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FAITH IS THE VICTORY - here we are given the names of the kings & cities that were defeated as Israel possessed the land. The book of Joshua is more that the history of Israel to possess the land. It is also the journey of every believer throughout time on their journey from sinfulness to redemption. We see principles of our journey in Joshua.
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FAITH IS THE VICTORY - here we are given the names of the kings & cities that were defeated as Israel possessed the land. The book of Joshua is more that the history of Israel to possess the land. It is also the journey of every believer throughout time on their journey from sinfulness to redemption. We see principles of our journey in Joshua.
Listen to Joshua 12 Faith is the Victory by Cross City Church MP3 song. Joshua 12 Faith is the Victory song from Cross City Church is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 41:28. This high-quality MP3 track has 41.295 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 7 Jul 2025. Stream and download Joshua 12 Faith is the Victory by Cross City Church for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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Jimmy shared personal stories related to the founding and history of Israel. He mentioned meeting Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and discussed the political complexities of Israel's formation, including Arab rejection and US support. He also recounted a trip to Israel with rabbis and pastors, highlighting the tense situation during the Lebanon invasion. He emphasized the ongoing tensions in the region due to religious and political factors. He concluded by reflecting on Israel's significance in biblical prophecy. Well, good morning. Good morning. Are you all dead as a hammer today? All right, well, good morning. Good morning. Oh, man. You all are still half asleep, aren't you? Well, good to see you. Our son Bailey is with us today. He doesn't usually come. But Elizabeth was under the weather today, and Randy stayed with her. My kids don't think I can drive anymore. So we have Uber drivers in our family that bring us to church every week. So it's Bailey's time this week, so he decided he'd come in here. James is teaching in another class, his son, but he chose to come in here with us, so we're grateful and wanted to be sure you noted. Now, the reason I can do this is because I'll just stop when we get to the right time, because I will be back next week. And I did bring a picture that I want to show you. You can all see it later. But this is a picture of me with the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir. You know, we've been studying in Joshua the establishment of the nation of Israel. And in our day, most of us can remember when Israel was declared a state again. In September of 1948, the United Nations passed a partition resolution offering two states in Israel, one for Jews and one for Arabs. The Arabs turned it down. They holler now they want to have two states, but they were offered two states in 1948. So Israel came in and accepted the agreement. And on May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence. Now, what's interesting is that we had a Baptist president in the United States back then. His name was Harry Truman from Independence, Missouri. By the way, if you're ever in Kansas City, the chilly place that Truman went to every time he came to Kansas City at the Independence is still there. And it's the best chilly you can ever find. So just ask someone where Harry Truman's chilly place is and you can go. But Harry Truman was the first head of state in the world to congratulate Israel on becoming a new nation. He issued that statement 11 minutes after the Israelis declared independence. So we were the first. And so we have watched the emerging of the state of Israel. And we'll say a little bit about that. Now, this picture, I did a lot of things that you all never knew about when I was your pastor. And this is one of them. Now, Dave Meyer and Mary Ann, his wife, at one time their travel agency took more people to Israel than anybody else. And I do not know why David and I were in Jerusalem. But the two of us were in Jerusalem. And because of his contacts and so many visits over there, he set up a meeting for me to meet with Prime Minister Shamir. Now, I'm showing you the picture because when you look at it, you'll look he has a strange look on his face. Now, let me tell you what happened. During the night, we were due to see him at 11 o'clock in the morning, and during the night his coalition fell apart. Now, I better explain what that means. Israel is a parliamentary republic. No prime minister in history since 1948 has ever won 50% of the votes. Not once. So they have to get together and they create an alliance. So here are the Likud Party and the Conservative Party and whatever party will have to negotiate back and forth until they get enough agreement that they get 50% of the votes. And so when his coalition fell apart, he had to rebuild it. Well, Dave and I had already left the hotel to go to the Knesset to meet him when they called me to tell me not to come. I never got the message until after we'd already seen him. Now, we had a taxi cab driver and Israeli radio was televising blow by blow of Shamir's meeting with his trying to create an alliance. And when we got back to the cab after we had the visit, he said the radio just said that he left his meeting with his inner circle to meet special guests in his office. So I guess we were the special guests that day. But he'd been through a harrowing night to say the least. And so I'm sitting there looking at him. My first words to him, and this is when Dave took this picture, I said, you look like you need a Gatorade break. Now, I'm sure that he thought, who is this guy and what is Gatorade? He's looking at me like, I don't know what in the world you're talking about. Well, it was definitely an awkward moment, but the visit went well. It had been my privilege to meet with, of course, let me give you this to give Carol. I was going to put it out, but Jack had so many pictures out there there wasn't any place for it. So we'll put that at the back somewhere when we're through. Now, the reason I can be confident I can make it is that I will be back next week. So when we get to the end of things, we will just pick up there next week. But it's been my privilege to know and to meet with three of the prime ministers of Israel. There have been 14 prime ministers since 1948. Some of them have served more than once, as Netanyahu, who has been there the longest, that has been there and then not been there, then been back again, back and forth. But it's been a delight to have some contact with the modern nation of Israel. And I think it's interesting when you realize where it came from back in Joshua to present day. A lot has happened. The Arabs turned down the offer for having an Arab state, a Palestinian state. And people say, why did they do that? Well, the simple reason is they hated Israel. Basically, the Islamic world does not believe Israel has a right to exist. And so when you hear the gang in Washington say from the river to the sea, what they're saying is we want to destroy Israel all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. So the truth is that the Islamic hate for Israel is because of their hate for God. And so there's a lot of theology and a lot of politics mixed in with it. But we find ourselves, the good news is that there are some Arab states who are making now treaties with Israel. And they're prospering when they do. And I won't go into all the details about how that's happening. But it is happening. And we've had some moves with Saudi Arabia and with Egypt and others that offer some hope for the future. But truthfully, the Arab world is driven so much by extreme Muslim theology that it will never fully accept Israel. And that's caused a lot of the tension today that we have around the world. So anyway, I was going to tell you one other thing too while I'm telling you stories. In 1982, I was elected president of Southern Baptist Convention. And the previous year, Bailey Smith had been the president. And he took a group of about 15 Arab Jewish rabbis and Baptist pastors to the Holy Land. And it was all planned by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. Mark Briskman, who was the head of this region of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, lives in Dallas. And so he set up everything. We had to pay to go, but they had everything planned for us. And so it was such a success that when I was elected president, Mark came to me and he said, we want you to take another group of 15 rabbis and pastors this fall. So in the fall of 1982, I took 15 Jewish rabbis and Baptist pastors. You would know most of the pastors that went. Ed Young, Houston went, and Paige Patterson. Just good guys that we had known. And they had selected some Jewish rabbis. And so we went to Jerusalem in 1982. When we got there, I had been scheduled. Let me back up. Two months before that, in September, I had been scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Begin in Los Angeles. So I'm ready to go to bed to get up to fly to Los Angeles when I get word that his wife had just died. And he immediately left to go back to Israel. And so I did not get to go to Los Angeles to meet with him. But the meeting that I was to have with him occurred while I was with this Jewish rabbi, a bunch of Baptist pastors in Israel. We were the first group that he met after his grieving period. In Jewish life, you have about 60 days of grieving where you really cancel everything and you grieve the loss of your spouse. And so it had been just past two months, and we were the first group to meet with Begin at that time. Also, a week before we got there, Israel had invaded Lebanon. They called it the Peace for Galilee Crusade. And within a week, they had captured everything up to Beirut. Now, we have a strong group of missionaries in Beirut, and I had asked if we could meet with the missionaries. Well, they agreed to drive down to Sidon, which is about halfway between Beirut and the Israeli border. And I was going to find a way to get to Sidon. Well, Prime Minister Begin set it up, and here were the instructions. We were to rent two cars, and I'd drive one, and Dan Martin, who was a news person for Baptist Press, had gone on the trip with us. So Dan drove one of the cars, and I drove one of the cars, and we drove up to the headquarters of the Jewish campaign that they were in, which is right on the Lebanese border. And there we were going to have an escort all the way to Sidon. So we get to the army camp, and we go from there up to Sidon with armed guards because we're going into a war zone. I had a colonel with an Uzi sitting next to me, and Dan had one sitting next to him. We had a jeep with a machine gun mounted in the back in front of us and behind us. And so we moved from northern Israel all the way up to Sidon and had a great time, about three or four hours, with our missionaries and their families, and came back. And it was a real special time. It is kind of interesting that when I got back late that afternoon, all the Jewish rabbis and pastors gave me a standing ovation, I guess, for getting back safely because it was a wild time. But so much has happened. Israel is – you know, Zechariah said that Israel is always going to be a cup of trembling for the nations. It's going to always be a hot potato. And it is, and it will always be that way until the Lord comes again. But I think we have a lot of interest if we think about the establishment of Israel and all they went through in Joshua that we've been going through these weeks and where it is today. And their government is very different from ours. They have some democratic principles, but as I said, not one of the prime ministers ever got over 50 percent of the votes. So they always have to have a coalition. Now, just imagine that if it was that way here. We'd have to have all the liberals and the conservatives all get together to agree at least 50 percent of them before we could have a president. Well, that's the way Israel is set up. And it's done quite well, but it still is a unique form of democracy in the Middle East. Okay. Now, I would say one other thing, that the nature of the book of Joshua is very interesting and very important. While Joshua is a history of the Israelites crossing the Jordan River and conquering the land and possessing the land, it is also a picture of the believer's life. We have received an inheritance of the Lord just like the Jews received an inheritance in the land. And in our Christian life, let me just make the statement, Christian life is not difficult, it's impossible. We can't do it. On our own, we could never do it. Israel could not ever have conquered Canaan without God fighting for them. And so, believers, we need to understand, I love what Rory Fish used to say, God is for us. We all need to let that sink in a little bit. God is for us. He's not against us, he's for us. So we can trust him because we know he's for us. My dad used to say that while we may not understand everything, we can trust him because we know he's for us. And that is certainly true. So it's a prophecy of what the believer's life is going to be as believers in Christ and what Joshua and the people of Israel are going through to establish the nation. Now, the last verse in chapter 11, and John got us to that place last week. But the last verse simply says, verse 23, So Joshua took the entire land in keeping with all the Lord had told Moses. Joshua then gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to the tribal allotments. After this, the land had rest from war. That's a pretty good definitive statement. Joshua did his job. Israel possessed the land. But then the very first verse of chapter 13 seems like a contradiction. Joshua was now old, advanced in age, and the Lord said to him, You have become old, advanced in age, but a great deal of land remains to be possessed. Sounds like a contradiction, doesn't it? Verse 23 says that Joshua possessed all the land, and verse 1 of chapter 13 says there's still a lot of land to be possessed. Indeed, there was. They still were possessing land in the book of Judges, in the first three chapters of Judges. So we say, how do you reconcile that apparent contradiction? Well, it really is very simple when you understand. Joshua had control of the basic land, all of the details of the land of Canaan. He just had not conquered all the cities. And so he had control of the land to the point where you could say he controlled the land, he possessed the land, or he had the land. But at the same time, there was still more land to be given because it was a slow process of conquering all of the land. But the possession of the land came place after they had already done their invasions and had the conquest of north and south, and yet there was still land to be gained. In a way, there's really no contradiction in those words. Joshua 11 is speaking of just simply the control of the mechanics of the land. And chapter 13 verse 1 is talking about the actual conquest of destroying the cities and the inhabitants of the land. So when we come to chapter 12, the second phase, there are three phases in Joshua, the second major portion of Joshua is now completed. The victory over Jericho and Ai has been given full details in earlier chapters, so we know all the details of that, the sin of Achan, the defeat of the Israelites at Ai, which, by the way, they were defeated at Ai because they got cocky. They sent out a report and said, hey, there's not very many people down there in Ai, let's not send all 30,000 of our troops down there, let's just send a couple thousand of them, they can handle that. They didn't pray about it, they didn't ask God about it, God didn't fight for them, and they got soundly defeated. A devastating loss. Then God said to them that they were going to need to deal with the sin. He identified Achan, and Achan was dealt with, and he said, I'm not going to fight for you until you make this right. You're going to have to repent, you're going to have to deal with the consequences of Achan's action, and then I'll fight for you again. So the second incursion down at Ai was a breeze because God was leading the way now. They prayed, they had done everything God said, and so the second excursion to Ai, which is now a big city and not far from Jericho, was successful because they had sought God's way and God's will and God led the way and fought for them. So it's just a good reminder to us, Israel could never conquer the land in their own wisdom, neither can we conquer the sin that threatens us in our lives in our own strength and our own wisdom. Every one of us needs to understand that there's no sin that we're not capable of. Now that's a mouthful. You say, surely that's not true. No, it is true. I'll remember the day, and I've described it to you before, when God showed me that I was capable of every known sin. It shattered me. I was saved when I was very young. Never drank, never cussed, never had sex before marriage. I was a good kid, but I never thought there were some things I wouldn't do. I'd never be a drunk, I'd never be immoral, and then suddenly God opened my eyes to see what he saw in my heart, and what I saw was as deep as a thousand midnights. And God said there's no sin that you're not capable of committing. That's why we're seeing a plethora, a myriad of Christian leaders seemingly falling to the wayside. They thought they could handle it. They reached the point where they believed their press clippings. I live every day knowing that it's not that I don't trust somebody else, I don't trust myself, because I know what I'm capable of, and I know without God I would be as guilty as anybody else. That's a lesson we need to learn from Joshua and from the defeated Ai through the sin of one man. And when God reported this to Joshua, he said all Israel has sinned. Now wait a minute. All Israel didn't steal that bar of silver, that beautiful robe that Achan stole. Just Achan did. God said Israel did. Now I don't understand what I want to explain to you. The sin of one person often causes the defeat of everyone. Whether we realize it or not, we are linked together. We're not an isolated group of individuals who just happen to like each other and meet every Sunday like this. We are born again believers through the blood of Jesus Christ and through a miracle that we'll never understand. We have made one with God, one with Jesus Christ, and one with each other. Not just isolated individuals. There's no such thing as lone ranger Christianity. We belong together. We ought to be patient with one another. We ought to forgive one another. We ought to encourage one another. We ought to restore one another. When someone sins, it's not just a shame and we observe it and say, well, it shouldn't have happened. We're to restore them. We're to help them get over it. Sin never has the last word. Christ's death on the cross tells us that sin doesn't win. We've read the last chapter. We know we win. We know what the Bible says and how we're victorious. But we need to live in that sense of victory. But every sin is significant. It is not only significant in that it separates us from our fellowship with God. It separates us from each other. You know, I often wonder. Now, this is just me. There's nothing biblical about this. I always wonder, when I stand before Christ, are you all who are going to be watching going to hear everything I ever did? That's a scary thought. Well, the good news is I don't think so. Because when we appear before the judgment seat of Christ, our sins have been covered in the blood of Christ. And you would say, what about my future sins? Hey, all your sins were future when he died. So it doesn't matter. His blood is sufficient for everything. He covers us in his blood. And we're transformed because of the power of the Holy Spirit whom he plants in us. And we have victory over sin. And God says in Paul told the Corinthians that there's not any sin coming your way, no temptations coming your way that you don't have the strength to endure it. Why? The Holy Spirit lives in us. And we can say no because the Holy Spirit lives us. I love 2 Corinthians 4 where the Apostle Paul talks about we have given up our right to certain things. And he mentions them in 2 Corinthians 4. But what he is teaching us is you don't have to wait until you're tempted to decide not to do it. When you're tempted, it's too late if you haven't already decided not to do it. When we're tempted, we need to understand the Holy Spirit's in us and we don't have to do it. Philip Wilson, get rich saying, devil made me do it, but he didn't. We choose to do it. It's a rational choice that we make. Nobody made us do it. Nobody ever makes us do anything. We have a right to our own lives and we will make our own decisions. And we can be foolish like Joshua who sent troops after Ai without asking God's leadership. He also, showing that good leaders can be deceived, made a foolish and forbidden alliance with the Gibeonites. They lied to him and he believed them and made a covenant with them that he would protect them when they needed protection, causing them to have to flee back from Gilgal to bring the army back to when the Gibeonites were attacked and they had to take care of protecting the Gibeonites because they had made a covenant agreement with the Gibeonites. And God told them, don't ever do that. We cannot make an alliance with evil. Sin is never a good thing. It's always something that God needs to take care of in our lives. All of these things are seen through these experiences in Joshua. And again, the good news is that Joshua could never have conquered Canaan by themselves. Every time they tried to move in their own wisdom, their own strength, they were badly defeated and devastated. When they asked God to guide them and lead them, when the Ark of the Covenant was involved as a symbol of the covenant with God, they always won because God was doing the fighting for them. God's for us, remember? We want him fighting for us. We never get to the place where we don't need him. We can remember when we used to sing, I need thee every hour. Of course, we got a long way from some of the hymns, hadn't we? But that's absolutely true. It's not an hour goes by that I don't need the Lord. I cannot do it myself. And that's certainly one of the lessons we have here in Joshua. So let me move on here and see what we can come to before I run out of time. The 12th chapter begins with just a list of kings. It's interesting because earlier in Joshua, he is given more detail about all of the battles, the conquest of the southern tribes and the northern tribes. But here he just lists the kings. Now, he starts with two of the well-known kings, and then there are 33 kings in all mentioned in these first verses. And they're just simply a record of the kings. Remember, they had city-states in Cana. They had kings in every city-state. So there were multiple city-kings and multiple kings in Cana. And so they defeated these 33 kings. And by defeating Jericho and Ai, by the way, they cut the kingdom of Cana in half. If you look on the map Brother Jack gave us here several weeks ago, Ai and Jericho are right in the middle, just above the Dead Sea, and it's right in the middle of the Cana. You come in here and you look south and there's a southern kingdom. You look north, there's a northern kingdom. And so by doing that, they made it very difficult for the tribes in the north of Cana and the south of Cana to get together. They absolutely divided. They drove a wedge between the two sections of Cana and made it easier for the conquest of Cana to take place. And so chapter 12 records the conquest of Cana, and future chapters are going to describe the possession of all of Cana. Although certain cities were unconquered, the land was subdued as local opposition was now controlled by Israel. Judges 1 through 3 tells us that even after Joshua died, there was land to be taken. And so it just lists the kings, these 33 kings. Sihon and Og are mentioned first, and then 16 kings from the southern kingdom and 16 kings from the northern kingdom. All of these are mentioned here in the 12th chapter. Now we've reached a milestone. Joshua's now ready to fulfill what he's been told to do. He was given two commands. Conquer the land. Divide it up in proportion to the tribes. Give the tribes their inheritance. And so I think it's Weersbe that reminds us that in the first nine chapters of Joshua, we have the word inheritance 51 times. This is a dual assignment. Establish the, come in and conquer the people, defeat the people, do what God's told you to do, and then give the assignment of the tribal inheritance, and that's what's taking place now in these verses. Now we need to be, oh, by the way, in chapter 22, we, you know, they built a lot of memorials, a lot of altars, memorials. When they crossed the swollen Jordan the first time, Joshua had them build a monument of 12 stones in the middle of the river. Then he had another monument at Gilgal, which is just outside the river, and said, now these are memorials so that future generations will know by seeing these monuments that God is the one that he brought victory to the land. It will be a reminder to them. And so it's kind of interesting. After they, in chapter 22 of Joshua, they almost had a civil war because when the kingdoms were defeated, north and south were defeated, one of the groups of Israelites built an altar to commemorate the victory. The other side got upset and mad because they thought they ought to be able to build the altar. It's kind of interesting. Most of the fights that Baptists have were never theological. I ought to have done them myself. How dare you do that? You robbed me. Anyway, they got to arguing about it. Now, I won't go into any detail, but the book of Judges does give you a description of how they moved past and avoided a civil war among the tribes. Chapter 13 begins the actual allotment of the tribes, and God had already let out through Moses what they were to be given. As the law required, cities of refuge were designated. Forty-eight cities were given to the Levites. They did not get any land. They got cities. They received no designated land, but were given cities. The two-and-a-half tribes that were east of the Jordan River, you may not remember this, but when they were conquering Israel and the tribes knew where they were going to be, the two-and-a-half tribes were east of the Jordan River. They were out of Canaan. It was great pasture land, a great place of inheritance. And the two-and-a-half tribes told Joshua, we don't think we need to help out on this anymore. We're just going to go and possess our land and let the rest of you take care of Canaan. And Joshua said, you can't do that. You've got to go. People have to move together, and you have to go and conquer the land. When the land is conquered, then you can come back. So that's what happened. They did go and fight with the rest of Israel, and when all the battles were finished, they came back to their land and that way they were able to be part of the nation itself rather than just separated by the fact that they were east of the Jordan. By the way, they offered a kind of buffer zone between the enemies and Canaan, the tribes in Canaan, because they were outside the land of Canaan. And so the people had to go through them first before they could get to the rest of the Canaan tribes. And naturally they had a lot of invasions, and they suffered a lot of things because of that. But anyway, they built that altar and almost caused a civil war, and we are grateful that that didn't come about. God protected them from that. Also about the same time, the Lord stopped sending manna, and Israel now would have to eat from the fruit of Canaan. The rite of circumcision, which had not been practiced in the wilderness, was now reinstated as a symbol of the covenant between Jehovah and Israel. The Passover was celebrated, and most importantly, Joshua had surrendered his sword to the commander of the Lord's army. God was going to lead the way. The commander of the Lord's army was the one that led the fight and won the battles, and Canaan was possessed not through the efforts and plans and strategies of the Israelites, but through the power and presence of God himself. And that's the story of Israel, and it's the story of our lives. Don't ever believe your press clippings. The highest achievements any of us could ever make are of no significance at all, because we're still weak, we're still helpless, and we still will fail without the presence of God in our lives. Christianity is not embracing a theology. It is not embracing certain things to be true. It's a vital relationship with God himself, who, when we are saved, he lives in us, and we are new creatures, born again, new creatures, different than we were. And who of us can say different? Who of us can say we're the same as we were before we got saved? If you can, you're not saved, because if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation, new creature. And so we don't battle for victory. We battle from victory, because God is in us, and he leads us, and he's for us, and he fights for us. And so he promised Israel this land, and they got it. And the Arabs didn't get there before the Israelites. The Israelites were there a thousand years before the Jews, the Jews were there a thousand years before the Arabs ever showed up. Oh, and some of them, when they say that they stole the land from us, maybe they're talking about the fact that the U.N. resolution established two states. Well, since they rejected it, nobody took it from them. They didn't accept it. So I'm not sure where they get this, that not historically nor theologically is there a way to say that the Arabs owned the land in Jerusalem and that land before the Jews did, because God gave it to them, marked it out specifically, gave detailed instructions of where the boundaries would be, and it belongs to them. And so we just need to certainly pray for the peace of Jerusalem. You could pronounce Jerusalem Jerusalem, because that's really the meaning of the name. It is the house of peace, the city of peace. And we just need to pray that the Jerusalem people of Israel will someday know that peace. We know it will only come through Jesus Christ, but we know that we are to pray for Jerusalem. By the way, Israel today is not a religious state. It is a secular state. It is by action and by practice an agnostic state. There is a segment of religious Jews in Israel, but for all practical purposes, it is a secular state. And that's why they are still the people of God. And I think that's why the Arabs hate Israel so much, because Israel claims to be the people of God. Of course, Islam must claim the same thing. But the bottom line is that the hatred of Israel is built in their understating of God, and that's at the center part of what we are going to see in the years that are ahead. I guess Carol Ann and I have been over there more times than she has, but six or eight times we've been there. And it's kind of interesting. The first time we went was in 1969, and there were still evidences of the Six-Day War, which had been two years old. We still had burned-out tanks and evidence of the skirmishes. We still saw big fights between the Syrians and the Israelis over the Sea of Galilee. We were in Jerusalem at the time when an Arab threw a hand grenade intended to kill Jews, and it was right around the corner from where we were. There's still evidence of it, yet we never felt afraid. It's an amazing feeling. When you get to Israel, you somehow have the feeling you've come home. It's a special, special place. The world will never understand it. It will never have peace until the Lord comes again, and we certainly need to pray for them. Now then, back to Joshua's strategy. I just simply reminded you that he invaded the center of Canaan and divided the land, and then the whole conquest of the land was a matter of obedience and faith and courage in the leadership of God and the trusting of God for the victory. The account, I'll just mention it again because we need to always be reminded, but the account of Achan's sin being attributed to the entire nation teaches us the importance of every one of us. Every one of us is significant. If any one of us does anything untoward or that we shouldn't be doing, it affects all of us. And we all have to say when we look at public failures, there but by the grace of God go I. It could have been me. We're in this thing together. My dad always told me, he said, when you make a mistake, admit it. He said, everybody else knows you made it. So he said, just admit it, then promise never to do it again. That's pretty good advice. When I got to Dale City, Oklahoma, First Southern Baptist Church, great church, I met with the deacons, and one of the deacons stood in deacon's meeting and said, Pastor, hadn't been voted on yet, but he said, Pastor, we'll follow you anywhere once. We just ask you not to make the same mistake twice. And I can tell you there were several times that I had to come back and say, Guys, shouldn't have done that. It won't happen again. Like I planned a big rally at the music hall in Oklahoma City without checking. The State Fair of Oklahoma, just a mile or so away, opened the same night. And it was a colossal failure. I even had Pat Boone come in and had a big concert. Boy, it was going to be wonderful. Hardly anybody showed up. And I came back to deacons, I said, well, dumb me. I didn't check the city calendar, the state calendar. But it won't happen again, and it didn't, and it won't. But we learn from our mistakes. You know, we learn more from our mistakes than we do our successes. If we're not careful, our successes will make us cocky and arrogant. If we're real careful, you know, we're not going to make the same mistake twice. And that's good to know. And it's good to know that the gospel is the gospel of a second chance. And so we don't have time to go into the, well, it's time to go. So we're going to stop there. That's on page 10. And I'm about to tell you about what Warren Wiersbe said about the Gibeonites because it's really interesting. When Joshua made an alliance, a covenant with the Gibeonites, which God told him don't do that, they couldn't fight the Gideonites. They had to defend the Gideonites. But Joshua made lemonade out of that lemon, and I'll show you how he did that next week. All right, thank you. Father, thank you for your love for us, your patience with us. God, we're so fundamentally chaotic and we're so fundamentally arrogant and so quick to forget the blessings you stow upon us so quickly to point out someone else's mistakes and sins and not pay any attention to our own. God, forgive us for that. Keep us on a close track with you as you fight for us, and we gladly accept it and praise you for it. In Jesus' name, amen.
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