How do you chart your course in life? How do you decide what’s important and where you are going? Some of you haven’t really thought about that very much; you’ve never made such a decision; you don’t really have in mind a clear destination for your life; you just go where life takes you. So when your friends, for example, push you in a certain direction, even when it’s probably a direction you don’t want to go, you may push back a bit, but you are weak to resist, since you yourself don’t really know where you want to go in the first place.
Others of you have a much clearer picture of your life and where you are going. Rather than simply reacting to everything and everyone around you, you live more from within. You know who you are and what you believe and where you want your life to go. There is a core to your life, a center, a controlling picture. And you live out of that picture of life.
To live this second way, you have to be strong. Three times God tells Joshua, "Be strong and courageous. "The command has the sense of bearing up against resistance, enduring and not breaking down. It’s a picture of mental, moral toughness, being firm and unswerving in your commitments.
No doubt Joshua needed this pep talk from God. For Joshua faced an awesome task. Moses had led God’s people out of Egypt. And now Joshua had been chosen to lead God’s people across the Jordan River and into the Promised Land. But Joshua knew too much. Joshua and Caleb, you may remember from another story, were part of that 12 member reconnaissance team in Numbers 13 & 14 that had snuck into the Promised Land to see what they were up against. They came back to give their report and ten of the team members said, "We’re like grasshoppers compared to those guys. We don’t have a chance. Let’s go back to Egypt." But Joshua and Caleb had said, "The Lord is with us. Do not be afraid." But now a lot of time has passed. Moses, the revered leader of God’s people, had died, and Joshua now feels the full weight of leadership on his shoulders. And so God says to Joshua, "Be strong and courageous." And each of the three times he says it, he gives Joshua a reason that he can be strong.
The first reason is that the program Joshua is part of is not Joshua’s program, it’s God’s program. Verse 6: "Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their forefathers to give them." This isn’t Joshua’s mission, it’s God’s mission. It’s not Joshua’s plan, it’s God’s plan. We can be strong, firm, resolute, unbending when we really believe that what we’re doing, the thing for which we are making sacrifices, is worthwhile, important, and indeed, of God.
The second reason Joshua can be strong and courageous is that not only is this God’s program, God’s mission; it is rooted in God’s Word. Verse 7: "Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go." God says, Joshua, when you carefully obey my Word, when you stay on the path (don’t go to the right or to the left), the path laid out in my word, you will be successful. You will be blessed. And of course, if we’re going to obey God’s Word, we have to know it, and so God adds, Verse 8: "Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful." Strength, that ability to bear up under resistance and pressure, to stay on course, and courage, that mental, moral toughness to hang in there when we face dangers and difficulties—strength and courage come to us as we stay close to God’s Word. We know God’s Word, we trust it, we love it, we carefully look at our lives and seek to align ourselves to it; we allow God’s Word to judge us; we stand under it.
And then in verse 9, God gives a third reason Joshua can be strong and courageous. "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go." There are those great words. "God will be with you . . ." God said it at the beginning of his speech to Joshua, verse 5, "As I was with Moses, so I will be with you, I will never leave you nor forsake you." Joshua can be strong and courageous because he’s a part of God’s program, he has rooted his life in God’s Word, and because God himself promises, "I will be with you. I will never leave you."
Now as I worked on this message, a couple of different questions came to my mind and maybe came to your mind too. First, how do we square this command of God to BE STRONG with other parts of the Bible that actually put down strength? The Apostle Paul says that God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. Elsewhere he says, "When I am weak, then I am strong." The Old Testament prophets often condemned those who thought they were strong. What’s going on here? Is God calling Joshua to a virtue (strength) that in fact the Bible elsewhere condemns?
Scripture does in fact condemn strength that is really just self, self—reliance, strength that is not the power of Christ and his Spirit in us, but just our strength. When God calls Joshua to be strong, and when the prophets and psalmists over and over again in the Bible call us to be strong—this is a call to that strength that we now know to be not us but Christ in us. It is a call to live fully out of this new identity we have in Christ, in the Spirit. To "be strong," for the children of God, is not to flex our own muscles; it’s to rest upon the strong, firm, finished work of Christ, it is to stay aligned with Christ. As Martin Luther once wrote, Did we in our strength confide, our striving would be losing. Indeed, as Paul says in Ephesians 6,
10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.
The strength to which God calls us today is not our strength; it’s strength we have in the Lord. We can even take this point one step further and say that often, in fact, most of the time, we get most in touch with this true strength through our own weakness. It’s when we come to the end of our own strength, when we see that we just can’t manage our lives all by ourselves. It usually takes us failing in our own strength, to finally be open to a new strength, a higher power. It’s very significant that the first steps of AA are:
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol——that our lives had become unmanageable.
- We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Paul is very open about how he came to this realization in his own life. In 2 Corinthians 12, he tells about this "thorn in the flesh" that he struggled with. We don’t know what that "thorn in the flesh" was—whether it was a physical problem, a speech problem, an emotional problem. People have speculated for centuries about what exactly so weighed Paul down. But whatever it was, he pleaded with God (three times) to take it away from him. But God didn’t. And Paul struggled with that. Why won’t you take this burden away from me?
But then Paul goes on to explain: Rather than take the thorn away, God did something else. He promised Paul something. God promised Paul, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Which leads Paul to say, "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong." It is a deep mystery of the Christian faith that Christians are at their strongest when they realize their weakness, apart from Christ.
Well, that leads to another question I struggled with as I was working on this message, and I’m sure you’ve struggled with too. Namely, is strength really something that we can just command, summon up? "Be strong!" Isn’t this kind of like commanding someone to "Be sorry," or "Be joyful?" Aren’t these things that you don’t just produce on command, but are the byproduct of something else? I think that’s an important question. And behind it is the fact that some of us have sort of given up on being strong. We just feel overwhelmed. We’ve tried to command ourselves to be strong, but strength, fortitude, self—discipline, commitment—whatever it is—we’ve concluded that we just don’t have it, or very much of it. We’re just not very strong people. We’re weak in the bad sense of that word. We cave in, easily.
Well, I don’t want to be naive about individual differences in people. Some people do seem to be more able to remain steadfast in their commitments. Being strong sometimes does seem to be less of a battle for some of us than for others. And sometimes there are chemical imbalances in our brains or physical weaknesses in our bodies that make the call to be strong feel as difficult and impossible as a call to lift a mountain.
Having said that, I offer two reminders to all of us: First, a reminder of what I’ve already said, namely, this strength is not first of all our strength, my strength, it is strength in the Lord, it is being strong in Christ, it is attaching ourselves to a higher power, the power of the one who died and rose from the dead! It’s the strength of a relationship—so focus on and abide in this relationship, your relationship with Christ and with Christ’s body the church—that’s where the true strength is. Part of our problem is when we try to be strong all by ourselves. It just doesn’t work.
Second, remember that a lot of the Christian life is just plain practice—you try it, fail, assess, try it again. The only reason we can all walk is because we didn’t quit trying after we failed 10 times. We kept trying and kept trying. I can remember trying to learn how to ride a bike. I kept falling and I wanted to quit. My dad wouldn’t let me. Many of us today have tried to be strong in our commitments, to be strong in matching our words and our deeds, our beliefs and our actions. And we fall short. And after a while, the pain of failing seems greater than the pain of just accepting our mediocrity, our weakness. And we really quit trying to be strong, to be better, to excel. God’s message to us today is, don’t give up, keep practicing, be strong and courageous.
Wherever we are in life this morning, whether we feel strong or weak, we must hear again and believe the word of the prophet Isaiah, who says at the end of chapter 40:
28 Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. 29 He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. 30 Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; 31 but those who hope in the LORDwill renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
And we must believe the prayer of Paul in Eph. 3, when he prays for each one of us:
I pray that out of his (the Father’s) glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Prayer
O Lord, give us your strength. Encourage us when we feel weak. Guard us when we feel vulnerable to Satan’s wiles. And give us that power that is the renewing power of Christ himself, in whose name we pray. Amen.
Duane Kelderman
Rev. Duane Kelderman is the Vice President for Administration and an Associate Professor of Preaching at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids. Before his current position he served as pastor in Christian Reformed congregations in Toledo, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rev. Kelderman is married to Jeannette and has three children and two grandchildren. He was born and raised in Oskaloosa, Iowa and attended Calvin College and Calvin Seminary. He enjoys reading and carpentry.
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