Prayer Is Prevention Now notice there how Joshua reproached God: And Joshua said, Alas, O Lord God, wherefore hast thou at all brought this people over Jordan, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us? would to God we had been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan! O 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 us round, and cut off our name from the earth: and what wilt thou do unto thy great name? If that doesn't sound like us today, I don't know what does! "God, I just cannot believe YOU did this!" We TRY to blame God for our own mistakes. We leave Him out of our equations and then try to blame Him for not stepping in and keeping us from doing what we did! Joshua said, "Would to God we had been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan!" Sounds like us today: "Well, God, I did what I thought..." Therein lies the problem! Now look at verse 10 of that same chapter: And the Lord said unto Joshua, Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face? Know why God said this to Joshua? In Joshua 1:5, God had told Joshua, There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Now all of a sudden, there was Joshua, trying to reproach God for Israel's woes, and it was Israel that had sinned! The first thing we need to learn from this is that failure to pray makes us insensitive to sin. And I assure you of this, the insenstivity to sin will not be long in arriving. You see, Joshua was not even aware that any sin had been committed until he communicated with God! When he prayed, he was given knowledge and understanding and awakened to the fact that sin was working. Sin was working, and that sin had brought defeat, failure, and the deaths of thirty-six of his men, from a small enemy. If we will pray as we ought, God will reveal to us any way that the enemy is working in our lives. Another lesson we need to glean from this is, if we will pray in time of victory, we will not have to plead in time of defeat. Tell God all about it. Oh, He already knows it, but He wants you to recognize it and acknowledge it, too: "Lord, I know it was You Who gave me the previous victory. To You be all the glory. Lord, I know I cannot have the next victory unless you help me. I canNOT do it by MYself." God never ordained for Israel to turn their backs to their enemies! Go back and read that wonderful passage of scripture found in Ephesians 6:11-18. Nowhere does it say a thing about a "backplate". It doesn't say to run, it says to S-T-A-N-D. God does not ordain us to turn our backs to flee. Even with the whole armour of God on, if we turn our backs to flee, our unprotected backs are wide open to the enemy. Think about it! As soon as Joshua prayed, God showed him the trouble. From that, we can certainly bring forth the conclusion that had he prayed sooner, he would have seen the trouble sooner. In fact, to plead with God in a time of defeat is useless. When we get down to the place where we are pleading with God in a time of defeat, it is useless to stay there and pray. It is time to do something. Obedience Calls For Blessing Prayer is not a cure-all. This is another deception of the religious world: "Let's just have some all-night prayer meetings. Prayer can cure anything." It was not enough for Joshua--he had to take action, he had to get rid of the accursed thing. Certainly, both prayer and fasting are necessary elements in the life of a Christian, but I can find no Biblical basis for laying on one's face and pleading with God to get Him to bless His people. That is His very desire from the beginning--to bless His people. He wants to be allowed to show Himself strong to His people. For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him... II Chronicles 16:9. We don't have to beg God to help us win souls, help us live for Him, help us be square with Him, help us live for Him, help us give Him the glory: we do need to pray and remain humble before Him. Let me tell you, He is more anxious for souls to be saved than we are! Just as Joshua had to get rid of "the accursed thing", there are things today which need to be taken care of in the congregation. Because pastors hate to deal with those things, they say, "Well, let's pray about it." Right (correct) action is prayer of the noblest kind. When we do right, when we stand against wrong, when we lift up (as opposed to lower) the standard of the right, by our actions we are asking God, "Help me, Lord, I am doing my best." Right action is not prayer that is uttered in words. God has promised in every covenant He made that if we will obey Him, He will bless us. So if we take the right action through obedience, we are calling for God to bless us. If, at the hour of Isarel's victory over Jericho, Joshua had humbled himself before God and prayed, God would have revealed to him that he was already on the road to defeat. God had told them, very plainly, to not take one thing in that city, because the first is always God's. Yet, it had already been taken, stolen, and put in Achan's tent. Had Joshua humbled himself at the place of victory, he could have learned of the sin that had been committed because the moment he prayed, he found it out. Right after God has proven that He is able to give victory, there is a great temptation to neglect prayer. Whenever prayer is neglected, sensitivity to sin in dulled. The groundworks of sin can be laid in such a life and one will never know it unless they talk to the Lord. There is only One Who really knows us and Who knows what is going on in our hearts. It's not enough for us to "search our own hearts"--The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings. Jeremiah 17:9,10. God does not wait until we have failure to tell us what is wrong in our lives. The reason we only hear from Him after failure is because that is when we cry out to Him, not before. If we will stay in close communion with God, if the devil is working the slightest work or if anything is building up in my life which is going to lead to sin, He will uncover it. The Holy Ghost, along with all His other attributes, is a warner. Before the circumstance ever arises, He will warn you, "You'd better pray. It's been a while since you prayed. There is a need for you to pray." Have you ever felt that quickening and said to yourself, "Oh, I don't see anything wrong. I don't see anything to pray about. I'm too busy to waste it in praying for something that hasn't happened yet." Let me tell you, when the Holy Spirit urges you to pray, PRAY. Whether you can see it or not, there is a reason for it! That is the way the Holy Ghost works. He will warn you and have you ready for every circumstance. If you are one of those who say, "Well, it doesn't work that way with me," I strongly urge you to bring yourself closer to God in your daily walk so that you can hear Him. Oh, oh, how we need to pray! Seek His Leadership Just like Joshua, too many times we fail to ask the Lord about a matter; we just determine we are going to do such and such, without ever bothering to find out if it is the Lord's Will or not. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. James 4:15. Too many live too far from the Gospel. We preach that "Jesus is Lord", but how many really and honestly allow Him to be Lord? And even if we do, we pick and choose that which He is Lord of. Come on now, let's be honest. "Well, Lord, You take care of that, I can handle this." If the Lord be willing, there are a lot of things which would not be said or done, and a lot of other things that would be said or done. And in the majority of the cases, it would be direct opposition to that which WE think ought to be. This is exactly why more of the world is not seeing the kingdom of God. The Lord stands ready to fight our battles. He has never led one of His children to defeat. We meet defeat by going on on our own. This is the very reason so many people do not have victory in their lives. The Lord does not lead us to do wrong. He does not lead us to failure. Failure comes about when we fail to stay in close communion with Him, when we fail to get and follow His directions. When we fail to seek Him, we will end up in failure and defeat, every time. The Perils of Individual Disobedience The third reason for Joshua's failure was disobedience. God said, Israel hath 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, and they have put it even among their own stuff. Joshua 7:11. Evidently, only one person had sinned, but that one person was a member of the whole--thus Israel had sinned. One had failed and a whole army was defeated. Church, we are putting up with too many things today and we are not having the victories that ought to be having. Some might say, "We are in the New Testament." Old Testament Israel was a nation brought to redemption ground by one man, and all together they were a complete entity. God dealt with them as a corporate body. When one member of a local congregation is guilty of failure and sin, it blights the work of the whole congregation. God still deals with us in a corporate manner. We are working for God as a unit, and no one individual who claims to be a part of that unit can fail or refuse to walk with God without affecting the fervency of the whole congregation. No child of God can grow cold in his (or her) spiritual life without lowering the temperature of the whole unit. We are all members of one body--the Body of Christ. Romans 12:4, 5 tells us, For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another. Yes, each of us has to work out our own salvation, but it is through the assembling of ourselves together that we are in unity in the Spirit. Sometimes we get to thinking too much about salvation being in terms of an individual that we forget we are [supposed to be] doing a collective work for God. The victory of the whole unit depends upon the victorious life of every individual member of it. Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit. Ephesians 2:19-22. We are not only tied to God, but we are connected to one another. What each of us does, as an individual, reflects upon and affects the other brothers and sisters in Christ. When we humble ourselves before God in obedience and purity of heart, let me tell you: there is no Jericho too strong to capture. Yet, if we dissemble and fail, striving against one another and out of unity, there are plenty of Ai's to defeat us. Israel was defeated because there was sin in the camp! Our success depends upon God's presence, and God's presence depends upon our keeping His dwelling place holy and clean. And where is His dwelling place??? The witness of the Church, the body of believers, to the glory of God depends upon the victorious life of each individual person who is a part of it. Confession We have dealt with the cause of Joshua's failure (self-confidence, sin, and neglect of prayer), but what is the cure? The thing which brought ultimate victory for Joshua and Israel was confession and obedience. Do you wonder how Achan felt that next day as he buried that which God had said to not take hold of? When He watched the small army go off to Ai, wonder how he felt? Wonder how he felt when the news of those thirty-six dead and an overwhelming defeat reached him? We can apply similar question to ourselves: wonder how many had died and been eternally lost because we, ourselves, failed? How many have given up nad gone back out in sin because we did not hold the victory as we should have? Oh, we will easily shove that off on others: "It's their decision," but when we stand before God, it will be there--that we failed to be the witnesses, the lights, that we should have been and knew to be. It would have been better if old Achan had run to Joshua and confessed, but he did not. Perhaps he thought because there wasn't a crowd around to see what sin he committed, nobody knew of it. We keep forgetting that all-seeing eye that sees us when we think we are being most secretive. And let me say this: sin is blinding. Just as David was blinded to his terrible sin of committing adultery and murder, Achan was blinded to his sin. Sin can get hold of a person and make them think everything is going along just fine. But you see, there comes a day when that which is hidden will be revealed. Joshua went through all of Israel, tribe by tribe, family by family. And he brought his household man by man; and Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, 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 Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold of fifty 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 7:18-21. Achan's sin was covetousness and it is still very prevalent today. Covetousness is wanting that which God does not want us to have, that which God says to leave alone. Achan's sin is clipping the power of God's people all over the country and around the world. We are not seeing the victories that we could see because of this very same thing today. Covetousness was the very same sin which caused Ananias and Sapphira (Acts, Chapter 5) to be stoned just as Achan was. They wanted to keep that which belonged to God. The very atmosphere in which we live today is charged with the subtle poison of covetousness. There are many many people in financial trouble because they covet their neighbors' furniture, house, clothes, or cars. They are not willing to be just what God wants them to be. They want to keep up a pretense before the world, and it gets them in trouble beyond what they are able to handle. God gives us variety and He wants us to act in the ability which He has given us. Today, too many are estimated by their wealth. The great aim in too many lives is to get money and keep it. Covetousness can so take hold of you that you will not freely give. And here's a fact for you: if you do not freely give, you will not freely receive. ive, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again. Luke 6:38. If you really listen to God and let Him be Lord of all your life, you will not be able to give away your finances a bit more than you can give away your salvation. The more you try to give it away, the more it grows, and the more you have to give away. Jesus, Himself, said, And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life. Matthew 19:29. That is paying off big! Covetousness was stoned to death in Israel and covetousness was killed by God in the morning Church. Today, Christians tolerate it and then wonder why they do not have victory in their lives. People today are often foiled before such a little Ai because of such sin--thus we never see the walls of Jerichos falling that we profess we would like to see. Sanctify Yourselves Against Tomorrow 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 ye destroy the accursed from among you. Joshua 7:12. God wants us to fully realize how much He hates covetousness. Not only did thirty-six men give their lives because of it, but a whole family was killed to teach the children of Israel, and us how much He hates that which is sinful. We also see to what extremes He will go in order to wipe out sin which is contrary to His Will. According to the lesson, to acknowledge our guilt of sin is not enough. We must consider why it happened, and why we allowed it. We must get to the very root of it. If I have failed, there is only one way to pray to God about it: "I was too confident in myself. I did not pray, I was disobedient. I was too weak to face this which I faced, and I have failed." We must acknowledge our sin. We have a problem with that. We try to justify it. Sin cannot be justified--we must acknowledge it and repent of it. Up, sanctify the people, and say, Sanctify yourselves against to morrow: 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 ye take away the accursed thing from among you. Joshua 7:13. Isn't that the love and kindness of God? How are we going to be sanctified against tomorrow? By being one hundred percent honest with God TODAY. None of us knows what tomorrow holds. Tomorrow may bring great trial or persecution, sickness or death. I do not know what tomorrow holds, but I can sancfify myself against tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that the rest of my life. How? By setting my house in order and being square with God today.