Grace and Race Panel

Your future, it can seem mysterious and frightening. But there's good news. God has a promised land for you to move into, courageously and fearlessly. And the book of Joshua shows you how it can happen. How to live your promised land life. A promised land life is what we call our series in the book of Joshua. If you want to follow along with me, you can grab the message notes that look like this in your bulletins. But while you're taking those up, I was watching the choir, and I was remembering how when I was a kid in Sunday school, they used to teach us a song. Now, they probably don't do this anymore, because this was like back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. But sing it with me if you remember the song. Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho. Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down. Wow, I think everybody learned that song. That is awesome. And that song is a lie. Now, Jericho is real. Joshua was real. But that song, as short as it is, gets one crucial fact about Joshua and Jericho completely and utterly wrong. And see if you can guess what it is as the sermon goes on. I'm not going to tell you at first. Just see if you can kind of put the pieces together, because that's the story we're going to be looking at this morning if you have your Bibles open up to Joshua 6. The story of Jericho today.

Here's a question for you. Why are stories like this even in the Bible? Why doesn't the Bible just come right out and in propositional truth just say, here are the 1,000 sayings from Chairman Jesus, and this is how to live your life? Why does it even give us sort of semi-confusing stories like this? Well, let me put it this way. I just found out about something that's apparently a very big deal that I had no idea about. You can go on YouTube or Vimeo or sites like that and watch what are called video game walkthroughs. And what these are are when people who play video games videotape themselves playing the video game, and then you can go on and watch for hours. And I searched for this. There are over 16 million video game watch-- now, how far removed from reality is this? You are not playing a video game yourself. You're watching somebody else play a video game. Why would anybody want to do this? Well, there's a very good reason. Because when you watch somebody else play a video game, you learn from them. You learn from their little shortcuts, and you learn from their mistakes how better to play the game yourself. And as you can see, there is a huge market for this.

I was just talking to a UC Santa Cruz student before the service, and she is majoring in video game development. And she said, now this is actually a business. People get paid big money if they're good video game players for posting their video of themselves playing a video game online because people like to learn from the experts. Well, follow me here. Stories like the story of Joshua and all those stories in the book of Joshua and the book of Judges and the book of 1 and 2 Chronicles, those narrative stories in the Bible. They're in the Bible. Watch this as sort of life walkthroughs. You're watching other people trying to trust God, trying to follow God. You're watching other people learn lessons about faith as they face very formidable obstacles. And you are learning from them. It's a video game walkthrough only. It's a life walkthrough.

In this story, we see the people of Israel and Joshua themselves as their leader being examples to us. In fact, the Bible says this specifically in the New Testament. It says these things occurred as examples to us. In the book of Joshua, Joshua and the Israelites faced some real major problems as kind of a life walkthrough. And I want to make something clear. Sometimes they're good examples, and sometimes they're bad examples. And the Bible does not make clear which is which. The Bible is a work of art. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and it is also great literature. And like great literature, it doesn't simplify things. The Bible is not a Hallmark card. The Bible is not a children's story. To understand these characters and their motivations and what's actually happening in the story, you have to enter into the story. You have to learn about the context. You have to try to live and breathe the story with them. And that's how you're able to do the life walkthrough with them and learn from them the lessons they were learning as they faced some very, very, very big obstacles.

In fact, let me show you what I'm talking about. Let's dig into this week's story in Joshua 6. Quick recap for you, the times around 1400 BC. The Israelites have been slaves for about 400 years, and they're going back to their ancestral homeland Canaan problem to get anywhere they first have to get past Jericho. Jericho is a fortress with one distinct feature. It has incredibly well engineered walls. And to make any progress into the rest of the land of Canaan, the people of Israel have to get past those walls. So what I want to do this morning is I want to talk about what to do when you hit the wall. Hitting the wall is a term that runners often use when they get to a point where it feels like they cannot put one foot in front of another. They cannot take another step. They just want to quit.

And chances are I am talking right now to somebody in this room who is hitting a wall in your marriage, in your business, in your ministry, in your relationship, perhaps with your children or with a friend. You feel like you want to quit because you're not seeing results. You do not want to go one step further. How do I know that there's at least one person in this room who feels like that? Because I feel like that. Because there are times in my life, and I've been going through one of those times recently, where I look at my ministry, and I feel like I am not seeing the kind of fruit that I should be seeing, where I feel like I try and I try and I try, and yet it doesn't seem like anything's changing. I don't know if I'm really impacting people's lives. And it might sound-- maybe you're thinking, well, that's crazy, René, for you to feel that way. Well, maybe if you tell me where you were hitting a wall, I'd say the same thing to you.

What's true is the emotional reality we feel when we feel like I just want to quit. Because life is full of challenges you and I are going to face walls time and time and time again in life. And usually we face walls that are not our choice. We didn't make the wall. We didn't want the wall. We didn't design the wall. The wall is there. It's a wall of disease. It's a wall of obstruction. It's a wall of some sort of challenge in our ministry or in our marriage or in our business life. And we just feel like we are not going to conquer it. Facing the wall is not your choice. You are going to face walls in your life. Your choice is how you are going to face the wall and how you face the wall, whether you face it with fear and anxiety and self-pity or whether you face it with confidence and courage and resolution, makes all the difference when it comes to your experience with that wall.

And you see that right here in this story as well. I want to look at the story of Jericho and Joshua in chapter 6 and see how to face the walls in your life in a constructive way, in a way that glorifies God, in a way that builds your faith. So let's look at Joshua 6 starting in verse 1. It says, "Now the gates of Jericho were securely barred because of the Israelites. Nobody went out. No one came in. And then the Lord said to Joshua, 'See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men.'" And then he gives him some details about how this is going to happen. Very detailed here. "March around the city once," there's once, "with all the armed men and then..." Stop. "And do this for six days. Have seven priests carry trumpets of ram's horns in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seventh time, this time with the priests blowing the trumpets. And then when you hear them sound a loud blast on the trumpets, have the whole army give a loud shout, and then the wall of the city will collapse. And the army will go up, everyone, straight into the city."

Now, let's just be honest. This story sounds like a fable, doesn't it? It sounds like a myth. Is there any way to know whether there's any truth to this story before we dig into the spiritual truths that are contained here? Well, there was no proof for this story until about 80 or 90 years ago. It's something that sounds like a tale from Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the 1930s, British archaeologist adventurer John Garstang and his group consisting mostly of Bedouins decided that they would excavate in the tiny Arab village of Tell-es-Sultan. This was a date plantation with a strange small hill in the middle of the city. And for centuries, people had believed this hill, this mound, was just a natural geological feature. But the original archaeologists had a hunch that this mound hid the legendary but lost city of Jericho. And so they started digging, and that is exactly what they found. They actually found the Jericho of the Bible. And it's actually one of the oldest cities yet discovered in human history. Habitation there went back 10,000 years.

But when the public started hearing archaeologists had discovered Jericho, everybody wondered, would their excavations prove or disprove the Bible's story of a city whose walls suddenly came tumbling down? So what did they discover? Well, I was very excited a few years ago to get to go to Jericho myself, and I got actually to visit and walk through some of the excavations. Today, Jericho is a small town. It's actually a lot like Palm Springs. Show of hands, how many of you have ever been to Palm Springs or any place in the Coachella Valley? Most of you. Well, then you can easily picture Jericho because it's almost exactly like that. It's not as big, but it's an oasis on the edge of the desert. Lots of palm trees, dates are its primary industry, just like the Coachella Valley. It's even got a mountain with an aerial tram going up to it, just like Palm Springs does, as you can see in this picture. That's not Palm Springs, that's Jericho.

And what I got to do there when I visited was to go to the excavations and see how the first archaeologists found extensive remains of a walled city, and what they found there both confirms and helps us understand the Bible's story to an amazing degree. For example, it turns out that Jericho had a double wall, an outer wall that was an incredible 23 feet high, and then an inner wall that was about 30 feet high, and in between the two, dirt ramparts, which sloped up from the outer wall up to the inner wall. And do you see why they did this? This was a trap for invaders. If invaders somehow got over the first wall, then they would be trapped in that ditch as they tried to scale the second wall, easy prey for archers who would just pick them up. So Jericho, for thousands of years, because of its defenses, was absolutely impregnable. There was no one had ever breached the walls of Jericho, for literally for millennia.

And I was fascinated by some other details they discovered. They found in the middle of that earthen rampart, little dwellings of the people who couldn't afford to live up in the inner cities, sort of the lower caste people. And these were probably the homes of the poor and, for example, brothels. They actually found rooms that were literally part of that in-between section of the wall. So when the Bible says that Rahab the prostitute's house was part of the city wall, you heard Adrian talk about that story two weeks ago, it's likely that this is what it's talking about. Rahab lived in that middle rampart, and that's why the Israelite spies could get out of there to safety, because they were already outside that first inner wall.

But it gets even more fascinating, because the diggers then found a complete mystery in the ruins, something they'd never found in any other ruins in this area before. They found jar after jar, filled to the brim, with what had been freshly harvested grain, and not an ounce of it had been touched. All these jars were full of grain, dozens and dozens of them, and all the grain was burned up and never used. Why would anybody harvest a bunch of grain and then burn it up and not use it? Well, they realized this confirms several details from the Bible. Remember, a couple of weeks ago, Mark talked about the crossing of the Jordan River. The Bible says it was swollen because it was the time of the spring harvest. Well, these jars were full of spring harvest grain. The Bible describes the siege as short, lasting only a week, and that's why the jars were still full. People in Jericho had apparently gathered grain so they could last for a month's long siege, but it only lasted a week, so the people inside the city didn't have to eat the grain at all. And the Bible says the city was completely burned after it fell, and that's why these jars were full of burned grain.

There's so many details like this that have been discovered in Jericho, but the most fascinating detail they discovered was this. They found that in a cataclysmic event, the walls of Jericho had tipped over outward. The upper walls had crashed down the slopes of the rampart and broke the outer walls, forming a ramp right up into the center of the city, exactly the way the Bible describes it, and for the first time in millennia, the city of Jericho fell in that manner. Now, all of the archaeology agrees on these details. Nothing I've just told you is in any way controversial. One question remains in dispute the date. Did all this happen around the time of Joshua? John Garstang said yes, others said no. The walls fell 150 years earlier. That's too early for Joshua. Then in the 1990s, another expert took a new look at the data. The New York Times broke the story headline, "Believers Score in Battle Over the Battle of Jericho." And they led with this quote, "After years of doubt among archaeologists, a new analysis of excavations has yielded a wide range of evidence supporting the biblical account."

Now, I put a link in your notes if you want to read more about the archaeology because if you're like me, you absolutely love this stuff. I was going to say, "I dig this stuff," but that would have been a groan-inducing pun. But... So I didn't say it. But I am aware this is church, not the Discovery Channel. So what I want to do is dig even deeper than the archaeologists down into the meaning of this story, why it has had an impact on 3,000 years of readers. So let's look at what this says about when you hit the wall. This is why this story is so inspiring. If you feel like you're making progress, you're heading somewhere. There's a promised land in front of you that God wants you to have, and you've got your sights set on it, and then you hit an obstacle. And you feel like you're at that obstacle right now, and you want to quit right now, and you are sick of pep talks telling you not to give up. Here's why this story is for you today, because this is actually the opposite of a pep talk.

You see, the story of Joshua and Jericho is actually not about Joshua. It's not about Joshua's expertise. It's not about Joshua's grit. It's not about one man facing a wall who had determination. It's not about that at all. It's a story about God and how God is always faithful to all His promises. And this applies to you and me as believers. The Bible says in the New Testament, "For no matter how many promises God has made, they are yes and amen to us in Christ." That's in 2 Corinthians 1:20. What that verse means is God is always faithful to all His promises. And the way to persevere when you hit the wall is to trust God. Now, what am I talking about when I say trust God? You and I need to trust God in three ways. When we hit a wall in our lives. Jot these down. You need to know these. Number one, trust that God's victory is certain even when it seems evil is winning. Trust that God's victory is certain even when it seems evil is winning.

I've told some of you about that documentary I saw about World War II and D-Day. They interviewed somebody who'd been on the beach in Normandy, and he thought on the beach in that moment, there is no way we are going to win this war. This is all just sheer chaos. And in the documentary right after that, they cut to an interview with a pilot of one of the planes who saw it all from above. And you know what he said? I looked around and I thought there is no way we are going to lose. Same moment of the same exact battle they just had a totally different perspective. And you see that dynamic here in this story between Joshua and God. Look at the dramatic tension between verse one and verse two. Verse two, do you remember it said, "Then the Lord said to Joshua, 'See, I've delivered Jericho into your hands.'" So God says, "See." Now imagine you're Joshua. Joshua looks up and what does he see? Go back to verse one. He sees the gates of Jericho securely barred. Little bit of tension. Do you see that? Back to verse two. The Lord says, "I have delivered, but nothing has happened." God is speaking in the past tense about a battle that Joshua has not fought yet.

And you know what? There is a gospel parallel for you and me too. You see this all through the New Testament. For example, look at Romans 8:30. And let's read this out loud together. Let me hear you. This is about you and me as believers in Christ. It says, "And those he predestined he also called." Those he called he also justified. And those he justified he also glorified. Now wait a minute. I believe God chose me. I believe God called me and I believe God justified me that moment that I placed my trust in Jesus Christ, but I know I haven't been glorified. You can ask my wife Laurie. She knows I have not been glorified. Glorified, that means made as perfect as Jesus in heaven. Has anybody here been made as perfect as Jesus yet, you know, in heaven completely perfectly? We have not been glorified yet and yet God here speaks of our glorification in the past tense. Listen, to him your perfection is as good as accomplished.

To God he sees it as certainly happening. You could put it this way. God speaks in the past tense about my present tensions, my present battles. Sometimes I look at myself and I think, keep repeating the same sins over and over again. I'm not making any progress toward Christ likeness, but to God it's a done deal. God has seen your future and God knows his grace is going to be sufficient for you. He knows that already. God knows you're going to be perfected into Christ likeness. God knows that you're going to be glorified. Now does that mean you'll never go through tough times here on earth? Of course not. It means you're going to be okay. It means the promised land is yours. It means you have a destiny that is assured. So move forward confidently knowing that God speaks in past tense about battles that you are currently fighting. Isn't that good? I needed to hear that today.

Second huge truth here, trust that God's word is wise even when it seems ridiculous. Trust that God's word is wise even when it seems ridiculous. Listen, God tells you and me in his word how to live a godly life. And can some of those instructions in our culture seem absolutely ridiculous? Yes. And so the question is, do you trust God? This is actually the funniest part of the story to me. I don't know if you noticed another huge point of tension here. Josh was so human but you can miss it if you read this too fast. Did you notice how detailed God is with his instructions starting in verse 3? How he says march around the city. Do this for how many days? Six. Then have some priests carry, how many priests? Seven, right? And trumpets of what kind of horns? Rams horns and in front of the ark and then on the seventh day what you need to do is march around the city seven times and the priests are going to blow the trumpets and then when you hear the trumpets have the whole army shout and then the wall of the city is just going to collapse. Very, very detailed.

Now watch this. Watch how Joshua tells the people. So Joshua's son of Nun called the priests. So these are the religious people, right? These are the people who could be expected to actually believe about God. He says take up the ark of the coming of the Lord, have seven priests carry trumpets in front of it. The end. He doesn't tell them anything about the seven days. He doesn't tell them anything about the wall is suddenly just falling. Now look, he leaves out even more when he talks to the soldiers. So Joshua ordered the army advance, march around the city with an armed guard going ahead of the ark of the Lord. Period. Anybody notice what he's leaving out here to the army? No mention of the seven days. Nothing about the trumpets. Nothing about the walls kind of magically falling down. The story doesn't say this, but I think obviously Joshua knew these paramilitary guys would think Joshua's crazy if he would have told them the whole thing, right? Because soldiers do not look at a challenging military objective and go, "Hmm, let's get the band." You know?

They do not go double walled fortress city, legendary for being impregnable. What are the musicians doing? Let's go draft them. Obviously not. Why did God even do it this way? It is a deliberate non sequitur. Marching around Jericho and blowing trumpets and shouting actually had zero to do with why the walls came down. God did it all 100%. Maybe he made an earthquake happen just at that instant or something, but the wall didn't fall because they walked. It fell because God worked, okay? And here is where that old song gets it wrong. Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho. Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down. I don't hear anything about God in that song. That song makes it sound like Joshua fought and fought and fought and then the walls came down. The walls came down before Joshua fought a thing. It wasn't because they walked. It was because God worked.

So why the march? Important concept. God often asks us to show physical signs of spiritual commitment. Outward signs of inner trust in him. God was asking the Israelites to publicly show that they trusted him. He was going to do all the work. He was just saying, just demonstrate that you trust me and do it in a public way. It's a parallel for you and me. We're saved 100% by God's grace. He asks us to be publicly baptized as a public demonstration of our trust. Baptism doesn't save you, but it's kind of the Israelites marching around the wall with trumpets. It doesn't have anything to do with your salvation, but it shows a public trust in God. Another example communion, which we're going to do in a few minutes. Jesus Christ accomplished 100% of the work of our justification and glorification on the cross. But in communion, we show publicly our trust in him. Why? God is kind of the master psychologist. He made us and he knows we need this. And when we demonstrate outwardly our inner trust, what happens? It's encouraging to us. And when we do it together, we look around and it encourages us that all these people together are placing their trust in God. And it serves as an inspiration to others. I get moved during communion.

Now, there is another way the second point applies. One thing the archaeology revealed that had not really been known before about Jericho is this. Jericho was not a big city. The archaeologists have discovered that it was more like a fort, a keep. Only around 100, 150 soldiers could fit inside the walls. The Canaanite people mostly lived in the hills all over the place. The people inside Jericho were the king and the soldiers. And of course, there was Rahab and her place of business, you know, other support services, so to speak. But that fort, that garrison, you know, that is what stood between the Israelites and the Promised Land. They were stuck in that mountain pass. They had to get past that little 150 soldier garrison or they weren't going to make any progress.

Now, how does that apply to you and me? We might not fight physical fortresses, but we do fight mental fortresses. Check this out. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 10:4, "The weapons we fight with are not weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds." And that word, stronghold, means fort. It means military garrison, fortified outpost. Just like Jericho. We demolish what? Arguments. And we take captive every what? Thought. To make it obedient to Christ. Listen carefully. He's using the analogy of a fortress like Jericho to represent thoughts that oppose where God wants you to go in Christ. For example, you may have in your own little mind a little stronghold that is launching these arrows at your mind Just give up. You are worthless. Nobody really loves you and you will never make a difference. You've had such a string of bad luck in your life. God must hate you. Do any of those sound familiar? I hear those sometimes.

So how do you demolish those strongholds? Paul says, "We fight not with weapons of this world. We fight with God's word." Same way Joshua fought the battle of Jericho. If you hear, "You're a loser." What you do, you fight against. You realize that is a garrison in your mind launching those arrows at you. And to go where God wants you to go, you've got to get past that. And so what you do is you fight it with the arrow of God's word and you say, "No. No. If God is for me, who can be against me?" That is from Romans 8. Or you hear, and I know you've been hearing it, just quit. And you launch back a weapon from Galatians 6 and say, "No. God's word says, 'I will reap a harvest if I do not give up.'" Or you hear, "You are worthless." And you say, "No." Ephesians 1 says, "I am holy and blameless and beloved in His sight." How do you go against that stronghold in your mind? God's word, that is your weapon.

Listen, some of you right now, there is a stronghold of stinking thinking, as they say in recovery, in your mind. And you know, it's not really that big. It doesn't really amount to much. But it stands between you and the promised land life that God has for you. So don't just take it. Get past it with the weapon of God's word and speak truth to those lies. Does that make sense? I'm going to talk a lot more about this in the video devo that I'm going to do tomorrow morning, so there's details in the notes about how you can subscribe to those for free. But let's wrap this up. The third huge lesson I learned here is I need to trust that God's timing is perfect, even when it seems to take forever.

I want you to take just a minute and think about this. It says they did this for six days. So imagine you're a soldier. You know, Joshua, as we said, he has not told them that it's going to take seven days. We saw what he told the soldiers. So you put, like in your calendar app, you know, Monday, take Jericho, you know, save. That's what you're expecting will happen, right? So you go out, you march around the city once. I have walked around that city myself. In real time. And I timed it. It took about 15 minutes. So you get up at the break of dawn and you march around that city, and you're expecting there to be a battle. And 15 minutes later, Joshua goes, all right, everybody back to their tents. And you're like, what? It's like 645 a.m. And you go back home and your spouse says, how did it go today, honey? Well, it was interesting, you know. Next day, you're like, I think Joshua just wanted us to get the lay of the land, you know. But tomorrow, it's going to be a battle. You go out there the next day, you're like, okay, we scouted the land. We marched around the city. We got it. We got it, Joshua. Here we go. And 15 minutes later, back to your tents. That's day two. Then it happens on day three, and then day four, and then day five, and then day six. And you start to think, Joshua is a lunatic. What is happening here, right? You know, God could have done this all on day one. Why did he wait a week?

The story doesn't say this, but I think if God had let them in right away, they would have thought it was them. Sometimes God has to bring us to a place where we realize it is not about us and our genius. It's about God and His timing. And I'm talking to you, if you feel like you are on lap two, or lap three, or lap four, or lap five, and you start to thinking, what's happening? Why is it taking so long? I am walking, and it is not working. Listen, just because your progress isn't obvious doesn't mean God isn't working. Just because your progress isn't obvious doesn't mean that God has forgotten you. Just because your progress isn't obvious doesn't mean that God is not blessing you. Because look what happens. Verse 15, "On the," what? "Seventh day they got up at daybreak." This time they marched around the city seven times in the same manner. Face it, they thought it's just going to be the same old story again. Nothing's going to happen. Nothing had happened at this point. Nothing been the seventh time around. It all happens, and the walls collapse. Look at verse 20. "The wall collapsed, and everybody charged straight in, and they took the city." I know there are some people here who are just ready to give up. But as I heard somebody tell me one day in reference to this story, don't stop on six.

You're on day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six, and you're just sick of it. But what if this is day six and the breakthrough's going to happen halfway through day seven? You know, I used to be so impressed by people who stepped out in faith to start stuff. Loved those sermons on stepping out in faith. Now what impresses me is not when people start stuff. Lots of people start stuff. It's when people persevere through all the ups and the downs and the plateaus, pastors who stay with churches, spouses who stay with a marriage, parents who never stop praying and stick with it and persevere. Candidly, there are times we all want to quit at times. But you know, the pastors, for example, that I almost revere, are people like Pastor Kraft who was here. He was the pastor at this church before me. He was here for nearly half a century, 47 years. That's the kind of pastor I want to be. That's the kind of spouse I want to be. That's the kind of parent I want to be. That's the kind of friend I want to be.

So don't stop on six. Say this out loud because somebody needs to hear this today. Let's say it. Don't stop on six. For six and a half days, not a single brick moved. But this is life, isn't it? This is why it's so hard to get fit. Don't you think everybody would work out more if you instantly got reward? You do one pushup and there's a little bicep right there, right? That never happens. You work out for months. You don't lose any weight. You don't see any difference. Then suddenly one day you go, wow, and you look like Adrian Moreno. You suddenly have changed. Or parenting. Sometimes those of you who are parents of very young children, you think, am I going to be the parent of a two-year-old forever? And then one day you're walking her down the aisle. It just happens. It seems like it happens overnight, but what happens is there's night after night after night after night after night after night where nothing changes and that it all changes. So don't stop on six.

I'm so emotional about it because not only do I feel like this sometimes, but I know from my personal experience, from my personal conversations with people even this week at this church, there's some of you who just want to stop. You're going, God, let me see one brick fall. But nothing has happened. But this is exactly why the Bible says in verses like this, Galatians 6:9, and let's read this out loud together. Somebody needs to hear this right now. Here we go. "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." Sometimes you see nothing until the breakthrough moment. So keep walking. Even though it doesn't seem to be working, keep walking. Even if the wall hasn't budged, keep walking. Even if the circumstance hasn't changed. Because here's a big truth from this story. Obedience is my responsibility. Outcome is God's responsibility. And God is always faithful to all His promises. And I'm talking primarily about God's promises to you in His word about your development.

Some of you feel like I'm the wall. I've been walking this Christian faith thing, and I thought I was going to change and become a more loving person, but I'm getting disappointed with myself. God promises, "He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." That is a promise. Do not give up. Keep walking. Right now, you are closer than you think you are. So don't stop on six. Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, I just want to pray for everybody here who has felt like quitting. And with our heads still bowed, if there were times this week when you just felt like quitting, would you just put up a hand, just slip up your hand right now? Let me just pray for you. God, you see these hands raised. Grant these people perseverance, even though not one brick has fallen yet. Empower them, and especially I pray that you would help us to realize that you speak in past tense of our present battles. Christ has won the victory. You have completely delivered us. You have bought our salvation. And as we take our communion together now, help it to be for us like it was for Joshua and the people of Israel around that city, praising you for your promise, even though we have not seen its complete fulfillment yet. We want to thank you for what you accomplished in full on the cross and what it promises for our future. Our effort contributes nothing to our salvation. We just trust in you and praise you, and we receive it and believe it by your grace. And we pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.