Gracelyn, today you are Five years old! I want you to know how special you are to me, and what you mean to me. When Lydia and I heard your Mommy (our daughter Tonya) was pregnant with you, she was working for me at Tompkins Paving. It was the fall of 2003, and we were having a disastrous year. Stupidly I had allowed the company to grow too fast and we were doing jobs we had no business doing. Cash flow was horrible. We lost over $600,000 even though we had our best sales year ever-over $7 million in revenue. I owed the IRS $200,000 and the pressure was too much to take. I kept thinking I would have to shut the company down. Every week was a tremendous struggle to meet the payroll for 50 employees. On top of all that, I was also pastoring a small church in Edgerton, and some of the people were being fleshly and causing problems over trivial things.I was beating my head against a wall there as well.
All this time I was constantly going to the Lord, seeking His strength and provision, but my faith was deteriorating badly. I was having so many troubling thoughts-thoughts of running away, giving it all up, even thoughts of suicide. I thought that there was no way for God to turn things around. But every time I was tempted to give up, I would look over at your Mommy and see the growing baby in her stomach. I would think about you and pray to God that I would be able to see your birth and watch your grow into a Godly woman. I prayed that I would have an influence on your life, that I would be able to see a Godly Heritage begin in my grandchildren. I wanted to be able to tell you about a Mighty God, Jehovah Jireh, El Shaddai, who TRULY is able to provide our needs! God began to keep you ever before my heart, and used you to keep my heart open and depending upon His matchless GRACE, the GRACE that kept me having the WILL and the DESIRE to do His goof pleasure!
Although I had no part in your name, I know that God did, for you have become a Living Monument to God’s Grace for my life. It was almost miraculous, but at the time of your birth, God started to do amazing things to turn the business around. Profit and cash flow improved dramatically. God even brought a buyer for the business just 10 months after your birth. The church turned around, problems were solved and people came together. God’s Grace showed once again how powerful He is. He even enabled me to pursue that full-time ministry He had called me to over 34 years before.
So Gracelyn, I pray that someday you will give your heart and life to Jesus Christ. He is God’s only Son, the one He gave to die on the Cross for you and me. Jesus is the Monument of God’s Grace for the whole world. When you give your heart and life to Jesus Christ, you immediately come into the awesome Grace of God, the same Grace that kept my trust in God through all my trials. God has a miraculous purpose for your life, it began when you were but a tiny bump in your mommy’s stomach. God used you then to keep my eyes focused on eternity. I pray that God will continue to use you to turn others to Him!
Gracelyn, you are a constant reminder to me of the Amazing Grace of God in my life. I am praying that you will allow God’s Grace to capture your heart and lead you to LIFE in Jesus Christ. I LOVE YOU! You are a Visible Monument of God’s Grace in my life! Love – “Big D”
In Chapter 2 we find Joshua sending a couple of young men to spy out the city of Jericho. I ask, why, Joshua? Remember the last time spies were sent out? Didn’t God tell you to be Strong and of Good Courage, for you would overtake the land? This is the mystery of a life aligned with the Holy Spirit’s purpose. When you align yourself with the Holy Spirit, He will lead you do things which make no sense to a rational thinking man.
Joshua 2:1-7 (NKJV) Now Joshua the son of Nun sent out two men from Acacia Grove to spy secretly, saying, “Go, view the land, especially Jericho.” So they went, and came to the house of a harlot named Rahab, and lodged there. And it was told the king of Jericho, saying, “Behold, men have come here tonight from the children of Israel to search out the country.” So the king of Jericho sent to Rahab, saying, “Bring out the men who have come to you, who have entered your house, for they have come to search out all the country.” Then the woman took the two men and hid them. So she said, “Yes, the men came to me, but I did not know where they were from. And it happened as the gate was being shut, when it was dark, that the men went out. Where the men went I do not know; pursue them quickly, for you may overtake them.” (But she had brought them up to the roof and hidden them with the stalks of flax, which she had laid in order on the roof.) Then the men pursued them by the road to the Jordan, to the fords. And as soon as those who pursued them had gone out, they shut the gate.
Now I’m not condoning lying. God says lying lips are an abomination to Him. In her defense, she knew not God’s Laws, and was merely doing what she thought was best to spare the lives of the two young men. Does God excuse small sin to prevent a greater sin? I don’t believe so, as sin is sin. But the greatest evil that God hates is when we go our own way. Rahab was not going her own way when she lied. Something was happening in her heart, and that led her to protect the lives of the two young God-Followers.
Joshua 2:8-11 (NKJV) Now before they lay down, she came up to them on the roof, and said to the men: “I know that the Lord has given you the land, that the terror of you has fallen on us, and that all the inhabitants of the land are fainthearted because of you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were on the other side of the Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. And as soon as we heard these things, our hearts melted; neither did there remain any more courage in anyone because of you, for the Lord your God, He is God in heaven above and on earth beneath.
Men do different things in response to fear. Some run away, some give up and commit suicide, some relish the fear and channel it into a fight. Rahab allowed the fear of her heart to open her eyes to see God! FEAR SHOULD OPEN OUR EYES TO SEE GOD! When Sennacherib threatened to invade Judah and King Hezekiah with his considerably larger army, Hezekiah allowed his fears to open his eyes to the power of God. Listen to his prayer in 2 Kings 19:14:
She knew that God would cause the Hebrews to prevail against the mighty city Jericho. Her fear had led her to see the Invisible and she knew He would prevail. She boldly told the young men to promise to save her and her family. She had faith that they could save her family. She had faith that God was powerful enough to protect her! This coming from a prostitute, one whom the world rejected, used and abused, yet she believed there was a God who could love her and her family.
Here was a woman with a bad reputation, with no important status in the world, and all of a sudden the future of Israel is bound up in her faith. With God, there are no special privileges because of who you are, or what you do. We all stand before God with the common ground of faith. There is a little child over there with more faith in God than a wizened old preacher. There is a young teenager with more faith than a dying saint. God does not call good people to follow Him. God does not call perfect people to Him. He calls flawed people, but the one thing we must have to come to God is FAITH! This lowly prostitute became great in the eyes of God because of her faith in Him. That is why she is listed in Hebrews 11.
Joshua 6:25 (NKJV) And Joshua spared Rahab the harlot, her father’s household, and all that she had. So she dwells in Israel to this day, because she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho.
Why A Scarlet Cord? Was it something peculiar to her profession? It was obviously something she had on hand. It became the salvation of the two young men, and it became the salvation of Rahab and her entire family. The Scarlet Cord represented the sins of her former life. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as wool. The Blood of Jesus cleanses the vilest sinner and makes them clean, set apart, and usable for Holy God’s purposes.
God’s Holy Spirit was working in the people of Jericho. He was giving them an opportunity to turn to Him. Of the several thousand inhabitants, only one woman along with her family saw a ‘GOD THING’. She is the only one who opened her heart to seek after this Almighty God. The picture of God’s Grace is such that it is able to bring beauty into the ugliest life. Those lives that the world considers most decrepit, most destroyed, most likely to be cast aside are the lives that God can make most valuable, most beautiful. This is not to minimize sin. Yet when we learn of something someone once was, we recoil, we say no way, but there is no sin that the Grace of God cannot conquer. Where sin abounds, grace much more abounds. God was bringing His people into their inheritance, a place of rest. Too many Christians are running around all worried, frustrated, angry, upset, acting as if there is no Almighty God who is working in their lives. Rahab, a sinner in the world, found rest in God because she trusted in the Scarlet Cord.
The Lord is after getting us inwardly resting in HIM. Unrest, anxiety, is ever the ground of defeat. Uncertainty about the Lord brings weakness and defeat; the Lord sets great value on BELIEVING GOD – faith in GOD. In the list of the heroes of faith in Heb. 11, the Holy Spirit records Rahab the harlot, and links her with Abraham in James; she believed God and leapt out of ungodliness into righteousness, because her fear led her to believe God and she put her faith into action. Rahab was the key to Jericho and Jericho is the key to the land. That is the kind of key He uses. He uses the Key of Restful Faith!
The Scarlet Thread runs through the Bible. It is a Memorial to our Savior and His precious blood. How are you responding to the pressures of this life? Is there a Memorial in your life, a Scarlet Cord of the Saviors Blood?
As followers of Christ we are to seek to see Jesus manifested in our flesh. This is what Paul says in 2 Cor 4:11: “
A man delivered unto death has no power over his own life. He has no power to act on his own. Adam in the garden was to be dependent upon God and all that God gave him to have power over. Adam was to have no power over the fruit of two trees in the midst of the garden-the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the tree of Life. Adam was to depend totally upon God for life, and totally upon God for the knowledge and power to live this life. Adam was not to live independently of God. Adam was not to know about evil and good, and thereby have the power to act independently of God. 
God and the knowledge of Him was to be Adam’s life.
We say we desire to give glory to God with our lives, yet by acting under our own power, we give glory to ourselves. We fool ourselves into thinking we are living in Christ when there is very little we do that does not require His power to act. We live, eat, work and play with Jesus carefully tucked in our backpack, or tattooed on our body.
Because we are acting under our own power, we live a self-assured, yet self-possessed Christian life. In such a life, Jesus Christ cannot be revealed. Too often we have decided, acted, and had power apart from Him. The Christ we manifest is too small because in ourselves we have grown too big.
It is time to cross the Jordan River.
It is time to go through the Jordan River. The Israelites could not build a bridge. They could not go around. They had to go through the Jordan. The reason is because the Jordan River represents death. As we learned last week the entire purpose of the wilderness wanderings was to teach them that they had to put off the old man, the old flesh, and live by the power of God. Joshua in particular had to align himself with the Captain of the Hosts, He had to die to what he thought was best, and follow what God wanted to do. In that respect Joshua represents a man who has joined himself with the power of the Holy Spirit.
The challenge that God presents is that this inheritance, this rest can only be claimed by dying to the flesh, dying to what you want, and by living in the power of the Holy Spirit! The Jordan is a picture of the Cross. You always have to die by passing through Jordan to get to Canaan. The only way to be born again is to experience the Cross. When you are willing to die, then you are in the place where God raise you up and use you.
You Must Be Willing to Die to the Flesh in order for God to Raise You Up and Use You to Claim the Inheritance. 
When God presents a challenge to us, a challenge to die to what we want, and to live in His power, He always gives us the confidence of a promised victory! God provides us three-fold ammunition to assure us of victory:Promises, Presence, Past Performance
God has given 
Joshua 1:5 “I will not leave you nor forsake you.” What a promise God gave to Joshua! “As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you or forsake you” (Josh 1:5, NIV). God had given a similar promise to Jacob (Gen. 28:15), and Moses had repeated God’s promise to Joshua (Deut. 31:1-8). God has given this promise to His people today! The Gospel of Matthew opens with “Emmanuel…God with us” (1:23) and closes with Jesus saying, “Lo, I am with you always” (28:20 NKJV).
He relates confidence in God’s presence to lack of covetousness or fondness for money. Christians have come a long way since that moment when Joshua led the people across the Jordan. Our confidence is too often in our money our possessions. If you want God’s presence in your life, you confidence must be in Him alone. Many Christians have a real fondness for their possessions, their money. They watch it all the time. Here God was bringing Israel into a place where money was not going to do the job. It was an impossible task. God offered Joshua the promise of His presence, and in so doing, there can be no confidence in anything else!
Joshua knew the history of God’s faithfulness to his people. He had heard how God had steadfastly worked in Abraham’s, Isaac’s, Jacob’s and Joseph’s lives. He had heard the stories over and over again of God’s protection, God’s provision and God’s power on behalf of his people. As a very young man he had witnessed the miracles of the plagues in Egypt, the saving of the first-born Israelites from the angel of death, the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, and the manna from the skies. God had proven himself faithful.
THE PROMISES ARE NOT A PILLOW BUT A PROD
OUR COVENANT RELATIONSHIP
The modern ideal is individualism, self-interest, and self-centeredness. We glory in the philosophy that says, “I will do what I want to do, when and how I want to do it, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks.” But the moment we are converted, such life must come to an end, for as Christians we are called to live in covenant relationship with God and with each other. A covenant is an agreement between two or more persons; therefore, covenant life is community life, and a covenant person will seek, not his own interest, but that of the entire community. So a husband will look after the interests of his wife; parents will look after the interests of their children; and a believer in Christ will look after the interest of the whole community of believers of which he is a part.
Each of us is on our own spiritual journey that will ultimately end in either Rest and Reward, or Punishment and Pain. I wish it were that easy. Good and Bad, Life or Death, Heaven or Hell, Black or White. But life is far from easy. In this life on earth we are usually in one of four places:
JUST LIKE LOT: many centuries before. Genesis 13:10-11 tells us that “Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered, like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt . . . So Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan.” Lot made his choice based on one reason – he owned many cattle. Lot based his decision on sight, not on faith.
God does not waste time with headaches and hangnails. When staring at the Red Sea, Moses told the people: 
Faith can move mountains. Jesus didn’t mention anthills. Jesus never healed a mild headache. Our Lord dealt with the impossible cases. Americans don’t like impossible situations. We can fix anything. So when God gives us an opportunity to exercise great faith, we often set it aside for a fleshly fix. We rob ourselves of the chance to see Him who is Invisible. There is little sense in saying “I believe” if you already have an alternative plan in mind. Faith works best when there is no other way out. 
Loving the Word with the MudPreacher 