“When you hear the priests give one long blast on the rams’ horns, have all the people shout as loud as they can. Then the walls of the town will collapse, and the people can charge straight into the town.”Joshua 6:5 NLT
Recently, I was listening to a sermon given by Christine Caine titled “Possessing the Promise.” The subject material pointed to the walls of Jericho in Joshua chapter 6. Christine talks about how when the Israelites entered the promised land, they encountered the last thing they would expect…looming, formidable walls…seemingly insurmountable walls.
Some times we experience victory, we triumph, only to realize that there are still battles to be fought, even though we have entered the territory that God promised us. Even though we are doing the right things. Even though we have seen so much answered prayer. Sometimes we enter the promises of God and we hit a wall. Things get hard. Transitions get messy. And we could be left to wonder, if God really led me here shouldn’t everything go smoothly? Not necessarily.
So what do you do? You keep marching. In the case of the Israelites, they had to march around those city walls for seven days. For us that means that we continue to move forward in prayer, faith, hope and obedience. Christine says in her sermon that we keep making laps around God’s promises until we see those walls fall down.
This message really resonated with me. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned this year (and there have been plenty) is the importance of standing in faith and keeping your hope alive, regardless of how things might look. This year God really challenged me to put my nose to the plow and begin to contend in faith for things I couldn’t see (at all!) in the natural and not to stop no matter how desperate my circumstances became. This put me in a position of needing to put my faith and the words God had spoken to me above the opinion of others. It forced me to dry my eyes and look ahead with confident expectation toward a hopeful future.
I am still in that place of contending today and while I may not yet be fully where I would like to be, I have already seen God bring so much restoration to my life and bring beauty from the ashes of my brokenness. More than anything I’ve learned that He is oh so faithful.
What walls are you facing today? Keep on marching. Sooner or later those bad boys will come tumbling down.
