Let's take our Bibles and turn
to Joshua chapter 7. Joshua chapter 7. But the children of Israel committed
a trespass in the accursed thing, for Achan the son of Carmi, the
son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah of the tribe of Judah, took of
the accursed thing. And the anger of the Lord was
kindled against the children of Israel. Now notice what he
says here. This is an individual that sinned,
but his anger is against the whole of Israel. And Joshua sent
men from Jericho to Ai, which is beside Beth-Avon on the east
side of Bethel, and spake unto them, saying, go up and view
the country. And the men went up and viewed
AI. And they returned to Joshua and
said unto him, let not all the people go up, but let about 2,000
or 3,000 men go up and smite AI and make not all the people
to labor thither, for they are but few. So there went up thither
of the people about 3,000 men, and they fled before the men
of Ai. And the men of Ai smote of them
about 36 men. They chased them from before
the gate of Shebarim and smote them in going down, wherefore
the hearts of the people melted and become as water. In other
words, they feared. And Joshua rent his clothes and
fell on the earth upon his face before the ark of the Lord until
eventide. He and the elders of Israel put
dust upon their heads. And Joshua said, Alas, O Lord
God, wherefore hast thou at all brought this people over Jordan
to deliver us under the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us,
would to God we had been content and dwelt on the other side of
Jordan. Lord, what shall I say when Israel
turneth their backs before their enemies? For the Canaanites and
all the inhabitants of the land shall hear of it, and shall environ
round and cut off our name from the earth. And what wilt thou
do unto thy great name? Now here's what's happening.
You remember the spies said that, contended with the Lord, and
said we've been better off staying in Egypt. You brought us out
here to kill us. That's not what Joshua was praying
here. What Joshua was saying is we've
been better off staying over there than to come over here
and see thy name defiled. He's actually pleading the name
of the Lord is what he's doing. Israel has sinned and they have
also transgressed my covenant which I commanded them for they
have even taken of the accursed thing and have also stolen and
dissembled also. In other words, this had an effect
on the whole of Israel. And they have put it even among
their own stuff. Therefore the children of Israel
could not stand before their enemies, but turned their backs
before their enemies, because they were accursed. Neither will
I be with you any more, except you destroy the accursed from
among you. Up, sanctify the people, and
say, Sanctify yourselves against tomorrow. For thus saith the
Lord God of Israel, There is an accursed thing in the midst
of thee, O Israel. Thou canst not stand before thine
enemies until you take away the accursed thing from among you.
In the morning, therefore, you shall be brought according to
your tribes, and it shall be that the tribe which the Lord
taketh shall come according to the families thereof, and the
families which the Lord shall take shall come by households,
And the households which the Lord shall take shall come man
by man. And it shall be that he that
is taken with the accursed thing shall be burnt with fire, he
and all that he hath, because he hath transgressed the covenant
of the Lord, and because he hath wrought folly in Israel. So Joshua rose up early in the
morning, brought Israel by their tribes, and by the tribe of Judah
was taken. And he brought the family of
Judah, and he took the family of the Zarites, and he brought
them, the family of the Zarites, man by man. Zebdiah was taken,
and he brought his household, man by man, and Achan, the son
of Carmi, the son of Zebdiah, the son of Zerah, of the tribe
of Judah, was taken. And Joshua said unto Achan, My
son, give, I pray thee, glory to the Lord God of Israel, and
make confession unto him, and tell me now what thou hast done. Hide it not from me. And Achan
answered Joshua and said, Indeed, I have sinned against the Lord
God of Israel, and thus and thus have I done. When I saw among
the spoils a goodly Babylonian garment, and 200 shekels of silver
and a wedge of gold of 50 shekels weight. Then I coveted them and
took them and behold they are hid in the earth in the midst
of my tent and the silver under it. Joshua sent messengers and
they ran to the tent and behold it was hid in his tent and the
silver under it. And they took them out of the
midst of the tent, and brought them unto Joshua, and unto all
the children of Israel, and laid them out before the Lord. And
Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah,
and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his
sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and
his sheep, and his tent, And all that he had, and they brought
them unto the valley of Achor. Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled
us? The Lord shall trouble thee this
day. And all Israel stoned him with
stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them
with stones. And they raised over him A great heap of stones unto this
day, so the Lord turned from the fierceness of his anger,
wherefore the name of that place is called the Valley of Achor
unto this day. May the Lord add his blessing
to the reading of his word. I invite you to turn back to the
chapter that I just read to you, Joshua chapter 7. And I want to say this at the
outset, this is the most difficult to understand and the most difficult
lesson I've ever had to teach. But I think I have seen some
things about it, and I'll attempt to tell you what I know. It's
not necessary. I don't want any of you to ever
feel that way. It's not necessary to try to
teach things that you don't know. If you don't know them, just
say, I don't know, and go on. This book is a big book, and
it's way deeper than our minds are able to comprehend. And it's
okay to say, I don't understand it. That understanding may come
in time. On the heels of a miraculous
victory. Think about it. These men never
lifted a sword. This city was the model city
of the Gentiles. It was kind of like Babylon,
it was the place. I don't even know what we would
compare it to in our day, but one of our large cities like
Houston or Dallas or something like that, and it was the city
of cities. It had, it was the most protected,
fortified, the oldest of the fortified cities in the world,
Jericho. And on the hills, these men went
into Jericho and did exactly what God told them to do. And
those walls fell without firing a shot, without waving a sword,
without doing anything. Just doing what the Lord told
them to do. These great walls and all these
men of valor just came tumbling down. And then they just walked
straight forward into the midst and slayed that city. Laid that
city in ruins. actually burn it. There was nothing
left but ashes. But on the heels of this, right
on the heels of a miraculous victory, chapter 7 begins with
the word but. But. And surely this is an amazing
thing. But the children of Israel committed
a trespass in the accursed thing. For Achan, the son of Carmi,
the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerub, the tribe of Judah, took
of the accursed thing, and the anger of the Lord was kindled
against the children of Israel. Now, I titled the message this
morning, The Sin of a Saint. And you may think to yourselves,
well, saints don't sin. Oh, I beg your pardon. John,
in the very first chapter of John's general epistle to all
the churches scattered abroad, the very first thing he said
is, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. And that's
the story of most of us. We sin and then we deny the sin. That's what we do. And I see
that in Achan, don't you? He's hiding this. He took it.
He wanted it. He coveted it. And then he buried
it in his tent. Hide it. Hide it under the dirt. I remember hearing a message
in the church I was raised in about Akin. And he was portrayed
as a sinner hiding in the midst of Israel. an unbeliever, hiding
in the midst of Israel, much like Judas was among the apostles. Nobody knew what he was except
himself. But that's not the case with
Achan. Provenient grace preserved him
in the wilderness. He was numbered with Israel. He was circumcised with Israel. and brought on dry ground across
Jordan and walked through the fallen walls of Jericho and stood
among the dead, God preserved him through the whole thing.
Be no doubt, this was a man of God. This is talking about a
saint, not a sinner hiding in the midst of Israel. But as he
walked, and think about this, he's walking among the dead. The wrath of God had slain these
men. They were a curse to God, and
they're laying everywhere. You can't tell me that Jericho
wasn't just thick with people when they all crowded in there
from those farms and everything around. They crowded inside that
walled city, and they had to just almost walk on the dead
to walk. There was 40,000 in Israel, and
there was enough men in Jericho where they thought they could
defeat them. So they were thick with men and women, but now they're
all lying dead, everything dead and burnt. And so Aiken's walking
through the battlefield now and there's flames coming up and
ashes and dead men everywhere. And he knows it, he can see that.
And he's walking along and all of a sudden he spies a Babylonian
garment, a goodly Babylonian garment. Now let me tell you
something about Babylon. Babylon is called the great whore.
Babylon stands for all false religions. It's a religion that
accentuates the flesh, glories in the flesh, trust in the flesh. And that's why God said this
place is a curse. And he's walking along and he
sees this garment. Well, I tell you, if there's
anything ever tempts a believer, it's Satan when he sets forth
that garment of self-righteousness, that garment. But under that
garment or around that garment was some gold and silver. Now
gold is portrayed in the Bible, it's pictured in the Bible, it
pictures The glorified Lord, everything in that tabernacle
is overlaid with gold. The ark, all of it, overlaid
with gold. It's talking about the royalty
of God, the divinity of God, the perfection of God. And silver,
if you go back and read through when the law was given, silver
had to do with atonement. And we're studying this as a
type, a picture. And this is an assault on the
heart. And now the heart realizes, I'm
dead, you know. Without the law, Paul said, I
was alive once, but when the law came, when it came in power,
came in revelation, he said, sin revived and I died. That's
the death he's looking at here. Believer understands he's dead
in trespasses and sins. You had to quicken till we're
dead. All right, and he's looking around and he sees some things
that he, I know it says he coveted those things. Covetousness is
idolatry. But he's looking at these things
in a different light. He didn't just look down and
see some gold and say, oh, I want that. So he got the gold and
the silver. He wrapped those things in that Babylonian garment.
In other words, he hid those things in his own self-righteousness.
He convinced himself, hey, I could use this. You know, there's going
to come a time when people are going to be in want, and I can
take this and give it to them. Or my family may be in want,
and I'll just store this until that time, because he's given
us this land anyway. And he starts reasoning. That's
the worst thing in the world you can do, by the way, is reason.
Quit reasoning. You don't reason at all. The
Lord said, come let us reason. You reason with him. You reason
over what you're hearing this morning and what you're reading
in this book. And this is aching, and he's looking at these things.
He's making excuses to himself. I know what it is. I've sinned
the same kind of sin. And you're thinking, boy, I need
to hang on to this. I don't need to just walk on
this and ignore it. I need to take this. Probably
even thought he could glorify God in taking it. I don't know
what crossed his mind. But this was a believer, so he's
not eager. And they had been told plainly that everything
in here is a curse. And if you take it, you'll be
accursed. And not only you, but all of Israel is going to suffer
for this. You know, we don't walk as individuals.
No man's an island. We walk together. God's people
are one. If somebody gets out of whack,
the whole church is out of whack. And that's the way it is here.
So this is the picture. And we're talking about the sin
of a saint. He was circumcised with Israel
brought across the Jordan on dry land, and the Lord was with
him as he fought in Jericho, you think about the providence
of God. In the providence of God, men go to battle, some men
die. That's not an accident, that's
the providence of God. This man was still standing by
the providence of God. You would think a man preserved
in a battle like that, and he's standing here walking on dead
men all around him, Do you think a man like that would be thankful?
Huh? Well, that's exactly why you
and I don't want to take of the accursed thing, because we're
thankful. We realize where that cursed thing leads. Leads to
death. Leads to burning. They were burnt. And the Lord said plainly in
chapter 6 verse 17, the city of Jericho shall be accursed,
and all that are therein to the Lord. Only Rahab, the harlot,
shall live. The only thing of any value in
there was a harlot. Huh? Achan didn't view himself
that way, did he? All that are with her are going
to be saved. All that's in her house. or brothers or sisters. And ye, in any wise, keep yourselves
from the accursed thing, lest ye make yourselves accursed when
ye take of the accursed thing. And then listen to the last part
of that verse. This is chapter 6, verse 17.
And make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it. I've seen whole
churches By one or two people going astray, I've seen whole
churches brought down to nothing. Just brought down to nothing.
And suffer until they're removed. Either God removes them or the
church does one or the other. Maybe both. Now before we get
into the lesson, I want to spend just a little time with some
definitions. I want to start with Jericho.
Jericho is a cursed city. I know we think in our mind our
children go off to school and stuff and they go down here,
maybe one of them will go down here with a friend and go to
the First Baptist Church and you say, well that's better than
going to a bar. Oh, I beg your pardon. I tend
to wonder you'd rather go in a bar than go in a false religion. You might do harm to your body
going in that bar, but you're going to do harm to your soul
when you go into that where those bunch of rebels are. Jericho
is a cursed city. It stands on the same basis as
Babylon. And they were strictly forbidden
to leave anyone alive or take anything to themselves. And then
secondly, I want to talk about the saint. What is a saint? There was only one saint in Jericho,
Rahab. Oh, but you say she was a harlot,
she was a saint. I'll tell you what God says about
his church in Hosea. He said, you go marry a harlot.
That's what he told his prophet, go marry a harlot. He's not promoting
whoredom, the Lord is not, but he's telling you what we are.
And that's exactly what we are by nature. A saint is short for sanctified
one, one set apart by God for divine use, one set apart and
made provision for in Christ. When Christ came into the world,
it was to accomplish, he said, the redemptive will of God. In
the volume of the book it's written of me, I come to do thy will,
O God. And to redeem a people chosen
in Him and predestinated by God the Father to the adoption of
children by Jesus Christ to Himself according to the good pleasure
of His will. And in Hebrews 10.10 it says,
by the which will, that is the accomplishing of that will, we
are sanctified, set apart forever through the offering of the body
of Jesus Christ once for all. That's a sanctity. He's sanctified. And you can talk about what He
is by nature and everything else. Well, talk about that gold and
silver the same way that was in there, but God sanctified
that silver and put it in His treasury and He alone could use
that for good. This was a complete and effectual
sacrifice. It's been offered and accepted
by God and by way of this substitutionary sacrifice, God's justice and
righteousness have been satisfied, His name's been glorified, and
He has, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, justified us all. Justified us freely by His grace
through the redemption that's in Christ Jesus. What are these
saints? They're sanctified ones. What
are they? They're vile sinners. That's
what they are. Being saved. They're vile sinners. Fallen in their father Adam,
and by nature, children of wrath, even as others. Read Ephesians
chapter 2. Estranged from the womb, they
go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies. And Paul
said, they're being under sinned. There's none righteous. There's
none good. There's none that understandeth,
and none that seeketh after God. destruction and misery are in
their ways, and there's no fear of God before their eyes. At
their best state, they are altogether vanity, and all their righteousnesses,
Isaiah said, are as filthy rags. Can you see yourself that way?
Can you say amen when the Bible said this is the saint? God's
taken this vile sinner, and he's sanctified him. He set him apart
for his glory. He made provision for him in
Christ, paid for his sin, paid for his folly. He bore our sin and his own body
on the tree. So how do these people differ
from other men? What makes them of any more consideration
than those lying dead in the streets of Jericho? The intervention
of God. That's what makes the difference. God chose them to salvation through
sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth. He made
eternal provision for them and His Son. And because they are
sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into their
hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Paul said, When it pleased God,
who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace. That's how we're called. Now let me tell you something. His calling is from death unto
life. His calling is out of darkness
into His marvelous light. He doesn't call you out of death
to death or out of darkness to more darkness. He calls you out
of darkness into His marvelous light. He's called us out of cursedness
to belovedness. John 5, 24, he said, Verily,
verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth
on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into
condemnation, but is passed from death unto life. And then in
John 6, 37, he said, All that the Father hath given me shall
come to me, and him that cometh to me I will by no means Cast
out. Being competent, Paul said of
this very thing, that he hath begun a good work, and you will
continue it unto the day of Jesus Christ. And then this is their sin. The
saints have a two-fold character. They're sinner saints. Don't
ever let anybody tell you any different. They're sinner saints.
They're both sinners and saints. They're being saved from sin. They have, by the suffering and
death of Jesus Christ, been saved from the penalty of sin, and
from the curse of sin, and from the judgment of it. But we're
sinners, and so an advocate is commissioned to sit at the right
hand of God, whoever liveth to make intercession for us. If
any man sin, 1 John I think it's verse 1 or 2. If
any man sin, we know we have an advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ the righteous. And then, of course, in the first
chapter of 1 John, he said, If we say we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we say we have not
sinned, we make God a liar, and His word is not in us. But here's
what you do. 1 John 1 verse 9, If we confess
our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and
to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Romans chapter 7 verse 18, Paul
said, For I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth
no good thing. For the will is present with
me, but how to perform that which I will, he said, I find not. And this was the thing about
sin, we got to realize we don't have the power. You know, Satan
said, you'll be like God. But what he didn't tell Eve was,
knowing good, you won't have the power to do it, and knowing
evil, you won't have the power to resist it. God's people cry out to God,
as Paul does at the end of Romans 7, saying, O wretched man that
I am! Who shall deliver me from the
body of this death? And this is the point of this
message that I want to get across. We have a body of death. It's
like walking through this world dragging a corpse. That's exactly
what it is. It's dead. It's cursed before
God. Oh, wretched. He didn't say,
I sinned every now and then. He said, oh, wretched man that
I am. The older Paul got, the more
of a sinner he saw himself to be. And all God's people cry out
that way. And it's a healthy fear to understand
your character as a sinner saint. That's a healthy fear. We're
all sinners being saved from sin. And then consider this. All God's saints are people whose
sins have been put away by the death of Christ. Blessed is the
man, David wrote, and he knew this from experience, to whom
the Lord imputeth not iniquity. Won't charge him with sin. Won't
do it. To punish, in a corporal sense, For one for whom Christ died
would make his death of no effect. It'd make God a liar because
he said he justified it. But I want you to know this.
Grace is not a license to sin. Don't even let that enter into
your thinking. Grace is not a license to sin.
God's people are children of God, and because they're children,
he will chastise you. And chastisement don't just mean
a smack on the hand. Sometimes it means death, as
it did in the case of Achan. The best thing he could do for
his family is take Achan out and stone him. He was that big
of a danger to Israel. Now you think about this. God
saved you. He truly does save you. He gives
you faith. But you still got these memories.
You're still seeing these things in your head like you saw in
that old church. And this thing of self-righteousness. You see
yourself a little better than that. You see yourself being
promoted by God by some merit or meritorious thing that you
do. I visited the sick and the widows and their affliction.
You know, all the things that you're commanded to do, you do.
But you're taking merit for those things. Now that's what Achan
did in a spiritual sense. He was gathering up things strictly
forbidden by God. He was gathering them up and
saying, I'm going to take possession of this and I'm going to dispense
these. And what he's doing is he's robbing God, number one,
of his glory. Number two, he's taking into
his hands things that he has no ability to do. He didn't have
the ability to dispense those things to the glory of God, but
God did. Where's an example of God
killing a saint? I'll give you two. In Acts chapter
5, Ananias and Sapphira lied to the Holy Ghost. What happened
to them? Got killed instantly, right there. I'll give you some
more. Over in the book of 1 Corinthians
chapter 11, he's talking about the Lord's table. And some took
that table unworthily. What does that mean? They didn't
understand what they were doing. They were just drinking the wine
and eating the bread. They had no understanding of
it whatsoever. And you can't remember Christ
if you have no memory of Christ to start with. And he said, for
this cause, many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. What's that mean? It means they're
dead. God killed them. He took them out of the way.
Well, what are you saying, preacher?
I'm saying don't play games with God. That's what I'm saying.
Don't do it. Don't say, well, this sounds
like a good idea. We're going to do this. No, just
don't even try to get ideas. God will command you exactly
what he would have you to do, and you do that. Well, I don't
understand it. You don't have to. Believe God
and go on. He may give you some understanding
down the road. I don't know that this ties in,
but it seemed to me like it did. The building of faith on the
gospel foundation takes all kinds of shapes depending on the material. gold, silver, precious stones,
hay, wood, or stubble. Every man's work shall declare
it because it's going to be tried with fire. And the fire shall try every
man's work of what sort it is. And if the fire discovers the
hay, wood, and stubble, It's going to be burned up, yet he
himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire. That seems to me
to have a little connection with what I'm talking about with Aten. You don't want to add your own
reasoning to your faith. Don't do it. It's going to have
to stand the trial of God, and that trial by fire is going to
expose us. All dross is going to be taken
away from the goat. So let's talk a little bit about
Achan and his sin. Something catches his eye. That
goodly Babylonian garment. When we sin, that's what we do.
We wrap it up in that garment. That garment had to just be a,
no wonder God called it a cursed thing. It's clearly defined as a great
horror of religion, and the matter of the mother of all harlots.
The garment is self-righteousness. Things that magnify the flesh,
accentuate the flesh, make it more noticeable, expose it, magnify
it. Gold has to do with royalty and
deity. Silver has to do with redemption.
And the sin is to take You think about that, he says he buried
this, he's talking about redemption is what he's talking about, but
the silver he buried in the dirt. Redemption in the dirt. Think
about it. And covered it all up with this
Babylonian scarlet. Boy, if that don't describe half
the churches in this nation, I don't know what does. And this is a picture of a saved
man trying to steal the glory of God in his salvation. God's not going to bless him,
and he's not going to bless those among them. Generally speaking, it will,
in a noticeable way, be exposed swiftly. It's going to come to
the surface. David sinned against God, confessed
his sin, and was forgiven his sin. But His forgiveness did
not remove the consequence of His sin. You see, the suffering
that we suffer, it's not meritorious. It's consequential. Maybe a better
word is sacrificial. Our suffering is not sacrificial,
it's consequential. And we're going... God's going
to chastise His own. Now, if you're not Him, You're
considered a bastard, not a child, and he's not going to chastise
you. The wrath of God already abides on you if you're in that
position. David's confession did not remove
the consequence of his sins. He suffered the rest of his life
for the sins he committed. When God the Spirit assaults
the heart with the gospel, he declares What is His? He's going to do a work in your
heart and He's going to recognize it as though you did it. But
it belongs to Him. And He lays claim to it. Rahab will be saved, but her
old world crumbled at her feet. Think about it. And God clearly
declared that all the gold, silver, and iron, and brass were his,
and he put them in his treasury. He consecrated those things.
And to take what God has consecrated for himself, to take anything
in Jericho, would be to rob God. You read the book of Malachi,
and he said, he asked this question, will a man rob God? We already know what the gold
and silver was. Let me see if I can find my place
here, I'll tell you what. The brass has to do with standing
the fiery judgment of God. Brass will take the heat. And
then iron has to do with stability. When it describes God, he uses
these very elements to describe God. His head, his body, his
legs, his feet, and so on. So what'd he do with these things?
He took these things, what'd he do with them? I know what
he purposed to do with them, or at least I think I know how
he was thinking. He was deceived and he thought
he could take these things and use them for God's glory. But
that didn't happen, so what did he do with them? He hid them
in his tent. This is your tent, right here.
This box, this place. We hide those things up, we hide
them in our heart, we hide them in our head. We don't want anybody
to know what we did. Thing of it is, God knows the
heart. Man looks on the outward countenance, God looks on the
heart. And the first lesson learned
here is that nothing in this false refuge is to be taken as
your own. We're to do with it what God
says to do with it. Religion glories in the flesh.
But not to believers. Boasting is excluded, Paul said,
by what law? By the law of faith. A fixed
principle of faith is by grace are you saved through faith.
That's the fixed principle. And that law, it ends boasting. There is no boasting. It's a
fixed principle of grace through the person and work of Christ. And when a child of God sins
big or little, now listen to me, something in that believer
dies. It dies. Whether it's a closeness
with God, a walk with God, that closeness, prayer, fellowship
with the saints, whatever it is, something dies. When we know
not to do something and we do it anyway, something in us dies. That's just the chastisement
of God. You know, here's a man who didn't
do anything. Well, he did in one respect.
He was just going to move on and take AI, and he wasn't even
going to counsel with God, Joshua. And he sent these men up. God
didn't tell him how many men to send up or whether to hold
some back or what. He just listened to the spies. They went up and saw a few people
in there, and they said, well, we can stomp them with about
2,000 or 3,000 men. So he sent them up, and here
they come running. didn't work. But he realized what went on,
and he bowed his face in the dust. And so do we when we think
about these things. That's why this is so difficult
to teach. For those who were standing there,
I'm convinced somebody knew he took these things. There was
a short amount of space here and forty-some thousand men tromping
around in there, somebody knew that Aiken bent down and picked
those things up. But nobody said anything. And
then, so what's the chastisement of God when you try to rob Him
of His glory? Death. That's what it is, death. You're not going to rob God of
His glory and get away with it. It's not going to happen. He
won't share His glory with anybody. And they took Aiken out and stoned
him, and if I'm reading it right, his children also. But they burnt
him with fire after they stoned him to death and then they laid
his ashes down and they piled up a heap of stones there and
it was a monument marking the valley that they all had to go
through before they went to the next battle. It was called the
Valley of Acre. Acre is a transliteration for
the word Achen. It means trouble. Valley of trouble. In this world,
you're going to have tribulation. That word is trouble. Man is
of a few days in fully trouble. And it's just old nature that
gives it to us. And that's why we have to walk by faith and
not by sight. When we start seeing things and
coming up with ideas in our head, you know, we're going to reason
this thing out. Don't do it. Just listen to God.
Do what he said to do. Walk by faith. Believe God. God
says don't do it, don't do it. God says don't take part in it,
don't take part in it. He's all wise, we don't know
anything. Isn't that right? Now, I want you to think about
something. This man was preserved in a wilderness.
There was nothing out there to eat or drink. God took a huge
And that rock followed them everywhere they went. They'd come into camp
and there'd be that big rock, the same rock. It was a smitten
rock. Water would come out of the water.
Hundreds of thousands of animals and over a million people, all
through that village. They had no bread, but it rained
in the manor. And they made bread from the
manor. God provided. He gave them quail to eat. He provided for them. He preserved
them. He covered them with a cloud
and their enemies, no enemy attacked them. They're
out here in the wilderness, 40 years. Their shoes never wore
out. Same shoes they had on their
feet to start with, they had on their feet when they walked
over Jordan. Same shoes, never wore out. You think about all
this provision and then you think about that miraculous crossing.
You're walking across the Jordan River at flood stage and you
can't even see the top of the water pile up so high. And they
walked across on dry ground. And I don't know if they were
on horseback or marching, I don't know, but they went around Jericho. And then when they shouted, this
monstrous city, this huge wall crumbled and fell to the ground. Why would you think that you
needed any gold or silver or another garment? Why would you even think a God
like this would allow you to go without? He that spared not
his own son, but delivered him up for us all,
how shall he not also with him freely give us all things? Why
would the thought ever enter our head? Well, I'll tell you
why. Because you're in the sinner's
refuge. That's why. That's where Satan
lives. And that's the kind of thoughts
he likes to put in your head. You need this. No, you don't.
Why would you need it? Well, you might be able to distribute
it to God's people. That's what God's doing. You
gonna take his job? It's so silly sometimes. Anybody sick among you? Why don't
you pray? Why'd he tell you to pray? If
you had the power to heal him, you wouldn't need to pray. You'd
just go heal him. God has that power. It's here.
All we need to do is ask him. If we lack anything, let's ask
of God. And he'll give it to you. He'll
give it to you. If you truly need it. There are
a lot of things we ask for we don't need.