Fight the Good Fight of the Faith: Sin in the Camp

First, this week, there is not a devotional that goes with this sermon. As I have mentioned in the past, the devotionals in this series come from emails sent to my church on the Fridays before the sermons. Generally, they have something to do with the passage or subject of the coming sermon. I like to use them to fill in gaps in the sermon series. Because my series are often for a summer, there are a limited number of sermons I can preach, so sometimes I have to skip parts to finish a book or section of a book (like with my Joseph series). This was certainly true with Joshua, for I had to fit 24 chapters into eleven sermons. But, this week, there was not anything major I had to skip to move on, so, instead in the Friday email to my congregation that preceded this sermon, I sent a link to an article about the PCA's racial reconciliation efforts. You can read that article here, if you want, but it is not really pertinent to this series, so I am not going to talk about it. Instead, we will move on to the sermon itself.

Today's sermon is on Joshua 7:1-13, 19-21, 25-26. With this text, we come to the hardest passage of Joshua, I think. Of all the episodes, this is the one to which I was least looking forward. I’d rather preach on the whole conquest of the land and the annihilation of the Canaanites than this, and, by the way, last week’s Friday post covered the tough question of how the holy war against the Canaanites fits in the biblical witness. If you have not read that, you might want to because I think it will help you with a very difficult part of the Bible. But, again, I personally think that’s easier than this passage. Here we come face-to-face with the consequences of sin not only on the individual but on the congregation of God’s people, and that’s not a subject on which I want to preach. But, this is the counsel of God, and really no series on the battle of the Christian life would be complete without addressing the issue of sin, which is probably why the author includes this difficult story in the first place.

If you want to hear more, you can listen to the sermon here or read the transcript here.

I pray that God will use it to magnify His glory in your heart and fortify you for the battles of this Christian life.

By His Grace,
Taylor