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Hi, this is Pastor Tom, and I want to welcome you to week three, day one of our
look through the book of Joshua. We're going to be looking at the sixth chapter
of Joshua at the beginning of this week, starting with verses one and two today.
And these are verses that are all about how do you face your greatest battles?

How do you see God bring victory at the point of your greatest battle? Now, this
greatest battle that they were going to face in chapter six is a very familiar
battle in Joshua. Let me read for you Joshua chapter six, verses one and two.

"Now, the gates of Jericho were tightly shut because the people were afraid of
the Israelites. No one was allowed to go in or out. But the Lord said to Joshua,
'I have given you Jericho, its king, and all its mighty warriors.

'" Maybe one of the reasons we know this battle so well is because of the old
song, "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho. " The real problem, the real challenge
is, how do I fit these truths into my everyday life that are taught in these
scriptures? The book of Joshua, as we look through it, is not about how Joshua
really fought the battles.

It's not Joshua who fought the battle of Jericho, it's God who fought the battle
of Jericho. And we're going to see how he fights that battle through Joshua,
working in Joshua these next few days together. Last week we watched the walls
of preparedness go up in people's lives.

This week we're going to see the walls of Jericho come tumbling down. And these
chapters are all about how victories are won, the victory of God happening in
your everyday life. God does not give us a perfect life in this world, that's
only for heaven, but he can give us a victorious life in this world.

Victorious over sin, victorious over evil, victorious over temptation. God can
give that kind of victory into our lives. How does he do it?

There are many principles for it in Joshua chapter 6. Joshua 6 actually
proclaims one simple truth about how this victory occurs. In fact, that one
simple truth is in one simple word, the word trust, trust.

Trust in God is the key to personal victory. So don't look at Joshua chapter 6
so much as how the walls of Jericho fell, rather for your personal life look at
it as how trust in God is built. I see four important building blocks for trust
in God in this chapter as we start the chapter.

We'll look at the first one today and the rest of them throughout the rest of
this week, the start of the rest of this week. The first principle for how trust
is built in your life is this, you want to live a life of trust. Number one, you
act on the word of God, not on the circumstances of the moment.

You act based on the word of God, not based on the circumstances of the moment.
If you compare verses 1 and 2, which we just read, you see they are very, they
are very far apart from each other. In verse 1, you have the city of Jericho
tightly shut, the gates tightly shut because people were afraid.

And then in verse 2, you have the Lord saying, "I have given you Jericho. " On
the outside, it looked like there's no way in, but God is saying, "I've given
this to you. " The question is, what are you going to look at?

Verse 1 or verse 2, what are you going to look at, the circumstances or the word
of God? Now, the all-important principle in this is this truth, this fact.
Circumstances are momentary while God's Word is eternal.

It doesn't always seem that way to us. It doesn't always look that way to us. It
doesn't always feel that way to us, but it is the truth.

Circumstances are momentary while God's Word is eternal. And so we have to
choose which to trust. And it would seem simple if I just say that God's Word is
eternal, okay, that's what I'm going to trust.

It doesn't seem simple, but there are two big challenges. Challenge number one
is this. God's Word is unseen in its work while circumstances are clearly seen
in our daily lives.

And here's the perfect example in Jericho. They could clearly see the city
standing there. They could clearly see the walls.

They could clearly see this is going to be a difficult problem. And because the
problems, the circumstances are so clearly seen, it causes us as human beings to
want to depend on what is seen to solve the problem of what's seen. So we want
to depend on circumstances to solve the problem of our circumstances.

We want to depend on money that we see to solve all of our problems with money,
but it doesn't work that way. You have to begin to live life in a different way.
You live life based on your trust in His Word first, and then the circumstances
of life flow out of that.

They always do. But we've got to work through that and realize, okay, God, I'm
trusting you for what I don't see in advance, knowing that what I don't see is
more powerful than what I do see. That is not intuitive, but that's trust.

That may not be how you feel like acting in your daily life, but that's trust.
You trust in the unseen and not the seen. The second challenge in daily trust is
this.

God's Word is working toward eternity while we tend to live in the moment. What
God is working into your life is a character built to last for eternity. What
God is working into your life is a trust in Him, a love for Him built to last
for eternity.

But we, in our everyday lives in this world, we live in the moment by moment. We
live this moment, then the next moment, and the next moment. And because of the
juxtaposition of these two, we find ourselves too often living for the moment
rather than for the eternal.

So the question I have, based on this lesson that we see in Joshua, that they
had to bring God's Word into the momentary issues of their life, how do you and
I do that? How do we bring eternity into the moments of our life? Let me give
you just some ideas of how to do that today.

Five ideas based on the word trust. Just remember these five things throughout
the day today. They are ways to bring God's eternal love, God's eternal plan
into the everyday moments of your life.

T-R-U-S-T. First T, take God at His Word. You want to bring the eternal into the
momentary?

You take God at His Word. You do what God says rather than what the moment tells
you to do. You trust God rather than the temptation.

You trust God rather than the fear. You trust God rather than the opinions of
men. The temptation, the fear, the opinions that other people have around you,
as strong as all those might be, they're just momentary.

So you trust God above those things. That's how you bring the eternal into the
moments of your life. R, the R stands for rest in God's love for you.

All through the book of Hebrews, it talks about the fact that one of the ways
that the eternal is brought into our daily lives in this world is by resting in
God, entering into God's rest. Rest in the fact that He loves you. Don't try to
get Him to love you.

You're never going to get there. Just rest in the fact that He loves you in
Christ. That's one of the most significant ways that many of us, in fact, right
now, even in this moment can bring the eternal into the moments of your life.

Stop trying to get God to love you. Rest in the truth that He loves you. T, R,
U, the U in trust stands for use what God has given you to serve others.

You use whatever God's given you to serve others. You can't serve Him with what
you don't have, but you can serve Him with what you do have. Whatever little
resources, whatever abilities He's given, you use those to serve others.

Jesus came into this world to serve others and He taught us to serve. And one of
the most significant ways, unseen ways many times, to bring the eternal into the
moments of our lives is by serving someone else. That's where God's will is
done.

That's where eternity is changed. That's where our lives are transformed, is
when you decide to serve someone else. So T, you take God at His word, R, you
rest in God's love for you.

You use what God has given you to serve others. S, you start your eternal life
now. You start thinking eternal now.

Now, I understand that when you die, when you go to heaven, you get a new body,
you're going to have a great upgrade in your eternal life. I totally understand
that. It's going to be better in heaven.

But Jesus taught us that the moment we become believers, we have passed out of
judgment into life. We have begun in one sense eternal life. It has already been
given to us.

Now we're living eternal life on this side of death. Someday we're going to live
the rest of our eternal life on the other side of death. But from the moment you
started trusting in Christ, you started your eternal life.

So you can start looking forward to it now. You can start living in it now. You
can start rejoicing in it now.

Eternal life is a promise that you can be grateful for today. So you start
thinking eternal now. T, R, U, S, T, the last T stands for thank.

You thank God for His blessings. I don't know of any more powerful way to bring
God into the moments of your life today than to thank Him throughout the day to
day. Just find things to thank Him for, for the food you're going to eat, for
the safety that you have, for the journey that you're taking, for the success
that you had, for the ability to endure a failure that you had, for everything
in your life, from the big to the small.

When you thank God, you bring God into that situation of your life, into that
moment of your life. So you want to live eternal in the moments today. You take
God at His word.

You rest in God's love for you. Use what God has given you to serve others. You
start your eternal life now and you thank God for His blessings.

Our Father, we want to stop for a moment and do that right now. To thank you for
your blessings. Thank you for the blessing of eternal life.

Thank you for the blessing of your love. Thank you for the simple blessings of
the food that we need to get us through the day to day of shelter over our heads
this last night. Some of us had better shelter than others, but you provided for
us.

Thank you for your provision. Thank you, God, for the opportunities to do work,
to serve you in ways that can make a difference in this world. And thank you
that you're with us through it all.

Lord, help us to be thankful in our hearts today. Give us a thankful heart, we
pray, in Jesus' name, amen. Tomorrow, we're going to look at depending on God's
strategy for your life.