This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

We're in week three, day two of our look to the book of Joshua. We're going to
look at verses three to 16 today, some of the most familiar verses in all of the
book of Joshua. And they're verses that teach us how God brings His victory into
our lives.

Yesterday, we learned the first principle of this, that if you're going to see
God's victory in your daily life, you have to act on His word, not on your
circumstances, on His eternal word, not on your momentary circumstances. In
verses three to five, we learn a second principle for how to see God's victory
happening in the moments of our everyday life. The second principle is you
depend on the strategy of God rather than the strength of man.

You depend on the God's strategy rather than your strength. Listen to what
happens in verses three to five. Here's what God said to Joshua.

This is a principle in these verses for how God wants to work in our lives. This
isn't just about Jericho and Joshua. This is about you and your day today.

God has given you strength. And He will often use your strength in His strategy
for your life. But your strength does not define His strategy.

It does not direct His strategy. And in many cases, He will act in direct
opposition even to your strength, using your weakness instead. This is so
important.

Let me just say this again. This is how God works in our lives. God has given
you strength.

And He will often use your strength in His strategy. But your strength does not
define or direct His strategy. And often He will act in direct opposition to
your strength, using your weakness instead.

That's what God meant to teach them at Jericho, how to trust in Him. There are
many battles where they were going to win the battle based seemingly on their
own strength. They would just go and fight the battle and they would win.

But in this first battle, He wanted to let them know that He was the one working
in every battle. So He causes the walls to fall down. Now, I've got some news
for you.

They could have taken Jericho by conventional means. They had the army to do it.
They had the manpower.

In one sense, they were the Goliath to Jericho's David. And we read a couple of
days ago that Jericho was terrified of the Israelites. They could have done this
by conventional means, but God did not allow them to do it that way because God
was teaching them something very important.

His strategy, rather than their strength, was to determine their victory in
everyday life. He was not just teaching this to them. He's teaching it to us
today as well.

That also, by the way, is what God means to teach us at the cross, the cross of
Jesus Christ. His strategy of grace, rather than our strength of good works, is
how God works in our lives. And so we all have to come to these moments
throughout the day where we ask ourselves, what am I depending on?

Am I depending on my strength of my goodness or God's strategy of His
forgiveness? Am I depending on my strength of spirit, my own willpower? Or am I
depending on God's strategy of the Holy Spirit, there to accomplish God's will
on earth?

If you're living by your own willpower instead of by God's will, it's your
strength, not His strategy. You might be able to get a lot done on your own
willpower. You might not.

It just depends on who you are, how you were brought up, what your particular
psychological makeup might be. But I'll tell you this, you'll never get done on
your own willpower, what God wants to do in this world. That only happens
through His strategy, through His spirit.

What am I depending on? Are you depending on your strength of thought or His
strategy of truth? Depend on the strategy of God rather than your own strength.

That's the second principle for daily victory. If you depend on your own
strength, you might get a victory here or there. You might get fooled into
thinking you've got enough strength to get a long string of victories.

You did, but you're not going to get the ultimate victories. You're not going to
win the kind of victories that God wants to win in your life. Victories in
relationships, victories in love, victories in joy, victories in fulfillment.

Those only come through God's strategy for our lives, through connection to Him.
Now in these verses, I want to look at a third principle for how you and I are
to live in daily victory. This is an important one that we often forget.

The third principle is you discipline your life to act according to God's
timing. God's timing. Listen to what happens in verses 14.

Well, let me begin back in verse 12 and go down through verse 16. Joshua got up
early the next morning, and the priests again carried the ark of the Lord. The
seven priests and the ram's horns marched in front of the ark of the Lord,
blowing their horns.

Armed guards marched both in front of the priests with the horns and behind the
ark of the Lord. All this time, the priests were sounding their horns. On the
second day, they marched around the city once, and they returned to the camp.

They followed this pattern for six days. On the seventh day, the Israelites got
up at dawn, and they marched around the city as they had done before. But this
time, they went around the city seven times.

The seventh time around, as the priests sounded the long blast from their horns,
Joshua commanded the people, "Shout, for the Lord has given you this city. " I'm
sure you saw in these verses the timing of God. God said, "This is how I want
you to do it.

For six days, you march around once. On the seventh day, you march around seven
times, and that's when you shout. " I'm amazed in my own life at how much of
trust in God is simply learning to live life according to God's timing and not
my timing.

For them, trust meant shout on the seventh day. Not the first day, not the sixth
day, not the eighth day, but the seventh day. Now, using that as a picture, it
helps me to realize how often we can get off on God's timing.

There's a lot of first-day shouters out there. There's a lot of sixth-day
shouters out there, eighth-day shouters. But God says, "No, do it on the seventh
day.

Do it in my timing. " First-day shouters. Those are the kind of people.

The word "wait" isn't even in their vocabulary. They never even get to the "W"
in "wait. " They hear what God wants to do, and they have to act right now.

They can't wait a moment. They can't wait for God's timing. If they hear it,
they have to do it.

They can't understand how, if you have to wait for it, how in the world could
God be in it? But so many times, trust is spelled "wait. " Those that wait upon
the Lord, the Scripture says.

And again and again and again you see in Scripture how God causes His people to
have to wait for His plan to unfold, for His salvation to come, for His Word to
go out in just the right way. So if you're always having to shout on the first
day, if you're never able to wait until the seventh day, there's a lesson to
learn from these people as they march around Jericho, God's timing. There's also
what I would call sixth-day shouters.

These are people whose trust in God, it's always just short of fulfillment. God
says, "Wait seven days," and they say, "Okay, God, I'll do it, I'll do it. " And
they wait the first day, they're okay.

Second day, they're okay. Third day, they're getting sort of antsy. Fourth day,
"I don't know if I can do this, God.

" Fifth day, "Okay, God, I'm going to do it. " Sixth day, they just shout. They
just shout early.

Why does this happen to us? It happens because we start to trust in ourselves.
We take trust back.

It's so easy to do that. We start to let our anxieties and our worries drive us
rather than God's will drive us. In daily life, you're really going to live in
one of two places.

You're either going to live in the place of worry or in the place of worship.
And if you live in the place of worry, you're going to find yourself shouting
early all the time. But if you live in the place of worship, you find that God
calms those anxieties and lets you get in on his timing in a greater way.

It's one of the great keys to personal victory. Living according to God's
timing, not your timing. There's first-day shouters.

There's sixth-day shouters. There's also eighth-day shouters. They're always a
day late and a shout short.

These are the people who are really good at waiting. They're so good at waiting
that their waiting actually becomes an excuse for not acting. "Oh, I'll wait on
the Lord.

I'll wait and wait and wait. " But I wait in my chair and God's saying, "I want
you to get out of your chair. I got something for you to do now.

I got some place for you to go now. " It's time to shout so that the walls will
fall down. So some of you that feel like maybe through the rest of this study
today, "Oh, I'm great at this.

I'm great at waiting," maybe it's because you're too great at it and you need to
listen for the seventh day. You need to act, not just wait. We need to be
seventh-day shouters.

We need to be people who follow his direction in our individual lives. Not our
individual thoughts, not our individual opinions, but his direction. Let's pray
together right now that that could happen in a deeper and greater way in every
one of our lives.

Lord Jesus, you know us. You see us. You know our hearts and you know how we get
anxious and we want to run ahead of you.

Some of us, we can't wait at all. Teach us to wait. Some of us, we can't wait
long enough.

We let our worries overwhelm us. Teach us to worship. Some of us, we wait too
long.

We are not those people who would act when you say act. Teach us to work. Teach
us to follow your will when it's the time.

Or teach us to listen for that timing that you have and the longer we live with
you, the longer we spend time with you, help us to understand your timing more
and more. Because we know one of the keys of victory is doing what you want when
you want it done. Help us to be those kind of people, we pray.

Help me to be that kind of person, I pray. In your name, we pray, Jesus, amen.
Tomorrow we're going to look together at the power of personal purity.