This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Hi everyone, I want to welcome you to week two. This is day one of our look
through the book of Joshua. Last week we began this look in this great book at
what do you do when you stand at the edge of living God's promises in your life?

How do you prepare yourself to begin to step into living this new,
promise-filled, victorious life that God wants for us on a daily basis? This
week, we're going to look at the next step. For Joshua, it meant crossing the
river.

So for us, it's how rivers are crossed into living God's promises. God's
promises always seem to have a Jordan River in the way. And for them, as they
were facing this entrance into the promised land, there was this Jordan River
that they all had to cross.

And this was no matter of some mere afternoon swim. They had to get hundreds and
hundreds of thousands of people over the river. And it was at flood levels at
this time.

The span, if it was as it is today, was close to half a mile. They had the
promise, listen to this, they had the promise, but they didn't seem to have the
means to cross the Jordan, to get to the promise. So the question is, what is
your Jordan River right now?

Where's the place in your life where you have the promise, you have God's
promise, but you just don't seem to have the means. You don't have the financial
means. You don't have the emotional means.

You don't have the relational means. Peace is promised in your life, and yet
you're having financial difficulties. Salvation is promised in your life, and
yet you're facing doubts and inner struggles in your emotions.

Joy is promised in your life, and yet you're facing depressing circumstances.
You have the promise, but you don't feel like you have the means. That's just
where they were.

And I want you to know that God delights in dealing with our Jordan Rivers. We
usually try to avoid them. We try to bridge over them, to tunnel under them, to
find a way around them.

But God delights in splitting them right down the middle. As we look together
today at how rivers are crossed, you need to begin by facing the obstacle of
your own doubt and your own feelings of inadequacy. Just head on.

Quit trying to avoid your doubt, your feelings of inadequacy. Recognize God
knows they're there, and God has an answer. And then once you've done that,
let's learn from what they learned.

Listen to what happened in chapter 3 verses 1 to 5. "Early in the morning,
Joshua and all the Israelites set out from Shittim and went to the Jordan, where
they camped before crossing over. And after three days, the officers went
throughout the camp, giving orders to the people.

When you see the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God and the priests who
are Levites carrying it, you are to move out of your positions and to follow it.
And then you will know which way to go, since you've never been this way before.
But keep a distance of about a thousand yards between you and the Ark, and do
not go near it.

Joshua told the people, 'Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do
amazing things among you. '" At the beginning of this chapter, chapter 3, God
tells us how to prepare our hearts before we cross. Just like they had to
prepare their hearts we looked at last week before entering into the promised
land, now they're having to prepare their hearts once again before they cross
the river into the promised land.

What do you have to do to prepare your heart to live by God's promises, to
receive God's promises, to even begin to think about crossing over this river,
to live in a new way, living by God's strength, living by God's victories in
your life, not living a perfect life, but living a life where you know God's
using you, living a life where you know God's making a difference through you,
living a life where you know God is working his blessings not only in your life,
but through your life to other people. What do you have to do to prepare
yourself for that? Well the number one thing you have to do that we learn here
is you have to look at yourself in a new way.

Joshua says, "Consecrate yourselves. " To consecrate, that word means to be
clean, to be pure, to be holy. It's something that has entered the sphere of the
sacred.

In a sense, it means you see yourself in a brand new way. Now can you make
yourself pure? Absolutely not.

But you can begin to see yourself as sacred to God, as clean, pure, holy, set
apart by God because you depend on him and because of what Jesus Christ has done
for you. So beginning to prepare your heart to live this life of God's promises
is not about you making yourself better. It's about you recognizing what Jesus
wants to do in your life, how he wants to give his purity, his holiness into
your life.

You see in the Old Testament it was temples that were sacred, but in the New
Testament it is people that are sacred, that are set apart to be holy. We think
of buildings as sacred sometimes, as a church building, that's the sacred place
where we go to worship God. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A building can be a good place, it can be a tool, but buildings are just things.
It is people who are holy, who are set apart for God. So you see yourself as
sacred, as vital to the plan of God.

God wants to do something through your life that he can only do through your
life. And in order to do that, he has made you through Christ holy, pure, clean,
consecrated. To consecrate yourself is to see yourself through the eyes of what
Jesus has done for you.

Do that right now. Just take a moment to consecrate yourself, to see yourself
maybe for the first time in a long time, through the eyes of what Jesus has done
for you. You look at yourself in a new way.

The second thing you do, we learn in these verses, is you look at tomorrow in a
new way. Consecrate yourself, Joshua says, because tomorrow God's going to do
amazing things. He's going to do wonders among you.

Let me just ask you honestly, how often do you go to sleep with these kind of
thoughts on your mind? Tomorrow God's going to do amazing things. Tomorrow God's
going to do wonders.

To a lot of us, that sounds like very fake, very phony thinking. We think, oh,
to think that way is just to be, you know, I'm a glass half full, all the way
full kind of a person. I'm just lying to myself, tomorrow I'm going to face just
as many problems as I face today.

Well, yeah, you're going to face problems. Yeah, we live in a tough world, but
that doesn't mean that God can't do wonders. That doesn't mean that God can't do
amazing things.

The truth is, every day God works wonders, recognized or unrecognized. So we
need to practice being ready for the wonderful, being ready for the amazing
thing that God's going to do. What I'm saying is, stop expecting failure,
spiritual failure, failure in your relationship with God, failure in your faith.

Stop expecting also merely human success. You might think, oh, I never expect
failure. I always expect to succeed every day, but maybe your success is just
merely human success.

What do I mean by that? I mean what you can do on your own power, what you can
accomplish by yourself. And maybe you've been given a lot of good tools, got a
lot of good education, you were brought up well, or you just have a lot of
energy, natural energy, you can get a lot done human-wise, but God wants to do
so much more through your life.

So stop expecting failure, stop expecting merely human success and start
expecting God. Start expecting God will act. Don't set up permanent residence on
the wrong side of the Jordan, looking over into the promised land.

Oh, it would be great if I could live there. God would do amazing things. That's
for other people's lives, though.

Start expecting God to act. Be ready for God's wonderful work to occur in your
life at any moment, because He is working. There's no doubt that He's working.

And when God works, He does wonderful things. So you look at tomorrow in a new
way. You look at yourself in a new way.

And then you do a third simple thing we learn in these verses. You follow the
ark. I'm not talking about Noah's ark.

I'm talking about the ark of the covenant here. You follow the ark of God's
presence. That's what this ark represented.

Did you notice what it said in these verses? Because you've never been this way
before, go where the ark goes and you'll be going in the right direction. I love
that picture.

Because most of our lives, my life, your life, we are going in ways, in
directions we've never gone before. Maybe it's you starting high school or
starting college, you've never been that way before. Or maybe it's you getting
your first job or getting married, you've never been that way before.

Or maybe it's you having children or facing a crisis you've never faced before
or having a success you've never had before. Maybe it's you heading towards
retirement. I don't know what it is, but we only go through life once.

So most of life, we've never been that way before. So how do I know what
direction to go? Head in the direction of God's presence.

Now we don't have a physical ark to follow. So what does that mean for us? Well,
in very simple terms, when you're heading in a direction in your life and you
feel that God is not in it, maybe because of what you're being asked to do or
just some deep spiritual sense, I don't sense that God's in this.

When you feel that way, find a different way to go. That's saying something to
you. And when you sense you're heading in a direction in your life and you sense
God is in it, keep going in that direction.

Don't stop. Don't turn back. Even if it scares you, you keep going in that
direction.

You want to follow the ark. You want to follow God's presence in your life.
That's how you head in the direction.

That's how you prepare yourself to head in the direction of crossing over that
river to live in the land of God's promise, not in the land of perfection, but
the land of seeing his promises being fulfilled in your life on a daily basis.
He wants to do this. That's why he's given us his promises.

Let's pray together. Our Father, help us to see our self through your eyes, not
someone else's eyes, not our own eyes, but through your eyes. Jesus, thank you
that because you died on the cross, we have been made holy.

And so help us to live that kind of way, the way that you've made us. Or help us
to see tomorrow through your eyes, to see the fact that you want to do wonderful
things in this world. It is a world where terrible things happen sometimes, but
this world will not last.

And you want to do wonderful things that will outlast and overwhelm and overcome
anything that's going on in this world. So help us to see that tomorrow you want
to do wonderful things. And then, Lord, help us to follow the place of your
presence, to go where we know you're working, to go where we know you're doing
something in this world.

Help us to see that and then help us to take those steps despite our fear,
despite our doubts to take those steps, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. Tomorrow,
we're going to see one of the greatest lessons in all of the Bible about how to
live the life of faith.