Not What I Had in Mind

Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.  Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you.  Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go. – Joshua 1:6-7

I could use this same title for every post.  As I often say, I am a much nicer person on the internet than I am in real life.

Faith, hope, love – I was thinking about that, rather bitterly, last night as I was filled with anger and frustration.  My first waking thought was one of hopelessness.  Then I decided to get up and have a cup of coffee and see if I couldn’t make it until sundown.  There is no way I can get everything done today that needed to be done yesterday.  I’m like the guy in “Sixteen Tons” – “another day older and deeper in debt”, except mine is “further behind”.  I don’t think I have accomplished anything tangible in the last year.  In other words, the call to “good success” is not really ringing true this morning.

I do not like to fail.  I do not like to be exposed as anything less than perfect – or at least competent and strong.  I am not inclined to yield the field.  I suppose there is such a thing as a tactical retreat.  It could be, I suppose, that the courage I need is not the courage to press on, but the fortitude to admit my vulnerability, the strength to acknowledge that my strength and ability have limits. 

The meek, Jesus said, shall inherit the earth, but flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.  We are heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ Jesus (Joshua), heirs not of a bit of soil but of the spiritual reality of which Canaan speaks.  This inheritance is sealed and guaranteed by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Those who followed Joshua typified the death of self by crossing the Jordan River at flood stage.  The Lord held up the waters of Jordan, as He had done on the Red Sea, so that the people crossed, in effect, under the water.  

Every day – especially lately, it seems that the world is poking and prodding me, wounding my pride and then pouring salt in the wounds.  Overmatched, hounded, hurting and hopeless, I fight on – not out of courage but out of fear.  It seems as if I have been here before, and maybe I have.  Israel passed through the Red Sea to find the Law before passing through Jordan to find grace. 

I hope no one else is as hard-headed as I am, as arrogant and defiant, yet cowardly when it comes to living a surrendered life.  It comes down, perhaps, to an idea that if God gives it, it is His; if I earned it, created it, built it, it is mine.  There’s nothing wrong with owning something in the material world – so long as we recall that even our natural strength and ability is from our Father and that even what we can hold in our hands, we hold only as stewards for Him.  

 But on the other side of Jordan – that place we are promised, that Life that is waiting for us to step into, there is no room at all for my inflated estimation of myself.  Pride has to die right here, and if I try to hang on to even a shred of it, it will pull me down to hell.  Under water.  I have to go under, but I can’t stay.  I can let my old nature pull me to the bottom, but it has to stay there, and I (not I but Christ) have to rise.  I can’t hold my breath much longer.