When God Has Already Won: Facing Your Jericho With Faith
There is something deeply human about wanting a pep rally before a battle. We want the fight song, the banner, the crowd noise, the surge of adrenaline that makes us feel like we can do anything. We want the goose bumps before the glory….the hype to give us a hallelujah. We want to feel inspired before we step into the impossible.

But what if you did not need a pep rally? What if the victory was already secured before you ever showed up?

That is the staggering reality sitting at the heart of one of the most unusual military campaigns in all of Scripture. In Joshua 6, God's people stand on the edge of the promised land, staring down a city that has never been defeated. Jericho. Walls thick enough to make you feel safe and cozy. Gates locked tight. A city that has seen every enemy coming and turned them all away.

And God says, simply, "See, I have given Jericho into your hand" (Joshua 6:2).

Not "I will give it." Not "I might give it if you perform well enough." Given. Past tense. Done. The victory had already been declared by the only voice that ultimately matters.

Who Is Defining Your Jericho?
Every person reading this has a Jericho. It may not look like a walled city, but it is something big, something that makes you swallow hard and feel a little weak in the knees. It could be an addiction that has had a grip on your life for years. It could be a broken relationship, a prodigal child, a marriage that feels like it is crumbling. It could be a depression that follows you like a shadow, a financial situation that seems impossible, a wound from the past that you have never fully faced.

The question is not whether you have a Jericho. The question is who or what is defining it for you.

Some people define their Jerichos through past failures. They tried before and it did not work, so they assume it never will. Others define their battles through insecurity and self-doubt, rehearsing all the reasons they are not enough. Some look at their Jerichos through circumstances, waiting for conditions to be just right before they take a single step. And some have let the voice of the enemy do the defining, listening to his lies so long that they have started to believe them.

Here is the truth: only one voice carries the final word on your Jericho. God is the one who defines what is possible. His word is not one opinion among many. It is the verdict of the one who created the walls in the first place. When He says something is done, it is done. He is the final Google in facing your giants.

Seeing What God Has Already Spoken
When God told Joshua that Jericho was already his, He did not just announce a fact. He invited Joshua to see it. "See, I have given Jericho into your hand." That word "see" is an act of faith. The walls were still standing. The gates were still locked. Nothing visible had changed. But God was asking His people to look at the situation through the lens of His word rather than through the lens of their circumstances.

That same invitation stands for every believer today. Can you see the salvation of the spouse you have been praying for? Can you see the return of the child who has walked away? Can you see freedom from the stronghold that has held you captive? Philippians 1:6 assures us that the God who began a good work in us will carry it through to completion.
That is not wishful thinking. That is the word of a God who finishes what He starts.

Seeing by faith is not pretending the walls are not there. It is choosing to trust the word of the one who is greater than any wall ever built.

Walking Out the Word
Knowing that God has secured the victory does not mean sitting down and waiting for it to arrive. Joshua and the Israelites still had to move. God gave them a battle plan, and it was not what any military strategist would have drawn up. March around the city once a day for six days. On the seventh day, march around seven times. Then blow the trumpets and shout.

No battering rams. No siege towers. No conventional warfare at all. Just obedience, carried out step by step, day after day.

Joshua, a warrior who had been itching for a fight for forty years, heard this plan and leaned in anyway. He lined the people up. He got them moving. He walked out the word of the Lord even when it looked nothing like what he expected. James 1:22 calls believers to be doers of the word, not just hearers. The runway is built for takeoff, not for parking.

Living in the Shalls
There is a word that appears repeatedly in God's instructions to Joshua, and it is worth paying close attention to. The word is "shall." You shall march. You shall shout. The walls shall fall flat. Shall is not a suggestion. It is not a maybe or a good intention or a someday. It is a command, a certainty, a directive that demands action.

The walls of Jericho did not fall on day one. They did not fall on day three or after the twelfth lap around the city. They fell when the people completed every single shall. Timid faith falls no walls. The shout had to be a great shout. The blast had to be a long blast. The march had to be completed in full.

Some Jerichos are still standing simply because the shalls have been delayed. The knowledge has been there. The word has been spoken. But the obedience has been put off, traded in for good intentions and comfortable excuses.

The walls fell flat when the people did exactly what God said, exactly when He said to do it, all the way to the finish.

Your Jericho is not there to defeat you. In the hands of God, it is there to define you. See the victory He has already declared. Walk out His word one day at a time. And when the time comes to shout, make it a great one.
 

From Grounded to Wild: Stepping Into the Life God Has Promised
Have you ever found yourself in a day to day routine of going nowhere?. You wake up, you get through the hours, you go to sleep, and then you do it all again. The wild frontier of a God-directed life feels like something that belongs to other people, to bolder people, to people who somehow have it more together than you do.

But what if the problem is not your ability? What if the problem is simply that you have forgotten you were made to soar?

The Holding Pattern
Think about what it feels like to be on an airplane that cannot take off. The engines are running. The destination is real. Everyone on board knows where they are supposed to be going. But for reasons outside your control, you are not moving. You are just sitting there, inching forward, waiting, growing more restless by the hour.

That image captures something deeply true about the human experience. Many of us are living in a spiritual holding pattern. We believe in God. We know there is a promised land of purpose, abundance, and meaning that He has spoken over our lives. But for some reason, we cannot seem to get off the ground. The joy of liftoff feels like a distant memory, or maybe something we have never experienced at all.

The ancient people of Israel knew this feeling well. For forty years, they wandered in the desert, circling, repeating, surviving without truly living. An entire generation came and went without ever setting foot in the land God had promised them. And then, in the opening verses of the book of Joshua, everything changed.

A New Day Requires a New Decision
Joshua 1 opens at a moment of profound transition. Moses, the towering leader who had guided Israel through the wilderness, was dead. The man Joshua had served, followed, and mourned was gone. And into that grief, into that silence, God spoke directly and personally to Joshua.

What God said is striking. He told Joshua twice that Moses was dead. That repetition is not accidental. Grief has a way of anchoring us to the past. When we lose someone or something significant, the natural tendency is to sit in the memory of what was, to replay the glory days, to live in the land of "remember when." God was not being callous. He was being kind. He was drawing a line in the sand and saying, that chapter has closed, and there is life beyond it.

That word is for anyone today who is sitting in grief, heartache, or disappointment. There is life beyond what you have lost. The story is not over. God knows your name, He knows your history, and He has a personal plan and purpose that is still very much alive.

Get Up and Get After It
The command God gave Joshua was simple and urgent: Arise. Cross the Jordan. Move.

There is no wavering in those words, and there is no vagueness. God was telling Joshua that the time for waiting was finished. The wilderness season had run its course. Now was the moment for movement.

This is where many of us get stuck in a different way. We are not grieving the past so much as we are simply comfortable in the present. We have settled. We have found a routine that feels safe, and the idea of stepping into something new and unknown feels like far more risk than we are willing to take. But the hard truth is this: if you stay somewhere long enough, you will die there. That is true for individuals, for organizations, and for churches. Comfort, left unchallenged, becomes a slow kind of spiritual death.
God is not calling you to a life of safety. He is calling you to a life of soaring.

When the Wild Gets Woolly
Here is what nobody likes to talk about: when God calls you forward, something will always be in the way. For Joshua and the people of Israel, that something was the Jordan River. And when they arrived at its banks, they did not find a peaceful stream. According to Joshua 3:15, the river was at flood stage, overflowing its banks, wild and turbulent.

God said cross it anyway.

The waters did not part from a distance. They parted as the priests put their feet into the current. The miracle came in the moment of commitment, not before it. That is almost always how God works. He does not remove every obstacle before you step forward. He meets you in the stepping.

There is a profound truth tucked inside that reality. The place of your greatest discomfort is often exactly where your defining moment lives. The scary thing in front of you, the turbulent river, the costly decision, the uncomfortable change, is not a sign that you are going the wrong direction. It may be the very confirmation that you are going the right one.

Living Wild on the Promises of God
What makes it possible to step into the wild is not courage manufactured from within. It is confidence rooted in the promises of God. In Joshua 1, verses 2 through 6, God stacked promise upon promise before Joshua ever took a single step. The land was already given. Every place the foot would tread was already claimed. No enemy would be able to stand against him. God would be present. God would not desert or abandon him. The land was already sworn.

Those promises were not dependent on Joshua's resume or his track record or his feelings on any given morning. They rested entirely on the credibility and faithfulness of God Himself.

The same is true for you. You do not move forward into the wild on the strength of your own qualifications. You move forward on the sworn promises of a Father who does not lie, who does not leave, and who does not abandon the people He has called.

The question is not whether God has promised. He has. The question is whether you are willing to get your feet wet.

The wild is waiting. And He is already there.

Will You Soar or Stay Stuck?
There is a moment on every plane flight when the wheels leave the runway and the ground disappears beneath you. For most seasoned travelers, it barely registers. Eyes close, heads lean back, and the miracle of human flight becomes nothing more than a commute. But for a child experiencing it for the first time, that moment is electric. The buttons, the lights, the window, the roar of the engines gaining speed — all of it builds to a crescendo of pure, uncontainable wonder the instant the nose lifts into the sky…iiiiiiii yi yi!

The difference between those two passengers is not the flight. The flight is identical. The difference is the posture of the heart. One is underwhelmed. One is overwhelmed. One is yawning. One is soaring.

That contrast is not just a travel observation. It is a profound spiritual reality. How you approach your journey will determine your destination.

The Story at the Edge of the Promised Land
In Numbers 13 and 14, the people of God found themselves at one of the most pivotal moments in their history. After 400 years of bondage in Egypt, after miraculous deliverance through the plagues and the Passover, after walking through the parted waters of the Red Sea on dry ground, they stood at the edge of the land God had promised them. Moses sent twelve spies into the land to scout it out, and when they returned, every single one of them agreed on one thing: the land was extraordinary. Rich, fruitful, and flowing with abundance.

But ten of those twelve men could not get past what else they saw. There were giants. Fortified cities. Powerful people. The ten spies gave what the text calls a "bad report," convincing the people that the obstacles were simply too great. Their conclusion, recorded in Numbers 13:32, was devastating in its self-assessment: they had become like grasshoppers in their own sight.

And so, instead of stepping forward in faith, the people of God wandered in the wilderness for forty years. An entire generation never entered what God had prepared for them.
This is one of the most sobering passages in all of Scripture, and it raises a question that cuts straight to the heart of every believer: Will we soar, or will we stay stuck?

Three Reasons We Get Stuck
Understanding why we get stuck is the first step toward soaring.

We forget God's faithfulness from our yesterdays. The Israelites had witnessed miracle after miracle. God's track record was impeccable. Yet in the face of a new challenge, they acted as though He had never come through for them before. Numbers 14:11 captures God's heartbreak over this very thing, asking how His people could so quickly forget His goodness. The same tendency lives in us. When a new giant appears, we can forget every Red Sea moment God has already brought us through. Memory is a spiritual discipline. When we forget, we falter.

We stay pleased in the present. Comfort is one of the most effective anchors keeping people from their purpose. The ten spies loved the grapes from the promised land, but they did not want to fight the giants to get there. It is easy to admire what God is doing from a safe distance without ever committing to be part of it. Every great act recorded in Scripture required movement. You cannot remain exactly where you are and simultaneously go with God. The two are mutually exclusive. God’s people didn’t sacrifice their comfort; they stayed right where they were.

We fear the future. Numbers 14 records the people weeping and crying out in despair because they could not see how their story would unfold. Fear is not a minor inconvenience. It is a paralyzing force that, left unchecked, will ground you indefinitely. Understand this, courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is taking steps into the unknown based on what you know to be true. It is pushing off the wall and swimming toward the other side, even when your heart is pounding.

Four Reasons We Can Soar
Against the backdrop of ten fearful voices, two men stood apart. Joshua and Caleb looked at the same land, the same giants, and the same obstacles, and they said: let’s go. Their example points shows us how to soar.

Follow the Father's voice. There were three voices competing for the attention of God's people: the forgetful voice, the fearful voice, and the Father's voice. God had been speaking His promises over this people for generations, all the way back to Abraham. His word had not changed. It never does. When every other voice is loud and convincing, the practice of tuning your ear to the one voice that matters above all others is what separates those who wander from those who soar.

Dare to be different. Caleb stood up in Numbers 13:30 and declared that the people should go and possess the land. He and Joshua were willing to be the minority. They were willing to look out of step with the crowd. Living with genuine spiritual vision means you may not fit in. It means your priorities will look strange to people around you. But as Helen Keller once observed, there is something far worse than being born blind, and that is having sight without vision. Dare to be different!

Believe big. Joshua and Caleb did not deny the giants. They simply refused to let the giants be bigger than God. They looked through what might be called the lens of glory, and from that vantage point, the obstacles shrank. God has not shrunk. He has never shrunk. The question is whether we allow Him to grow small in the lens of our own limited faith, or whether we see Him as He actually is — vast, faithful, and entirely capable.

Obey fully. The people of God had everything they needed. The promises had been spoken. The path had been made clear. Their greatest need was not new information. It was full obedience. The same is true today. The great commandment has not changed. The great commission has not changed. God has given His people everything required to move forward. The only remaining question is whether we will follow Him completely, releasing our grip on the familiar and launching out into the deep.

The Wind Is Blowing
A kite does not rise by standing still. You find the wind, you face it, you run headlong into it, and holding on for dear life. Acts 2:2 describes the arrival of the Holy Spirit as a violent, rushing wind. The early church caught that wind and ran, and what was born in those moments changed the world forever.

That same wind is blowing. The question is whether you will open your hands, release what you have been clinging to, and let it carry you into the wild frontier God has prepared.

The runway is right in front of you. It is time to soar. iiiiiiii yi yi!

The Call of the Wild: Seven Realities of God's Untamed Work
There is something stirring in the human heart that resonates with the idea of exploration. Leif Erikson, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama — these names conjure images of men who refused to stay within the borders of the known world. Something deep within them demanded that they move forward into the uncharted, the uncertain, the wild. And because they did, the entire course of human history shifted.  What if God is extending that same invitation to you right now?

Throughout Scripture, God has consistently called ordinary people out of their comfort zones and into something far greater than they could have arranged for themselves. The story of Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3 is one of the most vivid pictures of this pattern. It is a story that is not just ancient history. It is a mirror held up to every one of us who has ever wondered whether God still calls people into something wild and transformative.

Here are seven realities of God's wild work that emerge from that story — and from the broader story of a God who refuses to be tame.

God Works While We Work
Moses was not doing anything extraordinary when God showed up. He was shepherding his father-in-law's flock — the same work he had done for forty years. Mundane. Routine. Ordinary. And yet, right in the middle of his Wednesday, God lit a bush on fire and spoke from it.

This is the first reality: God is always at work, even when we are simply doing our week. He does not take days off. He does not sit back and wait for us to get our act together. The question is not whether God is working around us. The question is whether we are paying attention. Moses had to turn aside from what he was doing to see the burning bush. How many burning bushes have we walked right past because our to-do list had our full attention?

God's Work Will Woo You
The first words God spoke to Moses were his name. Not a command. Not a task list. His name. That is deeply personal. God knows you. He knit you together, as Psalm 139, verses 13 and 14 remind us, and He pursues you with the same personal intimacy He extended to Moses.

But there is a condition to drawing close. God told Moses to remove his sandals because the ground was holy. When God calls you near, He will ask you to remove something — a habit, a distraction, a competing loyalty. He will not compete with your calendar or your comfort. Coming close to a holy God requires that we lay some things down.

God's Work Is With Him
Here is something worth pausing over: the Creator of the universe invites you to work alongside Him. In 1 Corinthians 3, verse 9, the apostle Paul describes believers as co-laborers with God. Moses did not dream up the plan to deliver Israel. God had the plan. God had the power. God simply invited Moses to come along.

This is how God has always operated. He asked Noah to build. He asked Abraham to leave. He asked Joshua to march. He asked Nehemiah to build a wall. In every case, the invitation was the same: come with Me. And Moses was eighty years old when he received his invitation. If you think your best days of usefulness to God are behind you, the story of Moses has a word for you.

God's Work Is Well Spoken
When God speaks, there is no ambiguity about it. He told Moses exactly who He was, exactly what He had seen, exactly what He planned to do, and exactly what Moses' role would be. God's plan was clear, transparent, and grounded in His own character and promises.

That same clarity is available to us through Scripture. God's Word is the place where He speaks His plans. If you are wondering whether God is calling you to something, the starting point is always His Word. His call will never contradict it.

God's Work Will Make You Whimper and Whine
Here is where the story gets painfully relatable. After God laid out His entire plan with clarity and purpose, Moses' first response was, essentially, "But who am I?" He questioned his own worthiness, worried about whether people would believe him, and even complained that he was a poor public speaker. He made every excuse he could think of.
And we do the same thing. God speaks, and we immediately begin negotiating. We cite our inadequacies, our past failures, our limited resources. But here is the truth that cuts through every excuse: God's wild work is never about our inability. It is about His ability working through our availability. The moment we make ourselves available, God's ability takes over.

God's Work Will Require a New Walk
Moses could not stay in Midian and go to Egypt at the same time. Responding to God's call required a genuine, practical adjustment to his life. It changed his address, his daily routine, his relationships, and his future. God's call always costs something.
In our discomfort, we discover God's destiny. The frontier is not found in the familiar. It is found when we trust and adjust — when we stop arranging our lives for maximum comfort and start arranging them for maximum obedience.

God's Work Will Lead to Worship
The end of Moses' story is not exhaustion or defeat. It is worship. God promised Moses in Exodus 3, verses 21 and 22, that His people would leave Egypt with abundance, and in Exodus 12, verses 35 and 36, that is exactly what happened. The Passover became a permanent celebration, passed from generation to generation, a monument to what God had done.

When you step into the wild work of God, the destination is always worship. The journey may be difficult, but the glory at the end of it belongs entirely to God.

The wild frontier is not a reckless place. It is the safest place in the world, because it is the place where God is working. The only question left is the one Hank Aaron answered at home plate when Yogi Berra tried to distract him saying, “Hank you are holding the bat wrong! You should be able to read the trademark when you hit.” Aaron hit the ball into the bleachers, stepped on home plate, and said simply, "I didn't come here to read."
The question left for us is,  What did we come here to do?