You may not know me very well. I love international rugby, I love single malt Scottish whisky and I get bored quite easily. If I’m not excited or engaged or involved with something then I can get easily distracted. This can be in the form of getting bored with routine and losing interest and also getting disillusioned with things that start of looking exciting and then lose their appeal.

For example….I was on placement with a Church and it as decided that, on a Saturday leading up to Christmas, we would open the Church and have a 12 days of Christmas exhibition type thingy, with the Christmas symbolism of each day explained and an activity at each station for each day. Brilliant! This is the kind of thing I love, creative, exciting, out-reachy. I got quite involved, spent some time working on some of the activities…..and then began to realise that this great idea was losing it’s focus….we weren’t entirely sure exactly who this was for, why we were doing it….my heart began to sink….on the actual day I turned up and had to struggle to stay involved. It just wasn’t really a very good event at all, and you could tell it wasn’t going to be from the very start when we were cutting out the numbers for the stations at the last minute from sugar paper and sticking them up – unprofessional and grim! All my enthusiasm had left the building and I desperately wanted to go with it. I couldn’t leave, so having lost interest, I then began to look for something much more interesting and ended up playing carols on the piano.

I don’t think I’m alone in my ‘distractability’.

I think that this is what Joshua was worried about. It was fine whilst they were fighting people and had a focus, it was life and death stuff, exciting, dramatic and necessarily involving…but now that they had sort of got their bit of land, Joshua worried that the people would begin to get distracted by other things and the other practices of people around them.
If we see a problem or a situation that needs our help, or where we can make something happen, make a difference then we can be enthusiastic about getting involved – put all our energies into it. However, something else that is chugging along it may not be quite so engaging…and our attention can wander to other things.
Joshua knew this. So he got all the people together to make sure this wouldn’t happen. (Josh 24:1)
He knew that whilst the Israelites had been through difficulty and troubles wandering through the desert for 40 years they had been focused upon and dependent upon God, because there had been obvious need and danger facing them. Now that they had fought the various ‘ites’, had conquered the promised land and were settling down to grow vegetables and read the Sabbath afternoon newspaper there was less of an immediate and demanding reason for them to remain so focused on God and Joshua worried that in peace-time, their devotional life might start to slip.
“The book of Joshua itself claims only that military campaigns secured a foothold in the central hill country which was to be the heart of Israelite territory, while the flatter and more fertile areas like the Plain of Jezreel were not taken over at this time – and in addition, many fortified towns such as Jerusalem and Gezer also stayed firmly in Canaanite hands.”
Joshua knew that ‘the battle’ was not won, even though superficially it might look like it has been. He knew that it would be easy for people to think, ‘Oh well, we’ve got a bit of the land that we’ve been promised, it’s nice enough, we’ll settle here….focus on building homes and villages…’ The trouble is that we seen time and time again in the later books of the OT that the people are all too easily distracted by the attractive practices of those people around them. Once the need to fight for survival had disappeared, the temptation to be drawn away from God and his ways would have grown. Joshua is prophetic in his understanding of the people – it’s like he has a psychology degree – it’s not recorded in this part of Joshua that he was thinking along these lines but we can see from these verses that the people were already being distracted away from following God whole-heartedly. (Josh 24:23-24)

I think that Joshua reminds us that it’s always important to revisit God’s call to us. It’s almost like a spiritual MOT.

God’s call to us as individuals has two parts to it.
The first is general and the second specific, and they each place different demands / requirements on our lives – though obviously it’s important / crucial to stress that these are in no way ‘entry to the kingdom’ requirements, I’m not talking about earning our salvation, but the ways in which we live out our lives as a response to the overwhelming love of God that he generously and abundantly showers us with.

• The first is the general call to discipleship, this is shared by all Christians and is a constant, unchanging part of our Christian lives. It’s this part of our call where we think about the general practices of discipleship - prayer, reading the Bible, meeting together, sharing in communion, giving to the Church, sharing our faith etc. These are things that all disciples should be engaging with – and it’s always good to revisit these things and see if we’ve slipped away from praying or meeting together or one of the others.
• The second part of the call is specific to you as an individual and may well change throughout your life-time. It’s this part of the call where God, who shaped you together in your Mother’s womb, who knows your gifts, strengths, weaknesses and abilities calls you into specific things. This will be different for each person, it may involve taking on an area of responsibility, taking time out of things for a while and going on a 30 day retreat, taking up a course, joining a local sports team, thinking about what being a Christian at work means for you

And these two parts of the call can also be applied to groups, like home-groups, churches, congregations in the same way. How are we doing on the two parts, the general practices of being a Christian small-group, church, congregation etc. and the second part of the specific call.
What Joshua is saying to the people gathered around is, keep your eyes fixed on God, keep in step with him, don’t get distracted, decide today and decide everyday… ‘but, as for me and my house, we will praise the Lord.’

Posted by Jenny Corcoran