Finishing Strong | Daniel Bentley

And here's this here's the deal. You and I, we too are writing a story with our lives. You write a chapter every day. Paul says in second Corinthians three that we are living epistles. We're living letters. Just like his letter to the Philippians and the Ephesians and the Colossians and all the rest. You are living epistles. You're writing a story with your life and it's being known and read by all men. The question is, what kind of story are you telling with your life? Is it is it a story that will serve as a warning to future generations, or is it a story that will serve as an example? [00:40:25] (39 seconds)  #LiveYourStory

As he outlines, this is what will happen should you choose not to follow the Lord. He doesn't say God's gonna come after you, and God's gonna get you, and you'll be on the run from God. He says, no. No. No. The the enemies that you embrace, they will become whips on your back. They will become thorns in your flesh. And and so, oftentimes, we think that if we choose to reject God and embrace sin, that God's gonna come down, he's gonna smite us, he's gonna throw lightning bolts at us. [00:35:04] (28 seconds)  #ChoicesHaveConsequences

Here's Paul saying, I haven't arrived yet. And think about who Paul is. He'd written most of the New Testament by this point. He'd been walking with the Lord for decades. And yet by his own admission, he says, there's more for me to experience. There's more ground for me to take. And if Paul hadn't arrived, guess what? Neither have you. There's more of God's grace to walk in, more of his faithfulness to encounter, more of his love to know, more of his goodness to drink up. And and so you got to keep going. Keep going. [00:20:50] (33 seconds)  #KeepPressingOn

The promises of God are yes and amen, and he will fulfill all of his promises, but he's not obligated to fulfill your potential. You have to choose the path that leads to life. Joshua chose a good path. He finished strong. And if you were to write a sentence to summarize his story, it might be, God has been faithful to me. I mean, he could write a book with all the stories of God's faithfulness in his life. In point of fact, that's exactly what he did. He wrote the book of Joshua. It's a chronicle of how good God had been. [00:39:25] (33 seconds)  #GodIsFaithful

And if I were to give a title to these two speeches, if we were to extract a theme from these speeches that Joshua gives, then we might title them how to finish strong. And Joshua was well equipped to speak on this topic because he had lived his whole life in faithfulness to God, and he was in fact finishing strong, which puts him in rarefied air. You know, a lot of people have great starts, and a great start is a wonderful thing. But a great start doesn't guarantee a great finish. [00:09:26] (33 seconds)  #FinishStrong

These divergent paths, you have the path of pursuing the Lord, and and walking with the Lord, and obeying his word, and and the life that that brings, a life of fulfilled promises. And then you have this other painting of a life lived in compromise and complacency, and how it's a life characterized by pain and regret. And so, it's like Israel was at fork in the road, so to speak, and they had to choose their path, and so too, each and every one of us gets to make a similar choice today. And I wonder where are you on that path? [00:37:37] (37 seconds)  #ChooseTheRightPath

And then he turns his attention to the future. He says, the God who fought for you then will continue to fight for you now. He says, I've already divided up what remains. There were some nations that remained. In other words, the job wasn't finished, but the the future had already been written. Joshua said, you will be successful, but you need to keep going. You need to finish the job. You see, Israel had come a long way, there was still work that needed to be done. [00:18:43] (30 seconds)  #FinishTheJob

And for the next, I don't know, twenty hours or so, Israel is able to pursue their enemies, and they don't get away, and they're able to mop them up and finish the job. Now, I think you'd agree with me when I say this. When God causes your enemy to fight themselves, when he takes them out with hailstones from heaven, and when he causes the sun to stand still in the sky so you can finish up the job, you can't take any of the credit for that victory. Amen? And so Joshua says, it was the Lord fighting for you. [00:18:13] (30 seconds)  #GodFightsForYou

The second point in our outline, this is what I I I think is the the real meat and potatoes, the heart of Joshua's speech. And it says he commends Israel to stay the course. His first point is keep going. His second point is stay the course. How do you finish strong? By staying the course. And for Joshua, that meant obeying the word of the Lord. And here's what's interesting. If you look closely at what Joshua says here, he basically copies almost verbatim the the words that God spoke to him when he initially assumed the reins of leadership from Moses. [00:22:03] (40 seconds)  #StayTheCourseObey

When you're old, you let go of the pretense and you just shoot straight from the hip. And that's what Joshua is doing. He references his age a third time in verse 14 where he says, now I'm about to go the way of all the earth. In other words, I don't have much time left. I'm getting ready to die. Now you have to remember that Joshua and Caleb were the oldest people in Israel by at least twenty years, but probably more like forty years. Imagine someone that is older than everybody else by forty years. That was Joshua and Kayla. [00:13:08] (35 seconds)  #FinishWithLegacy