“SUCCESSFUL FOR THE LORD”
Joshua 1:1-8
Few
focuses dominate our lives like the fear of failure. Our compelling need is to succeed, though we
may not know what that is. Be it school,
job, marriage, church, or even play, we must be a success. Yet the reality is that we all fail.
HOW
DO WE ENSURE WE MAKE A FAILURE OUT OF LIFE?
Follow
the line of least resistance. Be neutral
on moral, spiritual and righteous issues.
Straddle the fence.
Alienate
yourself from the church membership. Go
to church when you "feel" like it and when it is most
convenient. Disregard the mid-week
prayer meeting.
Indulge
your carnal appetites. Take it easy on
Sunday; it is a rest day. Be lazy, be
selfish. Accept the pleasures offered by
the world.
Look
at the inconsistencies and sins of others.
Pick flaws, find fault and criticize.
Ignore your own faults.
Unite
with worldly organizations. Join a good
lodge, be a member of some club or fraternity.
They do lots of good and you don't have to be narrow either.
Run
around with carnal believers and worldlings. Don't bring religion into your social life.
Make
intimate friendships with people of character, regardless of their attitude
toward Christ.
Eclipse
your salvation with business interests.
You have a living to make and a home to keep. Work overtime and Sundays because it will
make you more money. Get dollars. Business first........
Hear
what God tells us about how to be a success:
"Do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth; meditate
on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in
it. Then you will be prosperous, and
successful." (Joshua 1:8).
"For
the Lord God is a sun and shield: the
Lord will give grace and glory: no good
thing will He withhold from them that walk
uprightly" (Psalm 84:11).
"If
any man serves me, let him follow me, and where I am, there shall also my
servant be: if any man serve me, him
will my Father honor" (John
We must know the race is bankrupt. We are dead in trespass and in sin.
On
the one side, there is the utter bankruptcy of the human race, but on the
other, a salvation adequate to meet the need.
In other words, God has a remedy.
God has a cure. He has made
adequate provision.
LIVE
A LIFE GIVEN OVER TO ONE GREAT PURPOSE. You remember that the Apostle Paul said, “This
one thing I do." Paul was a man of
one thing. The man who is going to be
successful in evangelistic and soul-winning work is the person who has set
everything else aside, who has became a man of one thing, one purpose, one aim
in life.
LIVE
A LIFE FROM WHICH EVERY HINDRANCE HAS BEEN REMOVED. Do you remember that statement in Psalm
66:18: "If I regard iniquity in my
heart, the Lord will not hear me"?
Pebble in the Shoe. Did you ever start out on a treadmill,
or a jog, when soon you feel some unknown object in your shoe, right under the
big toe. You
want to keep going. You have two
choices: stop, take your shoe off and
remove the intruder or else ignore it and endure the irritation. You choose to endure.
But
you shake your foot and try to send the little agitator away, but soon it
returns to the ball of your foot. You
shake your foot again, hoping for relief, but it returns to pester you under
your heel. Soon the “boulder" is
demanding constant attention, and you can think of little else. Finally you get to the end and it seems like
an eternity. You immediately loose your
shoe and shake it. Out comes the
irritant - a tiny gray stone no bigger than the head of a pin. How could such a minuscule object cause so
much trouble?
So
it is when we as Christians allow even a tiny sin to remain in our lives. We, too, have two choices: either to confess and forsake it and “get it
fixed” or else to delay, try to ignore it, and
tolerate it. But soon, that little sin
will cause much trouble and greatly affect our spiritual lives.
Solomon
put it this way in Proverbs 28:13, “He
who covers his sins shall not prosper, but whoever confesses and forsakes them
shall have mercy.” How wonderful it
feels to remove the pebble, and how miserable it is to Ignore
it! (M. Calvert, The
It
may be that you have an idol in your life, that there is an Achan
in the camp. Perhaps you are burdened by
a weight of some kind, or a habit that you are unwilling to give up. You may not even recognize it as a sin, and
it makes it impossible for God to use you.
LIVE
A LIFE PLACED ABSOLUTELY AT GOD’S DISPOSAL.
We have been dealing with the negative side. Here we have the positive. God’s great purpose is that our lives should
be placed completely and absolutely at His disposal. That is why we have the statement again and
again: “Yield yourselves
unto God."
God Wants Our Best. Christ never asks for anything we
cannot do.
But
let us not forget that He always does expect and require of each of us the best
we can do. The faithfulness Christ wants and approves implies the doing of all
our work, our business, our trade, our daily toil, as well as we can. Let no one think that religion does not apply
to private life. It applies to the way
you do your most common work just as much as to your praying and keeping of the
commandments. Whatever your duty is, you cannot be altogether faithful to God
unless you do your best. To slur any
task is to do God's work badly, to neglect it is to rob God. The universe is
not quite complete without your work well done, however small that work may be.
- J.R. Miller
LIVE
FOR THE APPROVAL OF THE MASTER. There is a very well-known story told of
a young boy in
Following
each piece, the crowd cheered loudly. He
was one of the finest young performers they had ever had the pleasure of
hearing. And yet the boy seemed not to
notice their expressions of approval. In
fact some later commented that he almost seemed annoyed by the applause.
At
the conclusion of the recital, the entire audience rose as one to give the
young performer a standing ovation. They
shouted "Bravo’ and Encore!” and other words of praise and appreciation. However, the young musician seemed not even
to hear them. Instead, he stood looking
up into the balcony where an old, withered man sat looking back down at him. Finally, the old gentleman smiled and nodded
his head in approval. Only then did the lad
seem to relax, and his face beamed with joy.
You see, the cheers of the crowd meant nothing unless he had the
approval of the master! It was only the
latter that this young performer sought!
This
is a principle the Apostle Paul understood very well. At Lystra he was
hailed as a god, and the people sought to offer up sacrifices to him (Acts
When
we realize, as did Paul, that it is the Master whom we serve and seek to
please, both the acclaim and criticism of mere men will pale in comparison! "Be diligent to present yourself
approved unto God" (2 Tim
RECONCILIATION
Her mother and daddy disowned her. She did all she could do. When Elizabeth Barrett married the famous
Poet Robert Browning, her parents were so upset they disowned her. She and her husband settled far from home in
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