Tuesday 3 May 2011

Tuesday Reading: Joshua 10:8

Key Verse: Joshua 10:8
8  And Jehovah said to Joshua, Do not fear them, for I have delivered them into your hands. There shall not a man of them stand before you.

Devotion:
What is it going to take for you to listen to God’s Word? How about what was happening to Joshua after he had taken Ai? (Yes that’s the place, not artificial intelligence) God wanted Joshua to have absolute trust in Him so that the people would follow and have absolute trust and hence faith in God. And that is exactly what God wants in our lives still today – He wants us to know that we can trust Him in everything. He wants us to know that we can depend on Him for everything. He wants us activate that trust and that dependence and to use it every day in our lives.

How do you think that He could show you to depend on Him? Could He continue talking to you until He is blue in the face to wait for you to actually listen? Could He allow something to happen in your life so that you suddenly realise that you do need to depend on Him? Well I would like to think that He would continue talking to me until I listen but I know that from my life people eventually give up telling me to do things and then things tend to go wrong! People can try to warn us as much as they can – but if we do not listen then we are the ones that are going to have the problem! If we are only going to use that faith to depend on God when things are going really bad then should we expect anything else in our life?

Joshua was shown many times that He needed to trust God and some of those times may well have seemed a bit scary – when we look back at them now we think of them as being scary, but for someone on the inside that is actively placing his trust in God it might have been ‘normal’. We know that many people have continued to doubt God’s strength because we can read about people in our bibles and we can read about God’s responses to those actions by those people. With hind-sight we can look back and say we know best but when we are caught up in the action we look to what is directly in front of us and nothing else – how then can we see what God wants in our lives? The only way is to focus on His Word to see what He wants of us...

Points to Ponder:
Do you trust people?

Are you trusting God?