Step Into the River: The Responsibility in the Room

The elder minutes still have last month's take the first step sentence. We will go when we feel ready. Three chairs around this table already know which household named a river after the last vote, and which chair still treats the next named step as staff work. One of those chairs called a wait-until-you-feel-ready sentence prudence and then kept the meeting on time. Nobody spoke the next word the camp already needed.

A man two chairs down signed the last vote that printed the first-step line on the packet. He also signed the first one that left the named river in a smaller office. He has a sentence about caution. He has not asked who still holds the room.

This is a sermon about the responsibility already in the room. If you preach Joshua 3 as a map of anyone's private courage program, you will lie. If you preach it as Israel at harvest flood, priests carrying the ark, soles in the Jordan before the water moved, you give this church a living God who goes first, and a people who cannot treat a printed first-step sentence as the charge the chairs already keep.

Text

Hear the crossing as Holy Scripture tells it, from the World English Bible: "Yahweh said to Joshua, “Today I will begin to magnify you in the sight of all Israel, that they may know that as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. You shall command the priests who bear the ark of the covenant, saying, ‘When you come to the brink of the waters of the Jordan, you shall stand still in the Jordan.’” Joshua said to the children of Israel, “Come here, and hear the words of Yahweh your God.”