13 - Choose This Day! | Lessons of Faith from Joshua

Joshua gathers the people in Shechem and reminds them of Abraham's calling and God's work of salvation. Faith works in the spirit, but it needs a standard to guide it. If the standard is right, faith is right. If it is wrong, so is faith.

God promised Abraham a son. Sarah was old, and humanly speaking, it seemed impossible. Out of unbelief, Abraham took the servant as his wife and fathered Ishmael. Jacob also did not trust in God, but in his mother. False faith relies on what is humanly possible. True faith relies on what is possible for God.

In Shechem, Joshua chooses the Lord: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” The people did not keep their promise. We see that man can never be independent. Either he serves God or unreliable, changeable sources. He thinks he can choose. But there are areas where this is not possible for him. What, then, can man choose? And is there a neutral position? No! But man thinks so in his error. Let us take a closer look at this. There are only two ways: the broad way and the narrow way. Christ came to open the narrow way and give us the choice of the new life of Jesus.

Since we have the wrong identity in our hearts from the moment of conception, our hearts automatically trust the wrong person and must believe their words. Our salvation lies in the mind, where the conscience can be based on a conscious standard in order to place our trust in God and understand His Word correctly, so that we can then believe it. We must trust God in our consciousness in order to finally recognize Him in our subconscious as well. The depth of these topics is covered in the thirteenth part of the series “Lessons of Faith from Joshua.”