Joshua: A Rested and Nourished Heart

So we're glad you're here at Christ the Redeemer.

What we like to say every week is we're more broken than we originally thought.

We're we're more imperfect, more sinful than we originally thought, but we're more loved by God than we could dare to dream.

And so that's what we like to see every week, whatever text we're in for the week.

Um that's what we're sort of uncovering and learning and trying to apply into our hearts and into our lives.

So we're going to the book of Joshua.

If you're new, you just showed up.

We're going to the book of Joshua and Joshua chapter five this morning.

In Joshua chapter five, if you happened to have read ahead, you would have read the word circumcised about every third word.

And so we are being gracious to Larn and that she didn't have to stand up here and read like 13 verses of the word circumcised, every third word without any context being given for all of us to grab hold of first.

So ultimately, this is about being marked by God, being defined by God.

And we're gonna uncover that.

So a couple months ago, Christy was out of town with some girlfriends, and she was out of town for a few days, and so I was on full duty, full throttle duty with our three girls all day, every day for three days while working.

So I experienced actually what Christy does on a normal day, I experienced just for three days.

And so I'd wake up early, about 15 minutes before the girls would wake up, and then I'd get the lunches packed.

I'd like to be prepared before they get up, as it takes me a little bit longer to just sort of do that morning routine.

And so I'd have everything ready and the water bottles ready, and then they'd wake up and they'd start through, and we'd do breakfast and then ponytails and all of that.

And by the end of all that, they have their backpack, they have their uh their jacket, their water bottle, the lunch box.

I mean, like all this stuff is what I really all this stuff's leaving my house.

I've bought, I've I've bought all this stuff.

This is my stuff.

Um, and and some of it doesn't always come back, right?

Some of you, if you if you're a parent or if you've been a parent, um you remember this, right?

Like you're hunting for your kid's jacket at the lost and found at your school, right?

And so I'm that week, especially that week, like I got these stickers.

We have these stickers um that say uh our child's name on it, you know, Masterson on it, and I I would I just started sticking these stickers on everything that was leaving every morning.

I'd be like, You got a sticker in that jacket?

You got you know, I was like, I was in charge, so all my control tendencies were coming out.

The sticker on the bottom of the water bottle, sticker inside of the jacket, right?

Like I was marking things because it was mine, right?

Like they're mine.

I I want them to come back to me.

I have purchased them and they're mine.

So I was marking them.

We we do this, right?

All of us do this to some extent.

I could I can remember my the my first office.

And what did it have right outside the office?

Right beside the door.

It had my name on it, right?

Like, oh, it's like, oh, it's my office.

Nobody else can come in here and try to claim it's it's mine.

We do this with our cars, right?

Put a license plate on it, it's ours, we mark it.

My dog did it this morning, like seven times.

Seven times.

He's he's just rationing it.

We mark stuff, we write our names on it, it's ours.

We we write our name on our soccer ball, and if people don't cooperate with us, we're gonna go home with our ball, right?

It's ours.

Nobody can.

It belongs to us, this is the point here.

This is the idea actually going into Joshua 5.

It's this idea, and first you read it, right?

We're gonna read it, and first you read it and you go, like, what?

Like, this is the parts of the Bible I actually read over.

But actually, the more we dig into this and we we uncover it, we go, oh, like this means something.

Now, this was an ancient time, right?

This was an ancient ritual of circumcision.

But really, it's about being marked by God.

It's about being defined, it's about being justified in the core of your being in the most intimate way, as gods.

That we belong to God.

So if you've been with us through Joshua, you can remember the last, I think, four sermons, perhaps, something like that.

They they were in Egypt, if you remember the history, the people of God, they were in Egypt and they were in slavery.

They get rescued out of slavery through miraculous events, and then what should take a few weeks to get through this wilderness, this desert?

It takes 40 years?

Because of their disobedience and their apathy, and they just don't care, and they forget, and they settle in.

And then God starts to speak to Joshua and says, Hey, you're gonna lead these people.

Like these people need to move not just from slavery to wandering, but from wandering into the land of rest and nourishment, a land of peace.

And this is an image for us to behold because this is what we have in Jesus.

This is the image that is giving to us to move from slavery and wandering into a place where our hearts can rest in peace and rest and nourishment.

So let's jump into the text.

Joshua 5, verse 2.

Joshua 5:2

At that time the Lord said to Joshua, Make flint knives and circumcise the sons of Israel a second time.

So if you remember, they've crossed over the river, this army that's going to go take over this land, which is their land, but they're not in the land, so other people are living in the land, they're coming back to get their land.

And so he says, Hey, make the knives, circumcise the sons.

And now this is going on because the generation before Joshua didn't do this.

They were told to do this, and they were disobedient.

So if we jump into verse 6, for the people of Israel walked 40 years in the wilderness, and to all the nation, the men of war who came out of Egypt, perished because they did not obey the voice of the Lord.

The Lord swore to them that he would not let them see the land that the Lord had sworn to their fathers to give us.

A land flowing with milk and honey.

So it was their children whom he raised up in their place, that Joshua circumcised, for they were uncircumcised because they had not been circumcised on the way.

So that's all that history kind of broken down into a couple verses.

So you know, welcome to a chat on circumcision, Sunday morning.

You're excited about this.

It seems barbaric, uh, it seems ancient, it seems uh uh very intimate, it seems bloody.

Um, and it is.

It's all of those things.

Uh, but what it is meaning for us when we see it in the biblical arc of the story and in the gospel, it's about being a person defined by God, marked by God as his child.

So, point number one is this our hearts are marked by Christ's unwavering love for us.

And we'll get there.

I'll get us there.

That's the point, though.

Our hearts, who we are and the core of our beings, are marked by Christ's unwavering love for us.

This week, uh, Christy and I watched the new Taylor Swift documentary on Netflix.

Has anybody seen that?

Miss Americana?

Anybody watch that this week?

It just came out the last couple weeks.

We've been Taylor fans for like 16 years, ever since Tim McGraw.

I don't know if anybody's been with her since that long.

Uh I mean, she just feels like we're family.

Uh, we're not letting go.

You can judge us on the way out.

It sort of doesn't matter what she does or says, like we're family at this point, and we're just gonna ride it out with her.

Um, and so we were watching the documentary because we're fans and we're gonna see what's going on, and we get an inside look, and so we're so excited about it.

And she says at one point, one of the really insightful things, she says, from the age of 13, pretty much, when she started standing on stages, until her late 20s, and you've got to think, I mean, this is a person, you know, the biggest of spotlights.

Here's what she says I became the person everyone wanted me to be.

When you're living from the approval of strangers, one bad thing can cause everything to crumble.

Right?

Maybe you know that feeling.

I mean, we all know the feeling to some extent.

We want a group of friends to approve of us.

Right?

I mean, we want a particular person to approve, a particular person in your family just won't give it to you.

It would be so great.

They just won't give it to you.

We all want to belong, is what this is.

We all want to have a definition in the core of who we are.

This is one of the one of our core needs in life.

On Tuesday, my mentor Scotty Smith, he wrote this on his prayer blog.

Free us from the grave clothes of people's opinions.

Criticism and rejection can devastate us, and praise and appreciation can seduce us.

May your unwavering love for us and great delight in us define us more than anything else.

So, back in this Joshua story, to these Israelites, them not living in their land and not having land, land back then was tied to identity.

I mean, it's sort of like what we do today with achievements.

Land was who they were, and they didn't have land.

And the brilliance, the brilliance of this story is that God marks them as his own.

That's what's going on here.

This story in Joshua 5, God marks them as his own before they go and recapture the land.

So before they go and fight the fight or conquer anything or achieve anything, he marks them as his own.

And so what this means is it tells us again and again what the scripture and the biblical gospel narratives tell you.

Before we fight fights.

By grace through faith in Jesus alone.

And now that is, oh, I mean, I don't know for you, for me, it's an incredible relief.

If you're in touch with your powerlessness at all, this is such great relief.

Because we're powerless to live righteous enough or good enough or achieve enough as to feel suddenly, oh, I'm, you know, I've arrived.

But if we're already God's beloved before, this changes everything.

In response to all of that, I just want to throw out for us a few questions for our hearts to ponder by means of asking the Holy Spirit to work inside of us.

Here's a few questions that this week I was beginning to ponder.

In what ways have I given myself to being marked by people's approval?

Wouldn't that be wonderful to be able to just know that and confess that, begin to unpack that a little bit?

In what ways do I allow my heart to find justification in what I have or am trying to get or trying to earn?

In what ways have I yet to fully embrace how fully loved and marked I am as your beloved.

Now, here's what Paul says in the New Testament about circumcision.

So he picks up on this image and this practice, he bridges it for us to understand it.

Romans 2, 28 and 29.

He's writing to a group of Jews talking about this new Christian faith that's come out of the Jewish faith.

Here's what he says: For no one is a Jew who's merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical.

Well, sure, it probably felt like that to a lot of the Jews, right?

Oh, well, then what was it?

Here's verse 29.

He says, But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart by the Spirit, not by the letter.

His praise is not from man, but from God.

So what Paul's saying here, he's saying, it's not about outward behavior.

This is not about a life living up to enough standards or enough rules or enough merit.

That's not what Christian faith is.

That's moralism.

That's just religiosity.

Spirituality, Christian faith, faith walk.

It's about the heart.

It's not about the letter of the law.

It's about the Spirit of God inside of us, loving us and redeeming us and delivering us, comforting us, convicting us, but in us working, marking us as his own.

You've got to remember that generation before Joshua, they didn't circumcise the kids and the people, and so they didn't follow God's direction and all that wandering for 40 years, and so they die off as this other generation that know they're not living where they should, and so they're in disobedience.

Can you imagine the voice of shame?

Well, of course you can.

Right?

Of course you can, because you remember you remember that night in college.

You don't want to talk about it.

You remember the night in high school, you don't want to talk about it.

You remember the night last week.

We don't want to talk about it.

And you shouldn't have done that, and you shouldn't have said that, and that person always set you off, and that's how it happened, and you didn't plan on it happening, and then it happened, and that voice of shame can happen.

That voice of shame can begin.

Joshua 5, 9 says this.

And the Lord said to Joshua, today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you.

So God was rolling away, taking away judgment and condemnation as to welcome these people into a land of peace and rest.

His image is unfolding for us.

Years ago, I was playing golf at the super cushy golf course up in Highlands.

Here's the first T.

This is Mountain Top.

Anybody ever played at Mountaintop?

Have you ever played there?

Golfers like want to play there, and I was there through my father-in-law, not my wallet.

You know, I was there through my father-in-law, and a friend of his was a member, and it's real clear I'm not a member.

I got my junkie clubs and my old golf shoes, and by the time I tee off, the driving range didn't help.

Okay, it didn't.

I'm slicing.

I'm consistent.

It's consistent.

It's just not good, you know, it's just bad.

I'm all up in those woods to the left and the right.

I'm I'm all over.

I'm hiking.

I'm I'm hiking.

I'm not golfing.

I'm hiking, I'm crisscrossing the fairway.

I'm exhausted.

It's very hard work.

If you're a bad golfer, you know it is it is very hard work being a bad golfer.

Whenever I golf with my friend Kevin, he's just having this leisurely, restful time, having a wonderful time.

I'm exhausted.

I'm I mean, it's like triple the effort for me.

About hole number five.

I think it was a hole number five, maybe not.

Maybe maybe you played there and you know this.

But about hole number five, we were about halfway up the fairway.

Over to the right, there was this little house.

I mean, it's a beautiful little house.

It probably, this little hut probably cost as much as my house cost to build.

That's how beautiful and just unbelievable it was.

And you went over to it, and nobody's in there, but every, every wonderful, yummy, healthy snack and unhealthy snack you could ever imagine is inside this hut.

Every drink you could possibly want, everything you want is inside of this hut.

And you walk in, I mean, there is homemade granola bars inside of this hut, right?

I mean, we're not talking like junky candy.

I mean, everything you want is inside this place.

And it is so clear to me this is where I belong.

And that's what, like, this is, I should just stay, I need to stay, I need to stay here.

This was, this was my this was my place.

This is where I belong.

It was a place, right?

Like that's our image here.

It was a place of rest and nourishment, at least for me, that felt like a lot of slavery and wandering, just wandering around golf course, trying to find my ball, and then this place is just such rest and nourishment, this little house, this little house.

This is this image that we're getting in history with these people of Israel.

It's also the image, the truth we have in Jesus.

That we have a place for our hearts to reside.

That He is our redemption, He is our deliverance.

Point number two is this.

We are called to live in rhythms of rest and remembrance, as to live as people of mission and calling.

There's an order there.

It's not a balance, it's an order.

We are called to live in rhythms of rest and remembrance, as to live as people of mission and calling.

Just when you think, right?

The army is over the river.

So just when you think off they go, they're gonna conquer.

Because if we read the text in Joshua 5, it says, all the people are they're scared.

They've heard the stories of this people of Israel and how they've come out of Egypt, and that happened to the Egyptians, and now they've crossed through this river, and like apparently their God is actually powerful and stuff's going on.

All the people in Canaan, they are nervous, they're scared.

And just when you think this army is just gonna get it, they're gonna fight the fight, they're gonna go in.

God says, Hey, by the way, yeah, you crossed the river, you're now in their territory, and before you go and fight, I'm gonna require you to circumcise everyone, which will force you to rest for a few days while you heal.

What application for our hearts today?

The application is our obedience is empowered by our rest.

It's not that we're just trying to be obedient all the time and every once in a while in life we're gonna rest.

No, no, no, no.

It's that it's that we live in positions of remembrance and rest as to walk in positions of activity for calling and mission and obedience.

As a pastor, pastorally, I'm not worried about your busy schedules.

You're gonna work that out.

Or it'll break you, one way or the other.

But I am most of all worried about your busy heart and my busy heart.

Because we can have busy schedules while having a heart that is at peace.

And we can have a lot of margin in life, but have a busy heart.

And the point of rest or reflection times or prayer or stillness, these practices, scripture reading, these practices of Christian life, the point is not to earn God's love.

The point is to put you in places of rest for your heart to be at rest in order to go and engage in the world.

To allow the presence of God to remind you of his love and nourish you of the deliverance you already have.

A few weeks ago for me, I went through the week.

I do it all the time, just like you.

I went through the week.

I had a busy schedule that week.

Every week's not that way, but my schedule happened to be busy that week, and then on top of it, what I did was is I just cut out just reflection and quiet time.

That's a good way to solve some problems.

And so I did that, so my heart just got busier and busier throughout the week.

And by Thursday night, I was just so anxious.

Actually, my chest was feeling tight.

It's easy just to keep marching into battle and neglect our hearts.

To walk in the Spirit, to move in the wholeness of being the beloved already marked by God, that you're God's beloved.

It means that we get to wake up in the mornings and not just march into another battle.

It means we get to rest first.

It means we get to remember first.

We don't have to go straight into activity.

For me, a little bit of reflection time just begins with a question is is my heart busy or is my heart calm?

I mean, I've I've even entered like quiet times and stuff like that often, just to like, oh, if I can learn enough, right?

And that just busied my heart even more.

For me, just that initial question is my heart, is my heart busy or is my heart calm?

And if my heart's busy, usually there's something to surrender, something to confess, something to repent of.

Just slow down a little bit.

And surrender to God's presence.

And then you move into learning something, reading something, doing something, moving on into what you're doing for the day.

Last point for us to ponder this morning.

And I can't say this too many times, and we'll probably just say it every week.

Point number three: God's presence and love is enough for our hearts.

God's presence in love is enough for our hearts.

So there's this phrase in our text, I read right over it.

Maybe you caught it.

You've heard it probably before.

God says He's giving them a land of milk and honey.

So, lately I kind of nerded out on this this week.

I just I got way deep in milk and honey, actually.

Uh a land with milk meant that there's ample pasture for their animals.

So for the shepherd's flock.

So there's it was more than enough.

More than enough.

And then there's this honey.

And this is a little more hidden because then we've got to go back and you read in Deuteronomy 8, 7 through 10, where God promised them the land.

And where he promised them the land, he promised there was there would be seven foods that would be dominant in the land: wheat, barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olive oil, and honey.

Now you go, okay, not important.

I would have read right over that.

Now here's what's interesting is usually us Westerners, when we read honey, we think of honey made by bees.

Well, everything on that list is a plant except for the honey, because if honey is made by bees, then it's not a plant, it's made by the bees.

And we go, well, most likely this is not honey made by bees.

This is probably a syrup that they made by dates.

This sort of changes things a little bit.

I nerd out a little bit more.

I read an NPR article about dates in the Middle East.

I read another article, and it said, You can be nourished forever.

I don't know how true it is, but it sounds really good.

You can be nourished forever on milk and dates.

So here's the point with this phrase.

This is God saying to them, with that land and that image teaching us what we have in Christ Jesus.

This is God saying, I want you to live, to have a state of your heart in a place where you always have enough.

Where your heart is at rest and is nourished.

Who would have thought all of that in a passage about circumcision?

But you are Mark as God's beloved.

That's pretty good.

God, thank you for your goodness to us.

So many of our hearts, mine included, wander about finding definition and things that will fade and fail us.

Remind us this morning that you are enough, that you grant rest to our souls, and you are the nourishment that ultimately satisfies our hearts.

We come before you with busy hearts.

We march into fights without pausing, without resting, without surrendering.

Thank you for this reminder this morning to pause, to rest, to be still before we move on into mission and calling and what we're doing in this world.

May this have practical application for what it means for us to live Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday.

God, would you help us to wake up with a remembrance of your love for us, that you have already delivered us from guilt and shame.

And we are not defined by what we do.

We are defined by what you have done for us and what you proclaim over us.

That we are your children by your grace alone and our faith in Jesus.

And for that we are so thankful.

May our hearts and our lives honor you.

Amen.