What a joy to be in the room this morning with all of your
lovely faces. And I was struck in worship this
morning afresh of what a privilege it is to come into a
space like this and to worship freely and to get to under pack
the Bible together. And I think I can quite easily
wander in on a Sunday morning and just go through the motions.
Love it and it's good. But what a privilege to stand in
a nation where we get to do this every week freely.
Yeah, what a good God if you've been here for a while, or if
you're brand new. We've been in a series called
The Call, and Mark has been looking at the story of Jesus
and the calling of the first disciples in Luke 5, and
specifically the moment where he called Simon into the boat and
caused him to throw the net into the sea.
And as we've unpacked this together, Mark has been, we're
looking at these three calls within it, the call to Jesus to
be with him, the call to holiness and the call to the
Great Commission. And the last few weeks and
specifically, we've been looking at the hallmarks of the call and
and it's turned into quite the series, hasn't it?
We are. I think we're about 5 hallmarks
in as it stands. And if you've missed any of it,
I encourage you to jump on YouTube and catch up.
But this morning we're having a brief pause and you get me
instead. And we're going to look at a
scripture that actually the Lord put on my heart about five years
ago as I was praying for the body of Christ.
And and I felt like he spoke a prophetic word to me about this
chapter. And I've sat in it lots and lots
of times since. And and so I bring it this
morning kind of as a stirring of dry bones in our midst, right,
like an activation type message. It's not got three points.
You'll be glad to know. It's got one very long point, so
I want you to open your Bibles with me here to Joshua, Chapter
3. And to give you a little bit of
context, here in the Old Testament the people of Israel
have been on a wandering journey in the wilderness and they've
been brought out of slavery in Egypt into freedom with a vision
of the promised land. And it's been almost 40 years
when we enter this part of the story and and the original group
that actually were brought into freedom, none of them are alive
at this point. There's a new generation that is
walking apart from two of them. Moses has been leading them, and
they're through all the twists and turns of the journey, a
journey which is, say, the 40 years.
But it could have been 11 days, I'd like to point out, which
just UN kind of ravels the twisting and turning nature of
this journey so far. And they've followed God with a
pillar of cloud and fire. By night, they've experienced
his patience, his miraculous provision, his correction, And
through it all, they've ultimately been on this journey
of learning what it looks like to truly worship God.
And now, here at Chapter 3, Joshua has just stepped into
leadership of this people of Israel, and his first major task
as a leader comes here in Chapter 3, where suddenly the
land that they've been promised is insight.
And before them, there is also this enormous, impassable river,
the river Jordan. And the Jordan is flowing at its
absolute peak. It's flooded, it's forceful.
And, and just for even greater context, there's estimated 2.5
million people in this camp of Israelites that need to get
across this river. And I want you to imagine that
scene with me for a minute. The tension that must have
existed in that camp. The excitement at finally seeing
what they've been promised and the disbelief at the size of
that river, The wandering of promise and the frustration of
reality as they sat there for three days and stared at this
river. And here we enter chapter 3,
verse 3. Let's read it together.
It's up on the screen three days after the Israeli army officers
went through the camp, giving these instructions to the
people. When you see the priest carrying
the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, move out from
your positions and follow them. Since you have never travelled
this way before, they will guide you.
Stay about half a mile behind it, keeping a clear distance
between you and the ark, and make sure you don't get any
closer. And then, Joshua told the
people, consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do
great wonders among you. In the morning, Joshua said to
the priest, lift up the Ark of the Covenant and lead the people
across the river. And so they started out and they
went ahead of the people. And the Lord told Joshua, today
I will make you a great leader in the eyes of all the
Israelites. They will know that I am with
you, just as I was with Moses. Give this command to the priest
who carry the ark of the covenant.
When you reach the banks of the river Jordan, take a few steps
into the river and stop still there.
And Joshua told the Israelites come and listen to what the Lord
your God says today. You will know that the living
God is among you. And it goes on in this chapter.
And guess what? They do what God asks them to
do. They step into that river
Jordan. They stand still under the
presence of God and the Jordan splits before their very eyes.
And that entire camp of 2.5 million people cross the Jordan
into the promised land on dry ground in flood season.
And as we read this story this morning, it'd be easy to think,
oh, this is so unrelatable. I am not in a desert and I'm not
standing before a Jordan River, and what has this got to do with
me? But I believe that here at Saint
Albans Vineyard or Verso Vineyard, St.
Albans, as we're soon to be known, we're in a pivotal moment
as a church in the life of our church.
And I think we're in a pivotal moment in the global church and
as a result, the life of our city and our towns and our
communities. And there's a sense of momentum
building, a sense of good shaking in our midst where the
Lord has been setting before us fresh vision under greater
understanding of what His Kingdom is about.
And he's given us this dream in here of this this group of
people that we want to see more spaces and places for people to
encounter Jesus. We want transformation, Jesus
transformation to to infiltrate into our communities.
And I get really excited when I think about what that would
mean, what that would mean for our communities, what that would
mean for us as a nation if we saw revival Jesus, revival in
our midst. And yet simultaneously, if we're
honest, we are facing a cultural moment that feels like the
darkness is swelling, that the complexities, the crisis, the
brokenness, the relentlessness of war and violence, it's in
flood mode. And at times it can feel like
we're at an impasse. And if I'm really honest, there
are moments where I I question the Lord, I'm like, is the good
news really going to make a difference in this moment?
It's OK to be that honest with God.
He's not afraid of it. And and at some level, I
recognise myself inside those Israelites.
And I think we can as a church, you know, we turn 35 this year
as St. Albans Vineyard and we've been
journeying, right? I've not been here for the last
35 years, but there are many, many stories of God's provision
of his miraculous work in our midst, of people who fervently
have loved Jesus in all the ways that they can.
And there's been times when we got it wrong, and there's been
really hard stuff in our story where we've made mistakes.
But it's been part of the journey and God's kindness of
growing us and maturing us and leading us to this very moment
that we stand in today. A Jordan River kind of moment
where he's been getting our attention afresh.
Today, today, here, right now, where we have to press into the
tension that we live in, in this moment.
And we have to allow him to give us fresh eyes, to grow our
hunger for His presence, and to realise afresh what is truly the
only sure thing in this world. And the best way to walk forward
into the impossible is where God is king of our hearts, and where
we stand before those seemingly impossible things of our time
and our personal lives, with an understanding that His presence
is the only way forward, the only one that can lead us.
And he instructed those Israelites in verse three and
four to posture themselves in a way that their eyes were fixed
upon the ark of the covenant, the presence of God not rushing
ahead of it, not lagging behind, but to be king of their hearts,
be quiet, because they've never been this way before.
And it struck me that this reminder was coming to a group
of people that have been following him already for 40
years. But I think this morning the
thing that the Lord wants to grab our attention with is
actually in verse 5, Consecrate yourself for tomorrow.
The Lord will do wonders among you.
What was Joshua commanding them to do in this moment?
What was their part to play in the moment?
Before they would see the wonders of God?
Joshua walked into this group of people who had no doubt had an
array of thoughts and ideas and strategies of how to get across
this Jordan River with confidence and boldness.
And he calls them back again to the act of dedicating themselves
to worship, to truly worship God, to consecrate themselves.
And what did that mean? It meant they set to the work of
putting God back into his rightful position in their
lives. Recognising and acknowledging
afresh who he was and despite what they could see in the
physical. Choosing to surrender the
wrestles of a humanist and surrendering it again to give
God back his seat on their their lives.
Allowing their actions, their words, their attitudes of the
moment that they were in. And saying I recognise where
I've let my things take the lead and I want to put you back in
the lead scene where they had to let him come in and see where
sin had entered the camp. Grumbling, gossip, unbelief,
idolatry, even the good things that they had loved, that were
taking first place. They had to be surrendered in
this act of consecration. Essentially this core to
consecration was an act to choose him again as king and
Lord and lover and friend. And it was a process of making
their lives holy, of purifying and dedicating themselves,
giving them back to God all that was in them.
And in Old Testament times, they had to do this by literally
going back to their tents and washing their clothes and
abstaining from activities that were good and a normal part of
their life as a demonstration of their intent and dedication to
purifying themselves. Now we because of Jesus dying on
the cross and rising again, we don't have to go through those
rituals today here, but I think there's something even in that
to consider, you know, John Mark Cromer says this consecration is
giving up the things that others considered normal to fully give
yourself to God. Consecration, in my definition
in essence, is about your increasing unconditional
surrender to a living, loving and active holy God.
Consecration is about your increasing, unconditional
surrender of every room of your life to a loving, living,
active, holy God. And where does it start?
It starts with your choice. God's already there, arms wide
open. We just have to choose it.
And I think God's invitation for us this morning, you know, we
didn't, I don't know, maybe Mark planned it this way.
But. But I was thinking about this as
a prepping. You know, we are on the the week
before we enter the new chapter next week, we step into a new
name and we turn the page in our story and we step forward in
faith in all the promises that God has placed upon us.
And I think God today is saying, consecrate yourselves again and
again and again and again. Diligently be the people that
show up in the secret place. Never graduating from needing to
see God afresh every day encountering His Holiness.
Not from a place of striving, but of one that says I'm here.
God come and meet with me. That place where we bring
everything that we see and we feel and we think to the living.
God again. And we allow the Holy Spirit in.
To convict us, to change us, to challenge us, to refine us, to
become increasingly surrendered as we become like Him.
And I think this often, when I was a kid and I'd read the
story, the big moment was the moment that the river Jordan
opened up, right? It's the big miracle that calls
for our attention. But I believe this morning he
would call us in this room to the diligence of the night
before holiness moment in this story.
And I want us to see afresh the power of the miraculous that
unfolded in the 40 years of wandering and learning to keep
themselves in continual consecration and worship.
And to God, it's this night before holiness where we decide
to go home to our tents and to allow God to speak in the middle
of our ordinary lives. For however long we've known Him
outside of this building, and outside of amazing worship times
and prayer times and gatherings in the corporate where we get to
experience the Mirac, the miracle that the presence of a
living, holy, loving God wants to be with you.
And in the safety of His presence, we can show Him our
true selves and allow Him to come in and redirect and shift
and show us where we're out of alignment and where we've let a
crack enter in and and we've started to believe the subtle
lies of the enemy that are going to take us off track.
It's this night before kind of holiness that invites the slow
work, diligent work of the Holy Spirit in our lives where we
keep choosing God on the days when we feel like it and when we
don't, on the days when we prefer to lie on our previous
understanding because it would just be easier that way.
When we acknowledge that there is more and more for us to
encounter in Jesus. It's this night before holiness,
where the quiet, hidden, nitty gritty work of our hearts again
and again and again is found not in the crowds, not in the
corporateness, but in the hiddenness of tents.
Our homes, our individual surrender.
To faithfully engage in the kind of rhythms that encourage us to
keep confessing and keep repenting and keep surrendering
to the kindest, most loving and powerful God.
Where he's not condemning us. He's the biggest cheerleader of
holiness demonstrated in our lives, and he wants our whole
lives as a demonstration of worship unto who he is.
The holiness of God transforms people one by one, and that
brings preparedness for us to witness and step into the
wonders that he's going to do in our midst tomorrow.
And it's where our confidence grows and our faith grows and
where we walk into these moments, like this pivotal
moment where the river Jordan opens and God increases the
influence. You know, the Israelite people
went from a people to a nation. The minute that they walked
through that Jordan River, God trusted them again and he
increased their influence. You know, I'm a hero of the
faith, and his name is Gypsy Smith.
He's an old, old geezer, long time ago.
But I've read about him as I've read about revival.
And I love this about him. He was uneducated.
He had none of the tools in his hand to be someone that stood on
a big stage and brought crowds and crowds.
And he used to get asked all the time because he was.
He was someone who ended up preaching the gospel to the most
people ever in human history before Billy Graham.
And he. And he's the people used to say
to him, why do these crowds gather?
Where do they come from? What?
What is the secret here? And he said the secret is that
when you need to go home, you need to get on your knees and
you need to get a piece of chalk and you need to draw a circle
around yourself and you need to cry out.
Revival and let it start in this circle.
And Joshua demonstrates this in this story for himself.
You know, he walks in as a a young leader to lead this
Israelite camp into a crazy moment before the Jordan River.
And it begs the question, where did that confidence come?
Where did that authority come to lead people to encounter Jesus?
And you have to go back through Joshua's story.
But in Deuteronomy 3114, we see this moment of transition where
Moses passed on to Joshua the leadership.
And where what happens in that moment is Joshua enters the tent
of meeting, which in the Old Testament is the place that
people had to physically go to encounter God.
And in that tent of meeting, Joshua presents himself as he
comes, and he encounters God, and he gets himself right.
And then God commissions him into his role of leadership.
And that's why Joshua can walk into that camp of Israelites and
speak with confidence. And in these days that we are
in, we have been commissioned by God here in this place, to
multiply the spaces and places for people to encounter Jesus.
And we can't just wish for it. We can't just hope for it.
We can't just expect the person next to us to do the work so
that we all get to participate. It comes back down to this.
We all need to show up in the secret place, in the hidden
place of our ordinary lives, and be a people that are dedicated
to increasing surrender to a God that we love and honour and
trust. And for some of us in the room,
that looks like simply acknowledging.
I actually, just I don't really like meeting with Jesus on my
own. I quite like it in the
corporate, but I struggle on my own.
For some of us might be this morning that we admit, actually
it's a bit dry and God feels silent, for some of us might be
loving it. But there's more.
There's even more. But just as they stepped into
the river of the impossible and God said stand still, God's
invitation to us as he draws us to consecrate ourselves is one
of not striving and not perfection and not judgement and
not I've got to get this right and this is A to do list that
I've got to keep adding to, he says.
Just give me your yes and step in and stand still in my
presence and watch what I will do in your heart.
Oh, so just a little side Now I want to just kind of notice
something that struck me as I was digging into this story
about language. Joshua was called into the
presence of God. We are called unto Jesus.
That is our true calling. And out of our giving, yes to
that relationship, he commissions us into the work of
the Kingdom. Classically, if you've been
church a while, you will hear people say, I am called to
leadership, I am called to lead worship, I am called to be a
teacher. I am called we are called into
all these fears and different things that we do.
And here in my heart it's just language and it's slightly just
somatics, but it's been helpful for me to make this
distinguished understanding. Actually, if you look at the
Bible, the word call is only ever really seen as God called
us to himself and he uses the word Commission to send us into
the world to do the Kingdom work.
And why is this important? Because we merge the voices of
God and our callings and and we end up really subtly.
I think the enemy loves to do this.
I think he loves to come in and he makes the the voice of Our
Calling, the things that we are commissioning to be the one that
grabs our attention because it's exciting and we see fruit and
and when we do that, that becomes first place in our life
and God is saying no, no, the calling is to me and if you give
my yes there, I will Commission you to do exactly what you're
supposed to do. And why is it also important?
Because tomorrow, if you wake up and you lose your job or
something happens to you and you're flat on your face in bed
and you can't do anything for the next six months, your world
is not shaken. Because you understand that your
purpose is to say yes to the call of God, to be in
relationship with Him. And then he will Commission you
flat and on your back in bed to do the work of the Kingdom from
right where you're at. Amen.
And you see this repeating
throughout Scripture. The secret place, the calling of
relationship with God, leads to a commissioning you.
I I could give you endless examples, but I want to go even
to the Great Commission. You notice it again in the Great
Commission. We love to quote the Great
Commission from Matthew 2819. Go therefore and make disciples
of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and
teaching them all the things, all the things.
And we skip the verses that preceded.
If you go back to verse 17 you will see that it says Jesus
called them and when they saw him they worshipped him.
And all authority is given to me.
Jesus says and then he says go therefore and make disciples.
They came to him, they worshipped him, He re
established who he was and out of that place they go and they
make disciples. We could only go where we've
been willing to go if we want to see this multiplication of
spaces and places for people to encounter Jesus.
It starts with you and me making space and encountering Jesus
even when no one else is around. We cannot lead others into the
places that we are not willing to go ourselves.
And you know if you know me, if you if you're one of my friends
or you follow me on Instagram. You will know that about 18
months ago I started this crazy journey of trying to grow cut
flowers. I fell in love with gardening
and my kids love to tease me that I've turned old and that
this is the thing you do when you turn 40 you grow flowers.
But I I basically moved house and entered this house that's
got a huge garden and and I was drawn into this process and and
I I'd I'd I'd never been successful at growing anything
like I was not a green fingered kind of person.
I was like looking at this garden.
I was wrestling through all the weeds and I was thinking I just
really love it to be filled with beautiful flowers next summer.
And so I entered this journey as a complete novice having
literally no idea what I was doing and I quickly learnt that
all kinds of stuff. I had to start reading Monty Don
watching BBC gardeners world. You know all the things I've got
these gardening flower books and and you know and I was doing my
best to to learn all the stuff and and I learnt some things.
I learnt that seeds actually I I don't in school that seeds
needed light for germination and they do but actually lots of
seeds need to be put into the soil deep in the darkness in the
hidden place so that that exterior shower can be broken
off. So that life can come out and
they can germinate and respond to the light and grow and
blossom. It blew my mind.
I was like, how does this work? And so and I and I started to
just have a go. I started the process.
I started showing up in this garden every single day.
I was like running out in the snow last spring to put blankets
over my seedlings because I didn't want them to die.
And I was like, you know, doing the work, learning about soil,
the way you dig soil it all, it all makes a difference.
Did you know? And how we grow cut flowers And
I slowly but surely shocked my family.
I think that I actually got to, I did start to grow things and
they were looking good and they were looking promising.
But The thing is that God showed me this stuff afresh about
consecration in this process of growing cut flowers.
I would say that growing cut flowers has been the most
spiritual activity of my life in the last 18 months.
Because God has shown me that to get those flowers which I got
the most beautiful flowers growing at exportionate levels
to give away and it was a joy to give them away.
But the process to get there was found in me literally going into
the garden every single day. And the more that I did it, the
more I recognised where the seedling was not looking OK.
And it might need a little bit of this or it might I need to go
back and Google and see what I need to do.
And I also learnt that you you have to cut back flowers.
So the more you cut grown flowers, the more they grow and
it and it was so counter intuitive.
But the biggest part of it I was recognising that the more I
spent time with the seeds that I was growing, the more I
recognised where things were off track or there was a danger of
slugs underneath, or there was. But I had to be there every day,
just in the garden, being present to the to the soil,
present to the flowers showing up.
And I fell in love with the process.
And actually, a few months in, I couldn't care less whether the
flowers were coming. I just loved the process of of
the journey. It was noticing the small things
and recognising my gardening did not have to look like Monty
Don's gardening and my rhythms for being in my garden didn't
have to look like my neighbour's rhythms for being in her garden.
But I just had to show up and I had to choose to walk out in
rain, in snow, in sunshine, in freezing winds, to do the work
that would mean I saw the fruit. Adam, I don't know if you're
around, but if you want to come up now and I want to ask us as
we come into land here, how are you doing?