am terrified of any of these things. I throw myself upon you and in your mercy be my Savior. And Lord, use your own words. There's no time better than now, but it's an incentive for us to pray. And I've already shared how it's part of a new meaning identity.

And here's the final thing. One of the things which we've lost because we're afraid of this book is a very profound truth. The Lord fights for his people.

The Lord fights for you. The Lord is not indifferent to your anxiety, your fears, the things which threaten you.

He's not, whether those enemies are aging or illness or cancer or dementia, whether it is mortgage rates and income, whether it is particular people, the Lord knows who you are and he fights for you.

And we understand fights for you not just, if the Bible ended at the end of the book of Joshua, we'd have to understand it in one particular way, but it doesn't end at the book of Joshua. It continues on. And so when we understand that he fights for, when I understand that he fights for me, when I, then the truth comes that I don't have to deal these things, but not only am I part of the Lord's people and people who will, who will cry with me and laugh with me and high five with me and get on their knees and pray for me.

And that's what a church should do. A good church should do that. That's why you have small groups and, and prayer times and mentors and all of those, and women's groups and men's groups is to meet people and to pray for each other.

But the Lord, the Lord fights me. And I understand from the whole story as it goes on, there's a very powerful story in Daniel chapter three when Nebuchadnezzar, the most powerful person that whole part of the, the whole part of the planet.

He, he says, you have to fall down and worship this particular statue and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, these three Jews refused to do it. And Nebuchadnezzar says to them, what God will deliver you from my hand?

And they say, we have a God who can deliver us from your hand and we are trusting in him. But if not, we will die in the furnace.

And we understand Paul who says to live is Christ and to die is gain. There will come a time we die and maybe we will have to die for that which is good and true and beautiful.

But we know the Lord fights for us and my death is gain. And in the new heaven and the new earth, he will wipe away every tear from every eye. The Lord fights for you.

So just in closing, I think it will hopefully be on the screen. Listen to how older Christians understood these truths because they weren't embarrassed by the book of Joshua. If you haven't done it, I encourage you to consider doing morning and evening prayer.

Maybe even it's just if every morning when you do your Bible reading and prayer, you read the two colics for the day, the standard colics or the two standard colics for the evening. This is almost 500 years that people have been praying this prayer.

Just listen to it when you understand the truth and the power of this idea. Listen to the second colic for peace, which is a standard prayer for morning prayer every day.

O God, who art the... My words might be slightly different because I think that's modern English, but you'll get the idea. O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom.

Just think for a second, pause for those prayers. Our flesh says that knowing you has nothing to do with real life and serving you will be bondage, but this prayer reminds us of what the Bible teaches, that we are to be the Lord's people in the Lord's place in the Lord's presence under the Lord's saving, redeeming, freeing rule, whose service is perfect freedom.

And then look at this. Defend us, your humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies, that we, surely trusting in thy defense, may not fear the power of any adversaries through the might of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Older Christians weren't embarrassed by the book of Joshua. They knew they had to pray it. You know, because we're afraid of the demonic, we're afraid of death, we're afraid of things that we do that terrify us.

We're afraid of others. We're afraid in our culture. We are an anxious age. And listen to the final prayer for the morning, the call it for grace. O Lord, our Heavenly Father, Almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day, defend us in the same, defend us this day with your mighty power and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger, but that all our doings, everything we do, may be ordered by your governance, your rule.

Why? To do always what is righteous in your sight through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. What wonderful way to begin our day. Christians have been doing this for 500 years.

don't be embarrassed by Joshua. The Lord defends you and fights for you because he loves you. Invite you to stand. Bow our heads in prayer.

Father, I began by praying and I end with praying the same basic idea. Father, I ask that you would do a wonderful work in each of our hearts, in each of our minds, in each of our lives and help us to remember your promises and help us, Father, to be formed by your promises.

Thank us, help us to be always formed by the promise of eternal life and in union with Christ and what he's accomplished for us in the cross. Help us, Father, to live day by day mindful of your promises and Father, bring your warnings home to us as well that we might remember them and that they might form us and we ask, Father, in light of your promises and in light of your warnings that you would make us a people of prayer, that you would help us to pray for the successes and failures of those of us who are around, not that they fail, but pray for others in their success and in their failure, pray for a common life, pray for the city, pray for this nation and pray for our loved ones that they will come to know Jesus.

So, Father, we ask that you bring your promises and your warnings deeply home to us in light of Jesus and make us people willing to get down on our knees to pray for others and to roll up our sleeves and help others.

And we ask this in the name of Jesus, your Son and our Savior and all God's people said, Amen. Amen.