First Presbyterian Church Of Baton Rouge

Joshua 5 seems like bizarre military strategy. But God means us to see that the victory belongs to him alone. We enter covenant with him, even though it’s a wounding and a dying to self. We adjust our lives to God’s rhythm through his church. We look not first to culture and its baiting of us to hate each other, but to the commander who is the LORD and follow his call into Christ’s mission.

Joshua relayed the message, "Raise the stones," so that our children will ask what they mean. And we can tell them, “The LORD your God dried up the waters of the Jordan so you could pass over. So that. So that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the LORD is mighty, that you might fear the LORD your God forever.” People of God, raise the stones and let the story be told!

The priests carried the Ark into the water before the people followed. If the Ark means God’s presence, then it means the LORD jumped into the water first. God doesn’t ask us to do anything he has not done already on our behalf. How supremely we see this in Jesus! God took up our flesh and blood in Jesus. Then he went ahead of us into a life of love and obedience. He got baptized in the Jordan. He offered his life on the cross. He crossed the Jordan again as he leaped into a human death of forsakenness and suffering. Jesus came out of those waters as a new creation. He rose. He promises that those joined to him will also rise from death in eternal life. And that begins now. We die to ourselves every day. So we experience Christ’s resurrection power. We do not fear death. We do not wilt under suffering. We do not freak out amidst the chaos of a rebellious world. Christ has jumped into the Jordan before us. He will see us through. So we are free to give ourselves to his service.

What God has in store for us can be exhilarating and overwhelming. For Joshua, the fear of the circumstances, personal shortcomings, surely felt overwhelming. But he trusted God in his times of change and upheaval.

We know that all things work together for good for those who are called according to God’s purpose, but that doesn’t mean every step is going to feel good. It means that one day it will be revealed as ultimate good, and sometimes we must trust that the answer to “why” isn’t clean and easy, but the reason will be made known in glory. It’s in response to this very difficulty that we remember a stanza from a favorite hymn. May this be our prayer. It goes, “whate’er my God ordains is right, here shall my stand be taken. Though sorrow, need, or death be mine, yet I am not forsaken. My Father’s care is ‘round me there, he holds me that I shall not fall; and so to him I leave it all.”

Jesus tells us, “My grace is sufficient for you.” It’s enough. It satisfies. Your lack of strength opens you to receive my strength. If you could live on your own without me, you would. And you would miss out on what truly makes for life. You would end up with nothing but yourself and you would be lost. My way leads to life. Trust me, this narrow path is hard but it is true. I am leading the very creation through the groans and pains of making all things new. Trust me. The thorns of Satan are meant to lead you to my cross of life. What Satan means to ruin you, I use to take you deeper into myself.

Salvation is the work of God in our lives. I can’t make you repent and believe. You can’t make yourself repent and believe. This is God’s work. If you want it, that’s God prompting you to want it. But that doesn’t mean you’re out of the equation. You want God to show himself to you? Ask him. Are you tired of kicking against God’s reality and getting smacked and bloodied? Turn to the Lord Jesus. Embrace him as he embraces you.

There’s a step of faith that carries you across from where you are into an experience of the risen Christ. If there’s a spark, would you fan it into flame with faith? He’s real. He’s risen. And he’s here. Lord Jesus, stay with us! For the hours fly by and we are far from home. Too much breaks. Too many leave. Our grip is fragile and our hope is frail. Stay with us. Be known to us. Open our eyes to see you ever with us. This day, join us to yourself anew in the sharing of the bread and the cup.

God has given you the church. You are not meant to go through this threshing world alone. Strengthen your brothers that kernels of faith might bring forth life!

Jesus hears your heart cries. When all strategies fail. All pretense blows away. All reasons to commend you are dismissed. Below all that precarious house of cards that is your life. Jesus sees you and he hears you. You drop your pride. You let down your guard. Your heart cries for mercy: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” He replies, “I do. Come here. I call you to myself.”

When you know the depth of the mercy you require and the wonder that such compassion has been given to you by Jesus, then your heart can be open to love. Then you look mercifully upon your fellow humans. Because you are as broken and needy as those you used to despise. And real life, eternal life, means entering that loop of mercy. Christ Jesus picks you up and carries you home in mercy. Then he sends you out to do the same. It’s not outside in: what I should and ought to do to get what I want. It’s from the inside out. How can I show love to the one who put me on his shoulders and carried me home? By sharing the mercy I have come to know.

Jesus did not avoid the realm of death to which all humans go. Rather he went there. He died as the sinless one who was made to be sin on our behalf. He went to the inky darkness of the state of death so that we never go there alone. Now he leads us through. We, like Jairus, are dismayed by all this suffering. But Jesus himself went off the map into the wasteland of hell. There are no regions of human experience unknown to him. The Father did not rescue his Son immediately from the cross. He underwent the plummet into death’s isolation so that we cannot leap, no matter how angrily we push off, beyond his embrace of all human suffering. Jesus knows. And still he loves. We have not the power to negate that love even by the rashest act. We are not alone, nor are the most tangled and wayward of his sheep.

It is we who journey away from Christ. And then ask in our misery, “Why have you treated us so? Why won’t you be a savior who arranges life the way I want it?” Jesus takes no delight in our anxiety. He does not sneer at the distress we feel when we’ve lost sight of him. He grieves all the tragedies that flow from the broken communion between God and humanity. He wants us to be reconnected. But he won’t be co-opted. He won’t fix the presenting problem so we can get back to life on our terms. Over and over he reminds us, “Do you not know that I must be in my Father’s house, about my Father’s business? That’s where you’ll always find me. That’s where life begins. That’s where love flows. That’s where reconciliation occurs. The meeting place between God and man, the healing place. I’m always there. Come back to me!”

All human life is sacred and precious to our God. How do we know that in the deepest way of all? Because we have news, news like no other ever announced on the face of the earth. The eternal God has stepped into our world through the womb of a human being. Jesus became an embryo, alive within the womb of Mary, completely himself but also completely dependent on her. The Son of God became an embryo on behalf of all embryos. He brothered every single human being as he, the Creator God, took up our humanity as his own.

We're about being connected to the world's only hope; the deepest reality that can be known. If we sink our roots into that, we discover that we are living and breathing in unity with eternal beings all around us.

We reach our wits’ end and collapse in a puddle of tears and frustration. We drop to our knees in helplessness. We are not the lords of the universe. We are not the captains of our destiny. We are just frail children of dust and as feeble as frail. What a mercy it is to realize that! What freedom to stop trying to do God’s job and let him be God. What peace to lean back on the everlasting arms. We can stop being so frantic, so demanding, so demeaning, so frustrated and annoyed all the time. The LORD God reigns, and God is good, and we are his people.