Daily Devotional – April 29, 2020

Well, good afternoon. Good to see you on this Wednesday afternoon. Do you feel like maybe you're in kind of a wilderness?

Maybe you've never really felt that way at all until today. There could be a good reason for that.

Today is the 40th day of Stay Home and it may be reminiscent of the 40 -year wilderness wandering of the

Israelites in that desert land. Or perhaps Jesus' 40 days of temp -testing out in the wilderness.

I'm not sure why you might be feeling that way. Maybe if you're here in northwest

Illinois, all the rain has caused you to feel like maybe you're on Noah's Ark.

40 days and 40 nights of raining. Well, whatever the case,

I'm sure there's no connection to that at all. There have been plenty of humorous things floating around the

Internet with parents being unexpectedly and suddenly thrust into the role of teachers in a homeschool.

They've never done that before. Some families are pretty much unaffected by all this because, after all, they've been homeschooling for years and the only effect on them is that they're not allowed to take the field trips that they might otherwise take to different places.

But that's not the case with everybody. Some parents are kind of struggling with this whole role of being the homeschool parent.

One rather hairy mom reports that homeschooling actually went pretty well yesterday.

She said, for science class, they studied the effects of NyQuil on students.

All right, that's a disclaimer here. That's a joke. Do not try this at home. And yeah, okay,

I didn't need to tell you that. Well, we've been thinking this week about how to respond in a crisis like we're in when everything's going well and then all of a sudden the wheels fall off.

And in our particular case, our nation was humming along, and maybe in your own personal life, things were going pretty well.

You were doing well at work and your job was going fine. Everything's just humming along well.

And then all of a sudden it's all ground to a halt by some microscopic germ.

What do we do? How do we respond to this? How do we handle the distress of all of it?

What questions come to our mind? And more importantly, where do we go with those questions that plague us?

Well, I'll not take the time to review the various alternative responses. I mentioned those the last couple of days.

And if you really wanted to, you could go to YouTube or to the church homepage and look at the videos from the last couple of days to refresh your memory or in case you missed those devotionals.

But my conclusion in those various alternative responses is that the only ultimately satisfactory response is the biblically

Christian one, going to God with our questions, seeking answers and direction from Him and not merely seeking relief from Him, though we do ask

Him for that, and that's certainly appropriate and certainly fine. But that's not all. We want to go deeper than that.

And so we go to God. The biblically Christian response in a crisis is to go to God with our questions, seek answers and direction from Him.

So yesterday in looking in Joshua chapter 7, we saw that in taking that approach,

Joshua responded first with humility. We read in verse 7 that Joshua tore his clothes and fell to the earth on his face before the ark of the

Lord until evening. He and the elders of Israel, they put dust on their heads.

Well, there's a lot of humility in that, isn't there? Rending their clothes, falling on the earth, the ground, with their face to the ground, putting dust on their heads.

Not too many of us would even do something like that. But we can nevertheless express humility, and we must.

Rather than having a kind of, you know, we can handle this, self -reliant, cocky attitude,

Joshua and his leadership team expressed humble dependence upon God, upon the

Lord. So first of all, respond by being humble. And then next notice, maybe we would easily pass this one by, but notice the response of silence.

They were facedown on the ground until evening. Now, we don't know how long that was.

We don't know how long it was from the time Joshua got the report until the sunset, and that would be, we'd be evening.

But it was some length of time that they were there in quietness, stillness, and silence, lying on the ground with their face to the ground before the

Lord. And I find that interesting because of, you know, my own tendency, my own nature is to, you know, typically distress.

Something distressing happens. My natural response is to, you know, rush to speak or rush to act instead of just taking some time to be silent.

And what that does is it gives us time to settle down, to process what's happened or what is happening, to kind of think things through a bit and not just go off the cuff with some kind of a response, to clarify our thoughts.

I think this is a wise response. After all, you know, in the New Testament, in the book of James, we read in chapter 1, verses 19 and 20,

James writes, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

I'm afraid, you know, my tendency would be to be quick to speak, be quick to anger, and then not produce the righteousness that God wants in such a situation.

So a second response, not only be humble, but we can respond by being quiet, being quiet.

Yet there is a time to speak. Again, we can look at the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, in that famous passage where the writer says, to everything there is a season, there's a purpose to everything under heaven, everything there is a season.

And then in that list of things where there is a season, he says there's a time to keep silence and there's a time to speak.

And indeed, there is. So we're in the crisis, we've been confronted with the crisis, instead of going off half -cocked and thinking, you know, we can solve all this, we go to God, we go humbly to God, and take our posture in a humble posture before him.

We spend some time in silence, meditating, thinking things through, reflecting and clarifying our thoughts.

But then there's a time to speak. And the third response that I find here in Joshua, chapter 7, is a response of being honest, being honest.

Being honest by asking honest questions. And Joshua does just that in verses 7, 8, and 9.

And, you know, these questions might rattle us a little bit, but they're honest questions. They were questions that were on his mind, they were on his heart, and therefore it was perfectly appropriate for him to ask them.

He's asking the right person of these questions, though. And notice what he asks.

He first of all asks, God, what have you done? You see this in verse 7.

He says, There are a couple of implied questions in that, aren't there?

What are your true intentions? You brought us over this Jordan to give us into the hands of the

Amorites to destroy us? Is that what your intention was in bringing us over the Jordan? There's also the implied question, what happened to your promises?

Because I would remind you that God promised to give Israel this land in which they are now dwelling.

They don't own it, they don't possess it. But there they are. And God promised to give them all this land.

And yet Joshua says, God, what have you done?

There's two other questions he asks in the next couple of verses. The next one is, what can

I say? And the third one is, what are you going to do about it? We'll take some time tomorrow to explore those couple of questions and then look at yet a third response.

But for now, what have we discovered thus far here in Joshua chapter 7? When the wheels fall off, be humble, be quiet, be honest.

Be honest before the Lord. So we have so much more that we can profit from this crisis situation in Joshua's life and in the nation of Israel's life.

So much more we can profit here. And I hope you'll come back tomorrow and we'll look at these other couple of questions and then we'll discover one of the most important responses that we need at a time like this.

So until then, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May he cause his face to shine upon you and may he give you his peace.

Father, we pray to that end today. Grant us in this time of turmoil and of upheaval, grant us your peace.

This we pray in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen. All right, go forth and have a good day.