Journey 2010 is about a church whose people Live in the Will of God. In order to even begin to know the will of God, we must understand what will always frame His Will. Scripture is very clear on what we must have in order to begin to discern the will of God. In fact, Living in the Will of God will always involve these three components:
1. Eternal Life
Jesus defined eternal life for us. It is not a prayer you make, nor religious activities you may do. It involves a relationship- “and this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. John 17:3. Eternal life involves KNOWING God and His Son Jesus Christ. Not one or the other. BOTH must be known. Know the Will of God will always involve knowing Him, and as such will always involve having eternal life.
In the midst of this circle of truth is God’s Will:
To Know God’s Will You must Know God. To Know God you must have Eternal Life. To have Eternal Life, you must know God. To know God’s will is to know God.
2. Wisdom
Listen to God’s Word on Wisdom:
- that their hearts may be encouraged…to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. … Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, Colossians 2:2-6
- that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, Ephesians 1:17
Both of these verses are found in prayers of the Apostle Paul. So overwhelmed was he that as he was writing, he was moved to prayer for those who would 
be reading his letters. He wanted them to know that in Jesus Christ is all wisdom. He prayed that God would open our eyes to see this by giving us the Spirit of revelation in knowing Jesus Christ. In order to know Jesus we must walk in Him. He must be the focus of our life, our learning, our everything.
Living in the Will of God will always involve walking in Jesus Christ. Living in the Will of God will always involve KNOWING Jesus Christ. This is how we have WISDOM, for Jesus Christ is our WISDOM!
- Wisdom is “seeing Life from God’s Point of View.” Knowing God’s Will will always involve seeing Life from His point of View. After all, it is His Will!
- Wisdom will always involve more of Jesus Christ in your life, for in Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
Living in the Will of God requires wisdom, for wisdom opens our understanding to God’s point of View. If you believe that God knows so much more than you about your life and the lives of those around you, then you will want His wisdom, you will want to see things from His viewpoint. Now since living in the Will of God involves Wisdom I need to point out how you get wisdom. It doesn’t automatically come to a Christian. The reason is that we tend to be self-focused and selfish by nature. James Gives this advice about getting wisdom:
Jas 1:5-8 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
You must want to see life from God’s point of view badly enough that you are willing to take your eyes off yourself, take your eyes off this world and focus your being on God and what He has for your life. If you ask for wisdom, if you ask to live in God’s will, yet part of you wants this or wants that, contrary to God’s righteousness, then you will not get wisdom from God. You will not see life from His point of view. You will continue to be like the waves of the sea, tossing to and fro, wandering apart from God’s will. Wisdom from God and knowing God’s Will requires the same desire-a Life that is in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ and His righteousness must become the Love of your life, the desire of your heart and soul.
If you are still self-focused and concerned only for your life, why should God direct your life? After all you only want Him to benefit you! But remember, God’s Will is ALL ABOUT HIM and what HE wants!
3. Faith
Living in the Will of God involves pleasing God. And Hebrews 11:6 says without Faith it is impossible to please God. By faith Moses left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king, for he endured as seeing him who is invisible. Hebrews 11:27. Faith allows us to See God and what He wants to do with our lives.
Faith in your life will do Two Things:
- Faith will allow you to see God behind everything that happens in your life.
- Faith keeps you in a place where you are not sure what will happen next.
If you can see the road ahead you don’t need to Trust God. Living in the Will of God will always involve eternal life, wisdom and faith.
WHERE DO WE START?
In order to know what the Will of God is, we must know what it isn’t. Here are four common Falsehoods about the Will of God:
FALSEHOOD #1: God Wants Us to Know the Future
This is the biggest mistake we Christians make with regard to living in the Will of God.
Just because God has led a certain way does not guarantee the end result. We keep trying to look down the road so we can figure out the direction God is taking us. The road ahead is always dark at times. There is NO WAY we can know how things will always turn out. There is a reason why God requires FAITH to please Him, because Faith is what brings God into the unknown
It is rarely God’s will for you to know your entire personal future. God doesn’t light the entire road. He promises just enough light for your step ahead.
Psalm 119:105 “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.”
The ancient Jews would carry small oil lamps that gave off one foot power of light. That meant they only had enough light to see one step in front of them. To see the way, they had to take a step. The light would then reveal the next step.
This verse pictures a man in total darkness walking along a dangerous trail. There is no moon in the sky. Darkness clings to him. His only light comes from the lamp he carries with him. When he takes that step, what happens to the light? It goes forward one more step. The light is not bright enough to illuminate even ten feet ahead.
Let’s face the truth–we want to know the future. At least we think we do. We want to know what is going to happen next year, so we can be ready in advance. But God doesn’t play that game with us. The Bible says, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29).
Does he know what will happen tomorrow? Yes, he does; but he’s not telling anyone else about it. Or to put it in familiar terms, does God have a blueprint for your life? Yes, he does; but there is no blueprint room where you can go to get a copy!
Suppose God were to offer you a folder with the details of your life (and for your loved ones also) for the next 10 years. Would you take it? You first impulse might be to say yes. But suppose I add this provision. You can’t change anything you find in that folder. Would you still take it? I can tell you that I would run the other way. Life is much better lived one day at a time.
Does God know what you should be doing on January 17th, 2020? Yes He does. But all you get to see is January 17, 2010.
God wants us to trust Him for each and every STEP we take. Jesus said to pray for our DAILY Bread.
He reveals His will one step at a time, so we must trust him moment by moment.
FALSEHOOD #2: The Will of God is Known with 100% Certainty
Many people believe they must be 100 percent certain of God’s will before they make a decision. I can understand their thinking. After all, if you are facing a life-changing decision–a potential marriage, a cross-country move, a new career, which college to attend, whether or not to begin chemotherapy–you’d like to know in advance beyond any doubt that you are doing what God wants you to do. There are two problems with this point of view.
First, sometimes we think we know God’s will with 100 percent certainty only to find out later that we were mistaken. Second,becasue we believe we must be 100% sure, we end up paralyzed into inaction. We are afraid to do anything, so we end up doing nothing. Some people live by the creed: “When in doubt, don’t.” So much of doing God’s Will requires simple obedience without total understanding. Every great Hero of Faith faced a time in their life when they obeyed God without 100% certainty of the outcome. I have always been challenged by Abraham who immediately obeyed God’s command to kill his son Isaac. The scripture says that he knew God could raise him up, but I can imagine there was doubt haunting his mind as they trekked up the mountain. He obeyed, and it became righteousness to Him. So many of my mistakes and failures resulted in my righteousness as I turned to God in total dependence. If I had not failed I would still be that arrogant, self-centered snot-nosed kid I was in my early twenties. God’s mercy is so great!
We see this principle illustrated in Acts 16. When the Apostle Paul and his team left Troas, they sailed across the Aegean Sea in response to a vision of a man saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (v. 9). When they got there, they found a woman named Lydia. But what about “the man”? He was nowhere to be found. Later on Paul and Silas were arrested, stripped, flogged, and thrown in jail. That night during an earthquake, they led their jailer to Christ, then baptized him and his whole family. The next morning Paul and Silas were released and escorted out of the city by the town leaders, who were glad to see them go. It’s a strange story. In many ways it appears that Paul failed in Philippi. After all, he was in trouble almost from the moment he arrived. Where is the great church he came to establish? But from God’s point of view Paul did exactly what he should have done. He followed God’s leading–God gave more light–Paul took another step and waited for further developments. Step by step, through twists and turns and unexpected means, Paul did what God wanted him to do, even though it wasn’t what he expected to do when he arrived in town.
GOD’S WILL MEANS TESTINGS AND TRIALS
Have you seen this before? (Maybe on those House Flipping Shows?) A couple (after much prayer and seeking God’s Will) buys an older house only to discover that it was in much worse shape than they had expected, costing them many thousands of dollars more to restore. One such couple even consulted with God about the home they would restore. After all kinds of setbacks, the wife wrote this letter:
Seeking God’s will has never caused me much difficulty in the past (partly because I didn’t always!), but when we were in the throes of trying to decide about buying this house, we both prayed long and hard that we would have a clear sense of direction and guidance from the Lord or at least a sense of peace about a decision if it were the right one. Because of the many troubles we’ve had while living here, I had convinced myself that we made the wrong decision and were paying for it in a big way.
Resentment started to taint my relationship with God. Why would He allow us to make such a terrible mistake (expensive one too!) when we spent so much time asking Him for his guidance? Only in the last few weeks have I felt that God does indeed want us here. Our difficulties in getting in here were not God slamming the door shut, but rather him holding it open just wide enough for us to squeeze through. Our difficulties in buying the house now seem like good training for the battles while we’re in it. I have discovered that the outcome of our decisions does not retroactively affect whether it was God’s will!
That final sentence is crucial. “The outcome does not retroactively affect whether it was God’s will.” That’s exactly right. Doing God’s will means taking the next step–whatever it is–without a definite promise about the end result. Many times you won’t have 100 percent certainty; but when the moment comes to decide, you must make the best decision you can, trusting God for the results. Sometimes you’ll know more, sometimes less; but living by faith means taking the next step anyway.
FALSEHOOD #3: The Will of God is My Happiness
Millions of Christians buy into this false idea. They believe that their happiness is God’s supreme goal for them. That sounds good, doesn’t it? “God wants me to be happy.” “God wants me to be fulfilled.” “God wants me to be successful.” They make it all about themselves. They push what God wants aside, and create their own fantasies. This falsehood has been used to justify all kinds of stupid and selfish behavior. I have had supposedly good Christian men tell me “I’m not happy with my wife. God has brought another woman into my life and we are very happy together. It must be God’s will that I should divorce my wife and marry this other woman because God wants me to be happy.”
The French have a word for that kind of thinking: BullCrap!
If your personal happiness is not God’s highest goal for you, then what is God’s will for your life?
- It is God’s will for you to be holy.
- It is God’s will for you to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.
- It is God’s will for you to do good works for the kingdom of God.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:10
First Thessalonians 4:3 states God’s Will very plainly: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification.” To be “sanctified” means to be made holy. It refers to the life-long process whereby God shapes you, through a myriad of experiences both positive and negative, into the image of Jesus Christ.
Here’s the Bullet Point: He uses the very worst things that happen to us in order to conform us to His Son.
Romans 8:29 says, “Those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.” That is the will of God for your life. He wants you to become like Jesus Christ. Whatever makes you like Jesus is good. Whatever doesn’t make you like Jesus is bad. And God is fully committed to shaping your life day by day into the image of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Most of us know about Corrie Ten Boom. During World War II she was taken from her home in Holland to a prison camp and later to the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp in Germany. There she and her sister, Betsie, were held, and Betsie eventually died. Corrie Ten Boom was released—by a Nazi clerical mistake—just before the end of the war. In her book “Tramp for the Lord”—she reflects on God’s leading:
Looking back across the years of my life, I can see the working of a divine pattern which is the way of God with His children. When I was in a prison camp in Holland during the war, I often prayed, “Lord, never let the enemy put me in a German concentration camp.” God answered no to that prayer. Yet in the German camp, with all its horror, I found many prisoners who had never heard of Jesus Christ. If God had not used my sister Betsie and me to bring them to Him, they would never have heard of Him. Many died, or were killed, but many died with the name of Jesus on their lips. They were well worth all our suffering. Faith is like the radar which sees through the fog—the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.
How can going to a prison camp be the will of God? It can’t be if God’s will is that you should always be happy and comfortable. Yet going to a prison camp can be the will of God for you if it makes you more like Jesus Christ and gives you opportunities to share the love of Christ to people that would never hear it otherwise. That’s the biblical perspective.
Will God’s plan for you and me always bring immediate worldly wealth and success? No, but God’s plan will always bring peace and joy and fulfillment, even in the midst of sorrow and suffering. Our duty is to follow the Lord wherever he leads us. And when we do that, we find a deep joy in him. The path of obedience leads to a joy the world cannot match.
FALSEHOOD #4: The Will of God is Hard to Know
Many folks think God’s Will is something you have to go to the Oracle to discover. Only after this journey or that experience. My brother who has struggled with drugs most of his life always used to say “If only God would give me a sign.” It was like he wanted a bolt of lightning to strike him before he would get his life right with God. Some people want a visible message from God. Like a God Postcard that reads, “Dear John, Buy the White Toyota. Signed, God.” Or they fear that one night, while they are watching Monday Night Football, God’s will flash His Will across the TV, but we missed it because of a potty break. Or they worry that they have sinned too much and have blown their only chance to do God’s will.
God doesn’t operate that way. He simply says Trust Me, Know Me. Wait on Me.
- God wants you to know his will more than you want to know it.
- God is more committed to showing you his will than you are to discovering it.
When you give your will to Him, he will take complete responsibility for getting you from here to there step by step.
- God has said, “Never will I leave you” (Hebrews 13:5). And He won’t.
- He also said, “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go” (Psalm 32:8). And He will.
- He also promised, “Surely I will be with you always” (Matthew 28:20). And He is.
We think that God’s will is hard to find. The biblical perspective is quite different. God will reveal his will to anyone who is willing to do it. Sometimes He makes us wait. But He will always show His will to those willing to do it.
YOU WILL KNOW WHEN YOU ARE WILLING TO TRUST & OBEY
God will usually show you His will and expect you to do it, because you told Him you would. He doesn’t give you choices. There is no Plan A or B or C. He doesn’t say, what do you think of this and allow you to say maybe I will or maybe I won’t. Do you have another plan God? This one looks too hard.
HE WILL SHOW YOU HIS WILL WHEN HE KNOWS YOU ARE WILLING TO DO IT.
There is an old hymn called ‘Workman of God’ written by Frederick Faber (wrote Faith of our Fathers):
“Workman of God! O lose not heart, But learn what God is like; And in the darkest battlefield Thou shalt know where to strike.
Thrice blest is he to whom is giv’n the instinct that can tell that God is on the field, when He Is most invisible.”
Nothing will sustain the servants of the Lord in hard times like knowing God’s character. And as the hymn (and life itself) makes clear, you don’t “learn what God is like” by going to seminary and memorizing the attributes of God. You learn what God is like in the darkness of the night, when you feel overwhelmed and burdened and full of fear and uncertainty. Ironically you learn that when you feel most alone, God is nearest to you. So make it your goal in life to know God.
LEARN WHAT GOD IS LIKE:
- Learn his holiness.
- Exult in his mercy.
- Ponder his patience.
- Consider his ways.
- Meditate on his goodness.
- Remind yourself of his justice.
- Rest on his faithfulness.
- Linger at the foot of the cross.
- Take up your cross
- Memorize his promises.
- Pray the psalms back to him.
- Testify to his kindness.
- Declare his glory.
- Defend his honor.
- Be silent before his judgments.
- Become His Servant
Get to know the Lord. Nothing matters more than this. When I gaze into my future, I see some things clearly, but there are a lot of gray fuzzy areas. Faith allows me to say as Job did so confidently:
“He knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold” (Job 23:10).
- My Abba Father knows the way that I take even when I don’t.
- My Abba Father knows the way that I take even when I can’t see clearly.
- My Abba Father knows the way that I take even when I get lost.
Walking in Jesus is a journey whose destination lies somewhere beyond the horizon. Even when we think we’ve arrived, we haven’t. Even when we think, “Aha! I’ve made it at last,” life suddenly changes and we take a sharp bend in the road. But the journey itself ought to be enjoyed. And we should use it to learn what God is like. If you are struggling with this concept of God’s Will, I urge you to start praying this simple little prayer when you awake each morning:
“Heavenly Father, you are in charge of everything that will happen to me today–whether it be good or bad, positive or negative. Please make me thankful for everything that happens to me today. For the sake of Jesus, Amen.”
This prayer is powerful because it doesn’t change anything outside of you, but it will enable God to change everything inside of you. Your circumstances won’t change, but your attitude will. Your heart will start to listen to God. Your eyes will begin to see Him in your circumstances. You will find yourself beginning to know Him as your “Abba Father”, your dear loving daddy. And He will always guide those who hold His hand.
Are you ready to Journey with God in 2010? Why don’t you tell Him right now!
Today I want to open the Word of God and answer Four Hard Questions that I believe God wants us to ask ourselves.
Revive comes from the Latin word revivere – to live again. In order to live again you had to be alive at one point, but now you are comatose or in a drunken stupor of some sort. A verse we will look about in a minute is 2 Timothy 2:26 “and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil” May come to their senses comes from a Greek word meaning “To awake out of a drunken sleep and become sober”CWSD. If we need reviving it means we are not dead, and need to become alive. How can we be dead if we have been born again. But if we need reviving, it is because we have allowed this world or the devil to get us in a spiritual state that our eyes are clouded and our head is foggy because we are in a drunken stupor. We need to come to our senses, we need to awake out of our drunken sleep. Once we wake up and clear our minds and hearts long enough to see, we must look long and hard and Holy God. We must look long and hard at His Holy Word. And then we must look long and hard at our love for Jesus, and then we must be honest before God and weep and mourn.
I’m not a believer in being slain in the spirit, but would to God that some of us might get slain in the spirit like John did when he saw the real Jesus! We need to see the real Jesus, the one who will judge us for every word we speak. We need to see the real Jesus, the one who one day will reveal that He knew all along what you did to Him – whether you have neglected his bread of life, neglected His water of Life, denied Him before your friends, failed to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, give water to the thirsty.
My greatest fear is not being eaten alive by rats or falling headlong into a pit of venomous snakes…my greatest fear is that one day I’ll look through the crystal portal of heaven (Before the throne there was a sea of glass, like crystal. Revelation 4:6 ) and look into hell and see some of you screaming in agony for all eternity. Why didn’t you take being a Christian more seriously. Why did you not realize that being born again is a changed life, not just some tears you shed because you prayed an emotional prayer. If you are born again there will be a continual desire for this Word. There will be a continual thirst for Jesus. Just as you can’t go for many days without food and water, you will not be able to go many days with nourishment from Jesus. Even in my most backslidden state I was aware of God pounding, pounding, pounding on my stubborn heart. 
When we neglect him, when we forget him, when we act as if we don’t know him, when we refuse Him to be Lord over our life, our heart, our mind, our soul, our possessions, our marriage, our worship. Ask yourself this morning – How am I denying Jesus Christ in my life?
There are things a Christian must do in order to become a vessel of Gold and Silver.
It begins when we deny Jesus Lordship over some area of our life. It can be music, what we look at, what we read, what we say, but we usually know when we resit Jesus in that area. The Satan starts to work. He loves to capture Christians with wrong thinking, wrong attitudes, wrong beliefs. He loves it when Christians start quarreling over things which get us off course, get us away from our passion for Jesus. If your life is going to be used to rescue people caught up in the snare of the devil, you must:
The truth is that at any point in our life we can get tripped up by the devil. These attitudes that are condemned by Paul in 2 Tim 3 can slowly creep into our lives. The danger is to accept being a common vessel. The danger is thinking that you are OK the way you are. You have made a little god for yourself, one who is not too holy, not too demanding, and not too judging. After all, my little god loves me and fogives me. When we think this way, we are excusing our sin, we are trampling under foot that which is Holy. We are not seeing Holy Jehovah God, but a clever looking god of our own making. 
Are there secret rooms in your life that are shut off from God’s Holy Spirit? Are there rooms where the Holy Spirit has been barricaded? Is there a room cluttered with unclean pictures? Are there any skeletons hanging in your closets? Can you invite the Holy Ghost to walk down the corridors of your thought life? Can you invite him in to see the hatred in your heart toward others. Can you invite Him to listen in as you speak evil of others?
And Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” And the blind man said to him, “Rabbi, let me recover my sight.” Mark 10:51 He had once seen, but now he was blind. Some of us had once seen the Lord, but our eyes are blind. We once walked with the Lord, but now we lie in a ditch on the side of the road moaning in a drunken stupor, too blind to see the devil has captured our minds our hearts, our souls, and he has stolen our heart from loving Jesus, he has stolen our hands from serving Jesus, he has stolen our eyes from looking at Jesus, he has stolen our strength from leading others to Jesus. 
Let us pray that God will revive us from our drunken stupor of selfishness, carnal living and give us SIGHT AGAIN-upward, inward, and outward.
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?
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. 
God gave Christ to be head over all things, to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him that fills all in all. (Eph 1:22)
Faith is no make-believe, no magical encantation. Faith allows us to take hold of the unseen FACTS of what God has done. God has placed us IN CHRIST through the power of the New Birth. THAT IS FACT. It is an accomplished work. When we dare to venture our faith upon those facts, the Holy Spirit is present to prove them true. Whenever you feel your life is overwhelmed by sorrow or struggles, whenever you feel your faith struggling, look to the Christ who fills all in all, and the Holy Spirit will fill you with His sustaining and uplifting power!
Loving the Word with the MudPreacher 