Joshua 22:5But be very careful to keep the commandment and the law that Moses the servant of the Lord gave you: to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to keep his commands, to hold fast to him and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.”
Some people are very good at taking notes in class. I am not one of those people. When I try to take notes, I get behind in my listening. As I write, I can’t keep my mind listening. It is as if my mind can’t write and listen at the same time.
Even if I can pause the teaching, I still have difficulty organizing what I am hearing. About the only time I can do it well, is if the speaker says things like, “My first point is….” Then I can get it! I also thing a trained dolphin could get it at that point.
But despite the fact that I take terribly disorganized notes, I have still managed to get a 4.0 GPA during my last Masters degree. I guess there must be more to learning than the ability to take well organized notes.
But I really wish I had that ability. It would even come in handy in my life today.
I am glad that good note taking skills are not a requirement for entry into the Kingdom of God. But there are things that are required of those who enter into a relationship with Him, not as prerequisites, but as outcome measures. We can know if a relationship exists by measuring the change that takes place is specific areas of our life.
I love our text. It is the cliff notes version of the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. It tells us what we are supposed to be doing as His followers. It told the Israelites what the outcome measures were so they could be successful.
The first clause sets up the following outcome measures. If they kept the commandment and law from Moses, their lives would look like the following items. These five things would make all the difference in their lives.
Notice that most of these are invisible to other people. You can’t measure someone else’s love or their heart and soul’s level of holding fast and service. Outsiders can only approximate that by watching their life. But we know our level.
But the other things can be more accurately assessed. We can see if someone is walking in obedience and keeping the commands. But only to a certain extent. We don’t know any more than they could know what small nudges the Holy Spirit was making in order to correct attitude and behavior.
So much of the work of using these outcome measures can only be assessed when the individual is honest before their Lord. And this is still true today. Many people claim Jesus as Lord, but we might not see the outward working of that relationship in the way and timing that we expect.
But it is not to us that they are accountable. They must answer to their Lord and ours, just as we must answer. We stand alone in judgment, but we stand together in the process of Body living. We need to encourage and rebuke when needed. We need to receive these as well.
But too often we are busy looking at others when we are called to examine ourselves to see if we are in the faith. Honesty is the key.
But we need to understand that there are expectations given for the life of faith. We come empty handed to the Cross. But then He expects us to allow Him to change us, just as He wanted the people of Israel to continue to trust Him and allow Him to fight their battles.
The Arnold Journey 