Joshua 1:8(NKJV) 8This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
Yesterday we looked at a powerful truth. Any promise of God is the will and power of God for your life. When you find a promise in the bible, you do not have to wonder if God wants that promise for you. His promise makes whatever you see in it God’s will for you. There may be things you need to learn in order to receive the promise. If so, God will begin to move in a way that will help you learn those things. There may be sins that you need to deal with, and God will bring conviction in those areas so you can receive the promise. There may be timing and various other things involved in bringing the promise to pass in your life, but none of those things changes the fact that the promise is the will of God for you.
The second aspect of this truth is that the promise caries the power to fulfill itself. You do not have to pray for the power to see the promise fulfilled. You simply have to believe the promise and the power is there to do whatever the promise says. Isaiah 55:8-11 tells us that the Word will accomplish what God sends it to do. That must mean the word, or promise, contains the power to get the job done.
Today I want to look at one of the keys that will help us tap into this power and release the promises of God into our lives. This key involves what the Lord told Joshua in today’s scripture. Think of who Joshua was and what he was facing. Joshua was the successor to Moses. Moses had delivered Israel from captivity to the strongest nation of his day. He had performed miracles. He was the greatest leader Israel had ever known. Joshua had some very big shoes to fill.
Three times in Joshua chapter one, the Lord tells Joshua to be strong and very courageous. It is easy to see why Joshua would need this exhortation. Not only does Joshua have to follow Moses, he must finish the job Moses started. He must bring the children of Israel into the Promised Land. To do so he must overcome many difficulties. He faces warfare with a number of different tribes. This will be no easy task and Joshua is going to need the Lord to accomplish it.
The thing God instructs Joshua to do in order to keep from being afraid is “meditate” in the book of the Law day and night. The book of the law is the bible of their day. He is telling Joshua to meditate in the word. However, we must remember that the whole bible as we know it did not exist. Most of the Old Testament had not been written. What book is he actually speaking of. He is talking about the first five books of the Old Testament. These are the books Moses had written telling of Israel’s history to that point in time. They included the book of Leviticus, which set forth the details of the Law of Moses. They also included Deuteronomy, Moses last directive to the people before he died.
The Lord speaks something to Joshua in verse 5 that Joshua can receive as a promise from God.
Joshua 1:5(NKJV) 5No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life; as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you nor forsake you.
To meditate means to dwell on or think about. It carries the idea of muttering, or repeating to oneself. God promised Joshua that he would be with him in the same manner he was with Moses. As Joshua meditated in the books written by Moses, he would see how God was with Moses. He would see that every time Moses faced a challenge, the power of God was there to overcome it.
God commanded Joshua to think about what he had done for Moses day and night. As he did that, the promise God had given Joshua would become more and more real to him. In that reality, he would have nothing to fear. The promise was that God would be with him as he was with Moses. If God’s power overcame every challenge in the life of Moses, it would overcome every challenge Joshua would face. That was the promise.
There are two words in Greek that the bible uses to signify the Word of God. One is the Greek word Logos. The Logos is everything God has said in the past. The written Word of God, the bible, is the Logos of God. It is what he has said about virtually any topic.
The second Greek word is the word Rhema. Many Christians are familiar with this word. You will find “Rhema” churches, bible schools and various other Christian organizations. You will find books and teachings that emphasize this word. That is because it is a very important word. Where Logos is what God said, Rhema is what God is saying now.
There are those who believe that the only kind of Rhema we can receive is if God in his sovereignty speaks to us directly. This might come to us through a bible verse we have read many times which suddenly comes alive in our hearts. It could come through a prophetic word spoken to us directly. Sometimes a teaching or message we hear is so alive we know that God is speaking to us personally at that time. All of these things are valid ways that Rhema comes to us. However, there is another way.
God told Joshua to meditate on the “book of the law.” This was the Logos of that day. He instructed him to meditate on it day and night so that he would not fear. One of the products of a “Rhema” word is that it will remove fear. As Joshua meditated on the Logos, it became Rhema. This then energized the Rhema promise that God would be with him as he was with Moses.
I believe any Logos has the potential to become Rhema in our lives. If we meditate on the word day and night, the Logos that applies to the situation we are facing will “drop down into our hearts” and become the Rhema of God or the word God is saying today.
When we were first in the ministry, and many times since, we faced severe financial trials. We found a promise in the bible from Philippians 4:19. I have alluded to this promise already this week. It was very important to us. We had four children at the time and we did not have the money we needed to provide for them. We began to meditate on this promise. We thought about it. We spoke it to one another. We went to bed thinking about it and we got up thinking about it. Either we could worry about what faced us or we could meditate on the promise. We chose the latter.
This promise did not come to us from a prophet. We did not open to it one day and it “jumped off the page” to us. We had not just heard a teaching on it. We simply knew that God had written it in the bible and chose to believe it. However, it was still “Logos” to us. However, it was still what God said 2000 years ago. We chose to meditate on what he said day and night.
One day something happened. Both my wife and I knew that there had been a change. The promise was the same. What we knew about it intellectually was the same but it was no longer words on a page. It was no longer a letter written to a foreign church 2000 years ago. It was what God was saying to us at that moment in time.
This transformation of the Logos of Philippians 4:19 into the Rhema of “God will meet all my need” released an even more personal promise into my life. God quickened another verse to me from Joshua. He said, “Within three days you will see the solution.” We had some bills due that we could not pay and that we could not afford not to pay. Within three days, the money to pay them came to us from a source we could never have imagined. The promise of God worked! It has continued working for over thirty years. (More Tomorrow)
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