Joshua 1:10-11 | Episode #1212

June 9, 2026

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Joshua 1:10-11

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for over 25 years. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word verse-by-verse and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

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Transcript

This is Hope Alive, where we apply God's Word to our daily life.

My name is Chad Harrison. I'm first a husband, a father and a grandfather. I'm also the teaching pastor at Lake

Community Church in Dadeville, Alabama on beautiful Lake Martin.

I've been serving as a pastor for over 30 years. I also serve as the Tallapoosa County District Judge. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word verse by verse through the Bible and to find his purpose and will for your daily life. If you would like sponsor this podcast, go to the Show Notes where there's a link where you can make a donation. I pray in the name of Jesus

that God would open his word to

you, allow you to see him and to know him, so that you would know his will and his way for your life that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today. Word of God, please speak to the hearers of your voice today in the name of Jesus.

Amen. Foreign. We are in Joshua, Chapter one, and we're dealing with. Well, really it's kind of the introduction of Joshua. And it is, it is a fascinating chapter. It always has been fascinating to me, mainly because it has a lot of the aspects of the Christian life which I guess I'm tuned into. I guess it's just the way to say it, I think through these things and it connects with me. Now to say that doesn't mean it's just gonna connect with everybody, but. And when I say connect with everybody, the Word of God connects with everybody everywhere. But there's certain aspects of the Word of God that connect with you really tightly. You can feed off of it. And that's likely has to do with your. With first of all, just you being who you are and your personality and the way God made you. Your bent, I guess is the best way for me to describe it. The way you look at the world and the way you look at life. A lot of it has to do with how you've grown up. A lot of it has to do with your experiences. And those are relevant to God because God glorifies himself in your experiences. So it's not like it's. Your experiences matter. They mean something. And so then you have what I think is very, very important. You have your spiritual experiences and who you were, who taught you, who you heard you were listening to, the people that were around you, who were discipling you, who were leading you. That's going to lead to a bent. And that's especially when you grow up. Spiritually you grow up spiritually in many ways, just like grow up physically. The things that you're introduced to and the way you're introduced to those things have an effect on you. And even though we're a non denominational church, which means we don't affiliate with a denomination, we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, mainline denominations, you know, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterians, Episcopalians. We have Catholics, a lot of Catholics. We have people from many Pentecostal persuasions, you know, church, God, assembly of God, all those types of Pentecostal churches. And they're, they're probably more numerous than the actual mainline denominations. And then, and then we have people that didn't have a whole lot of church background. We have people come from, you know, small group church background. And you just. The number and the way in which people grow up spiritually is, is too numerous to count. And it, it affects how you connect to the Word. Because some of the things that you grew up with, especially some of the things that really touched you when you were growing up, will resonate with you. And then you bring to the table your spiritual gifts. And your spiritual gifts definitely resonate with you. They in many ways are the things that are the driving. Well, the gifts God gave you. It's literally a gift from God given to you. A spiritual, I like to say, superpower. And people think, well, you know, that's kind of curtain. You know, it might be a little bit passe the way you're using it, but it really isn't. Because a super power is a supernatural. We take the word natural out. Supernatural meaning, meaning beyond the natural world power. You know, Superman can fly, he can defy gravity, which is beyond the natural world, and he can fly. That's a superpower. Well, there are real superpowers and they're not the ability to fly. An X ray vision, although you might be able to associate some of the superpowers with some of that. I mean, walking on water and the ability to fly would have some connotation together, I guess. But you know, and by the way, walking on water is not a superpower. Walking on water is a manifestation of the power of God. But when you think about those things, you have all those superpowers, you have a spiritual gift, which is a supernatural gifting from God that makes you able to do things in the spiritual that have great effect in the physical world. And so that's a great blessing that God has given us. The ability to effectuate the physical world that we live in with a supernatural gifting from him. A superpower and the use of that power which builds up the church, which builds our relationship with God and changes the world we live in. And so when you have those superpowers, you gotta be able to use them. And some of my superpowers I like, and some of my superpowers I don't like. You go, well, how many spiritual gifts do you get? I think you operate in so many. Some people are really just good at one of them and there's one, one talent person, meaning they just really operate in one super superpower and they're really good at. And there's nothing wrong with that by the way, that is sometimes they can be the most effective people in the kingdom of anybody. They just are really good at that one. And then some people have multiple and I tend to think that I have multiple. And that means that I got to be able to work them all together and do that, which means it's not always easy. But you know, the leadership that I see with Joshua, the faith that I see with Joshua and the story that is his story, which is leading people to the promised land, to the spirit filled Christian life, identify with that story. And so for me, Joshua one would be real important for somebody who's maybe into wisdom and things like that. Maybe Proverbs would be really important. Maybe somebody who's into love and into encouragement. The book of Psalms might be really, really good. Those who are heavily into theology, Hebrews and Romans would be the areas which would really touch them and the teaching gifts and things like that. And as you're going through your giftings, you'll connect with different aspects of God's word. And then your experiences will cause you to connect with others that might not be your natural draw. And so eventually you get to where all of God's word becomes important to you for different ways. And so we get to this passage and you've got Joshua and he is, he is operating in his spiritual gift, in his gifting by God, his anointing by God, you can call it anointing. That would be a idea that might come from that. His, his, his, his God given power to operate in the physical by use of the supernatural, spiritual. And one of his gift is leadership. And he is, that's what he's doing. He says Joshua commanded the officers of the people, saying, notice he understands leadership structure. Moses didn't innately understand leadership structure. It'd be taught it by his father in law. It didn't come to him naturally. Somebody had to help him with it. He was trying to lead everybody all as a titular head, just the one person in charge of everything. And that doesn't work. That doesn't work. You are, you know, Jesus led 12 disciples and probably five or six women that were regularly with him all the time. You know, he had a band of, you know, 18 to 20 people that were regularly around him all the time. And some of the women would change, big different women. And his disciples weren't always there with him every moment of the day. And he had other men that were being discipled by him. Maybe not as much, Nicodemus, some of them very tangentially. But he was discipling a lot of people. He was leading a large group of people, but that group of people wasn't super large. And he was teaching the disciples to be him so that they could go out there and change the world as a group of people. So he's training a leadership base and having a base of leadership, Having a group of. Of people who lead together. Sure. Was Joshua the head there? Yes. Was Jesus the head of his disciples? Absolutely. You always tend to have a head, someone who is the top of the leadership chain. But the truth is, the leaders under them are really more important than the leader himself because they're the ones that really make things happen. They're the ones who really use that gift of leadership to lead the rest of the people. And so Joshua understood that. And you'll see that throughout this study. If you just took Joshua as a study of leadership, you would do well. If you just said, I'm going to study how Joshua led, you would do well. In the book, you would say, I'm using my spiritual gift of leadership and I'm going to read how Joshua led his people. You would. It would be an excellent study. And so when I think about Joshua, I think that's great. That appeals to me. It's one of those things that connects with me because one of my spiritual gifts that I've never really wanted to be, but I've always seemed to be is kind of a leadership gift. And so I got to operate in it. And it is fun to see others become and be and grow because of that gift. But it's not all that fun for me to operate in it. I just have to. He says, Verse 11, Pass through the camp and command the people, saying, prepare provisions for yourself. Now, one of the things about leadership is notice. He said, command leadership's very difficult. Spiritual leadership's very difficult. Because when you're a sheep leading sheep, that has problems all unto itself. And the issue is to Command them. Well, you know, this was a pseudo governmental system, so there was a little bit of a government aspect to this. But the truth is, in a spiritual sense, leading people is very difficult because they don't have to follow you. They absolutely don't have to follow you. And to. To be a quality enough leader for people to want to follow you is a difficult task. And anybody who's good at it, you know, but I pray, you know, I applaud them because it's not easy. And if you can lead. If you can lead 50 people, really, you're great. And if you can lead 500 people, you're unbelievable. And you lead 5,000 people, well, you know, you're super, super, a supercharged leader using a supernatural gift. And, you know, those things are not easy to do. And so when Joshua was going to lead all these people into the promised land, hundreds of thousands, likely people in the promised land, he was a supernatural leader, definitely a supernatural leader. And what is he doing? He's getting them prepared. And one of the things about leadership is you can't move the people until they get ready to be moved. You got to give them a chance to get ready. You got to give them a vision for the future. You got to tell them the things they're going to need to move forward. You got to equip them with those things, and then you got to prepare them to get going.

Now, this had been going on under Moses.

It had been going on under Moses. And so it's not something that. That Joshua is throwing on them right at the start. And they're, you know, they're. They're trying to. To run like a hamster on a wheel to catch up. They're not. That's not what's going on here. But they do have to learn. They had. They do have to prepare. And there's an element of preparing your people for any move in, any leadership, any effort to lead or to move people forward, any of that that takes place. When you're studying the word of God and you're preparing people in a spiritual sense to move forward, it's important to give them a vision of what's happening. Notice, he said, pass through the camp and command the people, saying, prepare provisions, meaning get yourself ready. These are the things that you're going to need. These are the things that's going to be necessary for within 3 days, you will cross over the Jordan. This is where we're going. Prepare yourself, get ready, because we're going in this direction. And notice, he gave him a time Frame. He didn't say just get up and let's go. He said, we're going to leave in three days. Now you go, well, what's the significance of three days? You know, I don't think that there's a great significance for our own personal leadership perspective in the three days other than Jesus was in the tomb three days. And you can draw correlations with that. But, but in many ways the, the Spirit filled Christian life comes from a picture of the, the empty tomb. And, and the ways it comes from that picture is, is that you know, you, you've got to die to yourself and understand that, that, that in order to move forward and to be a spirit filled Christian there's an element of dying to yourself and, and, and that that act of faith of dying to yourself and dying to God's will is a process you got to go through. And that's why, well, that's why it takes a little time. And so this is a picture of going into the promised land. And maybe I'll spend a little time in the next couple of Bible studies explaining, you know, in a spiritual sense how that takes place. But the truth is that the element of preparing and dying to yourself, equipping yourself for the kingdom work and giving yourself wholly to it, is a process and it is a powerful process that does intense kingdom value. And in fact the process may be just as important as the results. We'll talk about that later on and maybe get some spiritual insights and go through it so that you'll understand why and where we're going. As you go today. I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name it.