I wasn’t going to say that.
Good morning, brothers and sisters.
All right. Turn to Joshua 5. Joshua 5:1.
Starting with verse 1, it says:
So it was, when all the kings of the Amorites who were on the west side of the Jordan,
and all the kings of the Canaanites, who were by the sea, heard that the Lord had dried up the waters of the Jordan
from before the children of Israel until we had crossed over,
that their heart melted; and there was no spirit in them any longer because of the children of Israel.
Then to Joshua 5:13:
And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho,
that he lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, a man stood opposite him with His sword drawn in His hand.
And Joshua went to Him and said to Him, “Are You for us or for our adversaries?”So He said, “No, but as Commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.”
And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped, and said to Him,
“What does my lord say to his servant?”Then the Commander of the Lord’s army said to Joshua,
“Take your sandal off your foot, for the place where you stand is holy.”
And Joshua did so.
Now Jericho was securely shut up because of the children of Israel; none went out, and none came in.
And the Lord said to Joshua: “See! I have given Jericho into your hand, its king, and the mighty men of valor.
You shall march around the city, all you men of war; you shall go around the city once.
This you shall do six days.And seven priests shall bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark.
But the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets.
It shall come to pass, when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn,
and when you hear the sound of the trumpet,
that all the people shall shout with a great shout;
then the wall of the city will fall down flat.
And the people shall go up, every man straight before him.”
And then Joshua 6:20:
So the people shouted when the priests blew the trumpets.
And it happened when the people heard the sound of the trumpet,
and the people shouted with a great shout,
that the wall fell down flat.
Then the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we come to You this morning with thanksgiving again, thanking You that You have given us the Savior in Jesus Christ. He has saved us, and He has presented us before You faultless. Here we stand in all that He is for us: free before You, acceptable. We bless You and praise You.
And now, Lord, as we come to Your Word, You are the Shepherd of the sheep. You are the Great Shepherd. We ask that You would feed Your flock. Lord, I pray this just will not be a teaching, but that it would be food. You transform it from a written word, from a lesson, into food that will strengthen us in our spiritual man and help us, Lord, to bring it into our lives and have it become real.
In Jesus’ name, we ask. Amen.
Okay, brothers and sisters, just a short review, because that’s what teachers do, right? They give a short review.
As I have been speaking out of Joshua these last few times, we have been looking at a generation coming into the will of God together. Again, a generation is not just one age group. It is all those living at a particular time in history. Everybody who is alive today is part of this generation. Some may be further along in it, and some may not be as far along in it, but we are all living together in this generation.
It is like Pepsi has the “Me Generation.” Who is not included in “me”? You know what I mean? Because it is the Me Generation; I am part of it, right? And so I am part of this generation.
The thing is, it is a generation coming into the will of God together, as individuals and as a group. God’s will for this generation is for Jesus Christ to be Lord in each individual and in the entire company. That is God’s will for this generation. That is to be the testimony of God in this people: Jesus is Lord. Nothing short of that. Jesus is Lord.
Last time, we looked at being in the land of promise for the first time. We saw that, in being there, God gave His people a vantage point. They got to see where they were.
First of all, they could look back and see the Jordan River. In seeing that, it signified that their sins and all their past had been covered. Remember, they took those twelve stones off the land and put them in the water, to be seen no more. So the past was behind them. They could look back and say, “Where is the past?” It has been swallowed up. It has been swallowed up in the victory of Christ, in the death of Christ and His resurrection. The sins are forever judged. They are gone. We are free of them.
Then we saw the twelve stones set up at Gilgal. They showed the ground on which we now stand. Every believer now is in the risen Christ. What it means that we are in the risen Christ is that we are not in the grave anymore. We are now in the presence of God forever, acceptable in the risen Christ.
Christ was raised from the dead and ascended, and we are in Him. Being in Him, we are before God; and being before God in Him, He is the most acceptable. Us being in Him makes us acceptable. This is the ground we are on. We never have to worry, “Am I acceptable to God?” Yes, we are, because we are in Christ, and Christ is raised from the dead and in His presence forever.
Really, what is happening here is all Ephesians 1, 2, and 3. This is our standing. This is everything.
Then finally, we saw their first action: that they were circumcised. Oh, I am sorry. I am going way ahead of my notes here. But let’s take that, since I skipped ahead.
Our first action is that we are circumcised. All that basically means is that the Word of God, in those knives, is being applied to our hearts. The sign of the covenant is that the Word applied to our hearts makes us different people. We are now people of the new covenant, not the old covenant of the letter, but the new covenant of the Spirit.
The Spirit is working in our lives, taking that Word and wrestling with us through that Word so that it can cut off those things that need to be cut off. Speaking of that Word, it is food to us now.
That is the third thing that we have: the unleavened bread, which speaks to us of Christ in His humanity and that perfect humanity as satisfying us. We look at His life, and as the Spirit illumines it to us, we see that it is good enough for me. It is enough to atone for me.
Not only is it good enough; I am satisfied with it. I eat it. I see it, I eat it, and I am satisfied with it. It satisfies me to the core. As far as this life stands for me, this life is good enough to be the Lamb, that unblemished Lamb, to be slain for me—to make my atonement for me.
We also have the corn of the land, which is the risen life of Christ, the new life that comes from Him, which we are to learn. As we eat anything, it becomes part of our lives. It becomes amalgamated into our makeup. It makes our muscles, makes us strong, makes us able to walk, makes us able to see. It does all these things for us as we eat it.
Now today, we want to consider the first battle. There are many battles that are going to be fought. There are thirty-one kings to be conquered. Some of these kings are in walled cities, and some of these kings are going to join together. But the thing is, there are thirty-one kings. There is a lot of battle.
It is not like we fight one battle and, hey, it is over. A season is not made up of one game. You have a championship game that makes up the whole season, if you know what I mean. That is why I like baseball. You have 162 games, so if you lose a few—fifty or sixty games—you are still doing pretty good, okay? Because it is a season. There are many battles ahead of us.
But the whole thing is, we have a vantage point from being at Gilgal that looks to the future. In Jericho, what we see is victory ahead of us. Our future is going to be victory. That is the future God has for us: victory.
So we find our first battle of many battles. In the verses we read, there are four things that I want to touch on:
We want to look at these four things, and then you can go to lunch.
Verse 1 in Joshua 5 tells us about the enemy and what this is going to be like. As I said, the enemy is going to take different tactics at every point. But here we find, first of all, that the enemy we are going to fight is in fear. He knows his time is short.
When an enemy knows his time is short, he does not just give up. He fights harder. Just because the Allies landed at Normandy did not mean that the Germans said, “Oh, gee whiz, let’s just give up now.” No. You had some of your fiercest battles after that time, because they had to fight something different.
The first time the Germans—the Nazis—fought throughout Europe, it was a war of conquest for them. They were conquering everything. Everything else was weak, so it was nothing. They really did not even have to flex their muscles.
But once the Allies landed, it was really saying, “We have got to show ourselves strong.” They had been beating up weak people all the time, and all of a sudden they had something stronger than themselves. They had to deal with that, so they had to fight stronger.
Or take the Japanese. Once the American forces landed on Guadalcanal, the Japanese did not just throw up their hands. They dug in. If you know anything about the war in the Pacific, the Japanese dug into caves, even to the point that twenty years after the war, they found some of those guys still dug into caves, not knowing the war was over.
That is how strong and tenacious the enemy is. He will bar nothing to hold his ground. “This is my ground.”
The Israelites had fought people before. If you look at the book of Numbers, they fought Amalek. They fought Og and Sihon, the giants. But that type of battle was open-field battle. When you are in an open field, you have a lot of different options. You can go at the center of the line, you can flank, and you can go around behind. You have all these options.
But the enemy at Jericho did not go out to meet Joshua. They came into the city, and they had a stronghold. They said, “You have to move us out of this stronghold.” You cannot maneuver against it. You cannot flank a city.
The city has men all the way around. They see everywhere around. They know your every move because they are up there. They have their walkie-talkies—which in those times were not walkie-talkies—but they had little signals. They could use fire or runners, but they knew everything that was going on.
It was a walled city. High walls. I do not know how high they were, because I did not research that. But put it this way: probably, we would call this a high wall if we were down at the bottom of the parking lot. Is this a high wall if we were up here? Yeah, it is a pretty high wall. It is about twenty feet high. So it is a high wall.
Jericho was different in that they did not face Joshua straight on. The enemy is going to defend what he claims is his.
Brothers and sisters, the whole world is in the lap of the wicked one. He claims it all, and he does not want to relinquish any bit of it.
As we are coming into this land, we are thinking of the fact that this land is really coming into the lordship of Christ—the lordship of Christ in our lives as individuals and as a company of people.
There are things that stand in our way of seeing this accomplished, of having the experience of His lordship in our lives. The enemy is going to put up roadblocks, and there are going to be strongholds.
Now, behind every stronghold—the foundation of every stronghold—is sin. Not sins. A stronghold is not necessarily a sin. But underneath that stronghold, behind that stronghold, is the power of sin. Sin is what conquered man. Sin is what conquered man in the beginning. He fell into sin.
What I mean by that is simply this: sin is my claim to myself. “I will rule myself. I will rule my own life. I am the captain of my destiny.”
Behind everything, whether it be worldliness or lust, is the saying, “I want it my way.” It is the Burger King analysis. Hold the pickles and hold the lettuce, because I do not want those in my burger. I just want the meat. Whatever it is, the whole thing is, “It is my choice. This is the way I do it.”
Man without Christ is ruled by this, but man in Christ comes up against this in his own life. Companies in Christ come up against this too. “It is going to be my way. It is my way or the highway.” Companies of people—we have seen it. Some of us have experienced that.
These strongholds have to be taken out. We have strongholds as individuals. Some of us have a stronghold of lust. Some of us have a stronghold of worldliness. Some have a stronghold of bitterness. We have all sorts of strongholds individually that the Lord wants to deal with in our lives so that His life can be Lord.
But we also have strongholds that are corporate, collective, or, as I said the other time, in community. The community has a stronghold in it.
For example, we are studying Corinthians, are we not? Have you noticed any strongholds in the community of the Corinthian believers? We certainly have. Factions. Factions are built on top of the stronghold of the idea that worldly knowledge trumps all. So we split up into factions.
What about unrighteousness? Unrighteousness comes out in the lives of the believers there, and they are not doing anything; they are just letting it go. Why? Because worldly values trump all in that community.
How about uncontrolled self? They were carnal people. That is all it means: our self-life rules everything. Uncontrolled self. What do we find in 1 Corinthians 14? Disorder. You cannot control yourself. “My gift is better than yours. I have a right to say this. I do not care if you are talking right now; I am going to talk over you.”
Or, “Hey, I am going to eat my meal here. I am sorry if you do not have anything. I did not prepare for you. You should take care of yourself.” There is disorder in the meeting, in the gathering together.
These things stand in the way of God bringing us into, and allowing us to experience, all that He has won for us—all that has been purchased for us in Christ. He has not just purchased forgiveness. He has purchased freedom: freedom from the world and freedom from sin. He has purchased all this for us.
These strongholds stand in the way of our knowing that freedom. When Jesus is Lord, that is when we know the freedom He has purchased for us.
We think of someone always lording it over us. But the greatest freedom is to see how the Lord treats us after He has purchased us, so that we become bondservants. We say, “I love my Master, and I will not go out free.”
We are going to fight a war. This is not a siege. We are not going to surround it for years, because when we are doing something for years and years and years, trying to get through, what happens to us? We get discouraged, and we give up.
No siege mounds here. No weapons of siege here. We do not even see ladders to scale the wall. Joshua is sitting on the outside going, “Well, gee whiz, how are we going to attack this city?” You might be thinking, “Maybe we need this, or that, or the other thing.” But then he meets the One who says, “I know how to defeat this.”
He meets the Lord, and he meets the Lord in a new way. Now, I want to put this to us about meeting the Lord in a new way: How do we view the Lord Jesus?
I put some things down here that are pictures drawn from the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. John opens with what? He is the Lamb of God.
Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
In John, He is the Good Shepherd. We sing the song, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” We look at Him as our Savior, our Healer, and our Teacher. All of these are wonderful things.
But all these things show us Jesus in a limited way—and I want to say this as reverently as possible. We see Him as a Savior who deals only with our failures. A lot of us, that is our view of Jesus the Christ, who is seated at the right hand of God.
We look at Him as the One who helps us deal with our failures. The rest of our lives are going to be full of failure, but it is okay because we have Jesus. You understand that?
There was a science-fiction movie, THX 1138. I do not know if you ever saw that movie. It had Robert Duvall in it. It was a utopian kind of setting, sort of like a Brave New World setting.
When these people had problems with conscience and things like that, they had a huge holy-card poster. Since I was raised Catholic, it was like this: one of the nicest holy cards we had was the Sacred Heart of Jesus. You had Him standing there, looking so kind, and His heart was unveiled to you.
When the people had trouble of conscience, they went to this room where this big poster was, and they had piped into the room: “I know. I know. I’m with you. I know.” Soothing stuff.
But some of us, that is all we look to the Lord for: “Lord, soothe me. Be my balm. Help me here.”
It is almost like how we sometimes look at David in the Old Testament. A lot of us look at David and say, “Oh, he is the shepherd boy,” or, “He is the sweet psalmist of Israel. What a wonderful person.”
But David was also the one who slew a lion. Was he not the one who slew a bear? Was he not the one who, in the name of the Lord, slew Goliath and brought about a great victory and a great deliverance? This is David too.
We look at Jesus, and we are looking at one side of a coin when we look at Him only as the One who deals with our failures. The other side of Him is the Lion of the tribe of Judah. He is a Lion.
We are used to seeing Him as a Lamb only, but He is a Lion. That is why The Chronicles of Narnia is so wonderful: it pictures the Lord as a Lion. Even to the point where the children come up and can hug Him and stuff, they are still a little afraid of Him because, after all, He is a Lion—not a kitty cat.
A Lion, not a tame lion. A Lion. The King of the beasts.
We have this new vision of the Lord. He comes out and says, “I am the Commander.” If you look in the New Testament, in the Epistles, you see things like, “He is the Captain of our salvation.” What does a captain do? He is the one who leads into battle.
Jesus is not just a Savior who deals with our failures. We find Him as a Savior who leads to victory. This new land, this coming into the lordship of Christ, is about finding out that Jesus is a Victor. We follow in His train. We follow after Him into His victory, and we become victors in His victory.
We need to see this as His people. We need to see Him as our Commander. We need to see the Lord Jesus as a man of war—a man of war. Just as here in Joshua, He has His sword drawn.
Warfare and conquest are on the mind of the risen and ascended Christ. Warfare and conquest. He tears down strongholds. He conquers. He is a Conqueror and a King.
He gives no quarter. He gives no terms of peace to those He is at war with. He only accepts unconditional surrender—victory without compromise. His foe must yield totally to Him.
This is the One we serve. This is the One who is our Lord. Yes, He died for us. Praise the Lord. Yes, He was that Lamb of God. Praise the Lord.
But that is now past. That is what we celebrate here. We remember. But we are looking forward—Jericho, we are looking forward. We are looking forward not just to victory, but with the hope of victory.
We are people of hope, not people who are always defeated and looking for a balm. This is the One we serve. He is a mighty Man of war. He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah. As Commander, He demands our respect, our allegiance, and our obedience.
This is the fear of the Lord. Just to back this up, I do not know what your relationship with your dad was. Mine was not very good, but in the beginning, when I was a little kid, my dad was wonderful.
He would play with us in the backyard. He helped make dinner, and he would kiss us goodnight. When he kissed us goodnight, he kissed us on the mouth—you know, little kids. It was wonderful.
But my view of him changed when I saw him at a work site. At that time, he was like a union representative. When I saw him at a work site, I could not believe how the people who had been bossing me around—as I was a little apprentice—showed great respect to my dad and his position.
All of a sudden, my eyes were opened to something new, and I started looking at my dad differently. “Oh, my dad commands respect.” Even when people he had helped as apprentices came over to the house to talk to him, they respected him because he had led them into their profession. They had become good at their profession, and they came back to get advice or whatever.
All of a sudden, my respect for my dad went up. It is the same for us. We need to see Him as the Victor, so we see Him in a new light—a light that, if it can be, raises our esteem for Him.
Some of us, because we live lives that are constantly defeated, do not have an esteem for Him that rises above seeing Him as the Lamb of God. Here He is saying, “Oh, if you could see who I am in My risen splendor. Death cannot hold Me. Sin has no hold on Me. I am able to overcome it. If you follow My lead, you will overcome too.”
He is not saying, “Go out and do this.” He is saying, “Follow My lead. Follow Me as I lead you into these things.” This is the One we serve.
I was talking to somebody who deals with youth. This brother told me that the youth look at him as a mother, because he gives them love. He is there, he brings them in, he patches them up, and he loves them.
But he said to me, “They need a father. They need a father.” A father is someone whom you respect because there is something that commands respect—something strong in that father that the father gives them, which they do not have by just having a mother.
That is why it is so important to have both parents. That is one of the things our society suffers from, right? They do not have that father figure. This brother was saying how they need a father figure, how they need someone who is strong and mighty to deliver.
Sometimes we think the father is just there to discipline you: “Wait till your father gets home.” But did you not ever say, “I am going to tell my dad,” when you were a kid? You remember the movie A Christmas Story? When the bully is beating someone up, the little kid gets pushed over and says, “Well, I am going to tell my dad that you did that.”
We need One who is strong like that. No, we do not need Him—we have Him. We have Him. We need to see that.
Now, the ground—the battleground. He says, “The ground that you stand on is holy.” That means there is ground that is holy and ground that is unholy, right? The ground we stand on is holy.
I read a book by T. Austin-Sparks a couple of years ago called The Battle for Life. You know what I was expecting? I was expecting it to tell me how I am going to be an overcomer and how I can get my life straightened up. I was disappointed in some way because it did not tell me that.
It is almost like when you read Romans 7: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” Then he does not tell you how. He just says, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ.” That always puzzled me, but this book kind of summed it up.
It says we are not battling to make our life better. We look at our life and say, “It does not measure up. It does not measure up to what it should be as a Christian. I should be doing this.” Then we go out, make resolutions, and try to do better. “I am going to pray more. I am going to do this.”
But we are just dressing up a clown. We are just putting new clothes on the clown. The face is still there. The actions are still there. You dress a chimpanzee up like a man, and he is still a chimpanzee. He just looks better.
Our life is unholy, and the thing is, it can never be improved. That is why this self-life we have was nailed to the cross. It cannot be improved. You have got to kill it.
It is not about this life—our life, so to speak—but the battle for life. What Sparks was saying is that He was fighting so that we could walk in the life that Christ is. That is what we are battling for. We are not battling to improve ourselves. We are battling to find that Christ-life in us, to have that Christ-life in us freed so it can live.
That is what the battle for life is about. This holy ground is not about trying to improve ourselves. It is about trying to die to ourselves, really, in that sense.
We are not fighting to improve ourselves. But that is our natural tendency, right? We want to improve ourselves. When we try to improve ourselves, we finally find that we are totally unable to do it. Then we say, “I am undone. What am I going to do? Wretched man that I am.”
It is interesting that the first thing Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount was this:
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
In other words, blessed are the ones who know they cannot do it. How can we be blessed with the knowledge that we cannot do it? Does that not make us miserable? Should that not make us the most miserable of all? “I cannot do it. I cannot measure up.”
Jesus says at the beginning to His disciples, “Blessed are you who are poor in spirit, because yours is the kingdom of God.” It is My rule in your life that you are looking for. You are not going to be able to rule over your life. You are not going to be able to fix anything in your life.
But once you come to the realization that you cannot do it, that is when we let God. That is why 1 Corinthians says, “Consider your calling.” Who are the ones who are called? The weak, the ones who are not all these things—1 Corinthians 1:28-30.
Why does He choose those? Because God gets all the glory. It is Him in you that delivers you from yourself.
This ground that we are on is a battle for His life to live experientially in us, through us, by the Holy Spirit.
All the help of heaven is behind us. I think that is what we never think of. We are not even conscious of heaven. You know what I mean? We do not even think about what is going on because we are so focused on ourselves.
But think about heaven. There is all sorts of activity going on in heaven. I will give you some natural ways of looking at it. Have any of you ever seen a meteor shower? Awesome, is it not? All of a sudden, the heavens are alive. You see them all over the place.
But it has to be a dark place and a dark time for you to see all that stuff. It is amazing what you can see when you are up above things, it is dark, and there is no moon. You see the heavens moving.
Or remember Halloween night? It was stormy, and a front came in. You could see the heavens moving. How could you see it? First of all, the trees—these big, stalwart things in your back and front yard—were all of a sudden bowing because the power of the wind was forcing them.
You saw the clouds in heaven being thrown through the heavens, driven through the heavens. Then you saw lightning come down, lightning in the skies. The heavens were lit up with lightning, lighting up the whole area in which you were living.
Now, that is just a natural thing. What about the supernatural? The things behind sin in our lives are powers. I do not want to get us saying “demonic powers,” because then we want to say there are demons behind everything. But there is a spiritual power behind those things.
The wonderful thing is, there is a spiritual power behind us. “I am Captain of the army of the Lord. Move with Me and with My army, and you will see the strongholds go.” This is a wonderful thing to think about.
Finally, we want to look at our battle plan. The method of attack and the tactics change from city to city. They change from place to place. They change from king to king.
Therefore, conquest depends on, and comes through, having a vital personal relationship with the Captain of our salvation—the living Christ who lives in you through the Holy Spirit, who reveals Himself and His will to you through His living and active Word.
You say, “Well, that is not a tactic, Jim.” I know it is not. But I want to say, if you do not have this, you will not get what the tactics are, because they will not be relayed to you.
So what are these tactics? To keep this relationship maintained. I am going to put it in two ways: there is a tent life, and there is a marching life.
When I talk about a tent life, I am looking at a priestly way of looking at things—a priestly way. A marching life is a soldier’s life. I want to look first at the individual aspect, and then at the corporate aspect.
Every soldier needs to know his weapons. I was never in the armed forces, but I have seen a number of movies, so that counts, right? Philip is going to come over later and berate me, saying, “You know nothing.” He will be right.
But you need to know your weapons. They give you a gun; do you not have to learn how to take it apart and put it together? Sometimes people have to do it blindfolded and in so much time. You need to know where everything goes. You need to know your weapons.
Our weapon—our equipment for the battles ahead, for coming into the lordship of Christ in our lives and in our company—is the Word of God.
All the armor of God in Ephesians 6 is the Word. All of it. You say, “Well, no, it is just the sword of the Spirit.” No. Look at it this way: your mind is renewed. Your thoughts about who God is, what sin is, and all these types of things are renewed. That is your mind. That is the helmet.
You find out what righteousness looks like, how righteousness is translated into our lives, and that is the breastplate of righteousness. Your feet are shod with what? The gospel. Where do you find the gospel? It is in the Word of God.
You have a belt so you can move around—keep your trousers up—because it is truth. You walk in the truth, and the truth is in the Word. The shield of faith protects against the enemy. Where does faith come from? Faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the Word of God.
Then you have the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. All of this is the Word of God. Know your weapons. Know it.
But that is pretty mechanical: you know your Word, you read your Word all the time, and you think about what is said. Or maybe you do not even think about what is said; you just read it, read it, read it, so you know what is in it.
What do we teach the kids? They know all the books of the Bible, right? They have little songs so that they start knowing these things. Know the Word. Know the Word. Know the Word.
Think of people who lived in the great awakenings, like Whitefield and others. That was what brought conviction. All these things were happening, but they knew the Word of God. Even in their wayward states, they knew the Word of God.
Then somehow that Word was quickened to them in certain aspects of their lives. All of a sudden, the Word was quickened to them, brought conviction, and brought them into conversion.
Now, tent life. When the priest went into the tent, one of the things in the tent was the candlestick. The candlestick gives you light.
This light is light on the Word of God. It is not just reading the Word, but getting light from the Word of God. Then we feed on the Word. What do we mean by feeding on it? Eating it.
When I take it in, I am not just reading in the morning, putting it down, and forgetting what I read. It is taking it up and thinking about it—thinking about what it is saying, letting the mind wrestle with it.
It is letting it be taken down into the spirit, into the holy place of my life; letting it divide the soul and the spirit; letting the Spirit apply it to my life. It is getting light in the Word for my life, eating it, bringing it in that way.
That is the tent life, and this is the individual part of our being in this army. Now, as a company, soldiers sharpen one another.
I remember, as a young Christian, there were seven of us living together in one house. We would battle each other with our Bible knowledge. “Oh, that does not mean this.” We would have great discussions, and sometimes fights, over these things. But we sharpened each other in our understanding of the Word. We learned how to handle the Word in that way.
We encouraged one another in the Lord. We battled together in the battles we had within ourselves and within the street where we were living. In other words, we were side by side in the foxholes together. That was the community we had as a company of believers.
We did not just have a private life with the Lord. We also had a spiritual life that went outside the closet. When we met with other brothers and sisters, it was there to sharpen one another and make us stronger. Iron sharpens iron and makes us stronger.
Priestly, as a company, there is the tent ministry. In the tent, the priests wore a breastplate. Do you know what was on the breastplate? Stones signifying all the tribes of Israel. They carried it over their hearts, and the name of each tribe was written on it.
That is the whole thing here. Some of our priestly ministry is carrying one another on our hearts before the Lord. This is our priestly ministry. It is not just all about us—not just praying, “Lord, show me a way through. Help me get through.”
All of a sudden, I am praying for my brothers, and I do not have time to pray for myself because I see need. I see hurt. “Lord, minister to this. Lord, help this. Bring a word for this—for my brother.”
Then they had the showbread. Commentators have a hard time with showbread because they say, “Well, it is bread, so it must symbolize Christ.” Okay, so it is Christ. But wait, there are twelve of them. Are there twelve Christs?
No. A lot of people say it symbolizes the twelve tribes. Well then, what is the showbread trying to get across to us? It is saying that Christ is in the believers.
We also know that the priests ate the bread. All this means is this—and this is an important thing that I think we forget about all the time—we feed on Christ in one another because we see Christ in one another.
This is a ministry that we are to have as a group. We are not just lone Christians. It is not just all about me. It is not just my ministry. I see Christ in others. I am not the only light. I am not the only bread. I am not the only supply. The whole company supplies.
There were captains of hundreds, fifties, and tens. The reason I bring this up is that there were a couple of million people there. We are not responsible for a couple of million, but some of us have been given responsibility to tend the flock.
You cannot tend the flock that you do not know. I am not talking about just knowing after the flesh, but you need to know who is in your company. You are going to have their back, and they are going to have yours. You need to know them.
You are going to be ministering to them, and they are going to be ministering to you, so they have to know you too. That is a big thing. A lot of times, we forget about our responsibility to one another.
Some of us have been given authority, and some of us have been given lesser authority. I will tell you something about a teacher. I taught for thirty-nine years. When you looked at your classroom, you could see the one who was struggling.
What did you do? You went to another student whom you knew was not struggling, took them aside, and said, “I am going to sit you next to this kid because they are struggling. I know they are afraid to ask me anything, but they can ask you where they find this or something, and you can help show them the ropes. This is what I want you to do.”
All of a sudden, there was that delegating, that giving to someone else. It is not all about me. It is not me ruling over everything. It is making everybody see the needs of the whole.
You do not have to see the needs of everybody. The whole thing is, you are pointed out to this. You have those twelve stones. You do not have fifty stones. You do not have a hundred thousand stones. You have twelve stones. That is manageable. You can take care of that.
When we think about this idea, one of the Scriptures we used today at the Lord’s Table was that they went from house to house, breaking bread. It is like the brothers who were with Jesus on the road to Emmaus. They came to the house and broke bread.
At the breaking of bread, what did they realize? It is Jesus.
Sometimes that is what we need to see. When we meet with brothers and sisters, we might go home from a Friday-night meeting, a Tuesday-night meeting, a prayer meeting, or just a cup of coffee with someone, and come to the realization, “I met the Lord.”
Or we come away like this. Remember when Jesus said, “Who touched Me? I felt power go from Me.” There are instances when we go out feeling like we are nobody, and all of a sudden we feel that the Lord ministered Himself through us for some reason. We are humbled by it.
But that is the whole thing. This is the tent ministry. This is the corporate ministry of the priest.
Lastly, we have the obeying of orders. The obeying of orders is not like, “Here are the written orders; go do them.” The orders come from the life within, from the living Word living inside you, which says, “Go this way. Do this thing. Do this.”
We do not want to look at obedience as merely, “You have got to obey.” It is really acting in faith. It is acting out of faith. The Lord has spoken this to me, and I am going to do the thing He said because I believe He has spoken to me to do this. So I am walking out in faith.
The wonderful thing is that the Lord is able to lift us up, to work through us, to work in us, and to take down these strongholds.
So, in closing, we have strongholds to face as we come into this life of Christ, where He is to be Lord. We have individual strongholds, yet we can deal with them with the help of others and with the living Lord Himself, who dwells in us. He dwells in us. He speaks to us through His Word.
Then we have corporate things. We have corporate strongholds of imaginations, thoughts, heart attitudes toward certain people, and rigidity in our practices: “It is this way and no other way.”
We have these strongholds that block the freedom of Christ from being manifested in His body—our blood clots. The Lord wants to take them out.
That is the whole deal here: the Lord is leading us into this land to remove the strongholds so that He can be Lord. He cannot be Lord as long as these strongholds are here. He cannot manifest His lordship without these strongholds being taken down.
What He is saying is, “Allow Me. Allow Me to take out these strongholds. Allow Me to point them out.” The Lord is the One who says, “We are going after this city.” “But that city is bigger.” “No, no, this is the one. I am Lord. This is the one we go after.”
Other things can wait, but this is My focus right now.
Really, what He is saying to us is this: “I have yielded My life for you. I have yielded up My life—My perfect life—for you, that you can be free from the penalty of sin. Now I am asking that you yield to Me your life, that My life in you can be manifested in victory.”
This is the Word of the Lord to us. This is what the Lord wants for us more than anything: to lead us into His lordship. In His lordship, there is freedom.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You for giving us such a Savior. Not only has He taken away our sins, but He is a Victor, and He is a mighty Victor.
Lord, we pray that our eyes would be opened more and more to this victorious Savior that we have, and that our hearts would be inspired to follow after Him.
We pray that we would do our part, Lord: that we would have that tent life, that we would have that marching life, and that we would go according to the marching orders as You speak them to us. May we obey in faith and yield to You as our Commander, so that these strongholds will also yield to You, and we will see Your victory for us in Jesus Christ.
Bless us, we ask, in Jesus’ name. Amen.