Includes a sample introduction to the lesson, text outline and highlights, illustrations to share, sample group discussion questions, and spiritual life applications to make. A video version of this overview is available on YouTube at:

INTRODUCTION:

??? DISCUSSION QUESTION???

“If you were going to give a speech to a graduating class, what’s something you’d tell them?”

(That answer will vary according to the individual, of course. You might get some interesting, insightful answers!)

In today’s lesson, Israel has in a sense “graduated” into the Promised Land. The promise God made to Abraham and all the patriarchs has come to pass. But “now what?” What are they going to do from this point forward. As we’ll see in today’s lesson in Joshua 24, the answer is very much up to them, and how committed they will be to serve God.

That question: “Now what?” is a good question for all kinds of people, isn’t it? “Now what?” What’s next for new graduates? What’s next for new retirees? What’s next for new Christians? What’s next for a church with a new pastor — or which has just lost a pastor and is in transition — on and on. “Now what?” To a great extent, just like for Israel, and for new graduates, the answer is up to us, if we will really choose to serve God, as Joshua tells Israel in our lesson in Joshua 24 today.

CONTEXT:

Today we conclude our brief study of the Book of Joshua. Last time we saw how the Lord commanded Israel to divided up the Promised Land, by lot to the different tribes and families, and how Caleb, at 85, was still zealous to go and take his inheritance from the giants and fortified cities. 

In Chapters 15-19 Joshua describe the division of the land for each tribe, then Chapters 20-21 describe the “cities of refuge” and cities given to the Levites.

In Chapters 23-24, Joshua gives two farewell addresses. Some believe there is only one “final address,” but the text indicates some differences:

— In Joshua 23 he called all Israel with their leaders, and he says, we’ve divided up the land, and now I’m old — “going the way of all flesh” he says — and he famously says in :14, “not one word of all the good words which the Lord your God spoke concerning you has failed.” And he exhorts them; God will keep His word in the future too: so you keep His Law. If you will, He’ll bless you, but if you don’t, then you will suffer the consequences.

— Then Chapter 24 opens: “THEN (meaning NEXT in sequence; here’s another meeting) Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem.” Here he reviewed Israel’s history: how God called Abraham, sent Moses, and now has brought them to the Promised Land. The question now becomes: “What next?” What’ll they do now that they’ve arrived? This brings us to our passage for today, starting in Joshua 24:14.

OUTLINE:

I.  What It Means to Serve God (:14)

II. The Personal Choice to Serve God (:15-24)

TEXT:  Joshua 24:14-24

I. What it Means to Serve God (:14)

14 “Now, therefore, fear the LORD and serve Him in sincerity and truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.” (NASB)

Joshua tells Israel here: “Now, therefore …” — in other words, now that you’re in the Promised Land, “what’s next?” — what are you going to do? Just like graduates, and retirees, and new pastorates, and so many other situations, the choice is up to you. He tells Israel, your future’s ahead of you, and it’s in your hands. So he encourages them in :14 to “fear the Lord and serve Him.” But what does it mean to serve the Lord? We see something about that in verse 14, and there’s really TWO PARTS TO THIS, “positive” and “negative”, both extremely important:

A. Actively serve Yahweh, the one true, God, with all your heart.

He says, “fear the LORD.” The word “LORD” here is in all 4 capital letters, which means that in Hebrew it is not the word “Adonai,” or “Lord,” but “YHWH/Yahweh/Jehovah” — the personal name of the God of Israel which He gave Moses to share with Israel when they asked His name. It was not just “any” God they were to serve, but THIS God, personally. 

The word “serve” is the Hebrew “abad,” which means to “work, or serve.” It’s often used of one serving a king, or of one who is a slave. So to serve God means that GOD — Yahweh, the God of the Bible — is our King; God is our Master. And with the appearance of Jesus in the New Testament, we can say that Jesus is our King; our Master. “My Lord & My God” as Thomas called Him in John 20:28. Jesus is not just Someone we “believe in” in some abstract way; we are to actively WORSHIP Him and SERVE Him as His subjects. He created us to love and worship Him, and He also has work for us to do! So we need to be “serving” the Lord. If we would say “I have given my life to the Lord,” then what is the proof of it? How are you serving Him? 

And what he says next is extremely important. He says we must serve Him “in SINCERITY AND TRUTH.” God does not want His followers to just “go through the motions;” He wants our heart to be in it.

ILLUSTRATION 

When I was in Kathmandu, Nepal, on mission there was a prominent Buddhist temple there, and outside it, there was a  huge  “prayer wheel.” You may have seen one of the small “prayer wheels” that many Buddhists hold in their hands. They twirl them, and supposedly it “makes the prayers go up.” But this prayer wheel was huge, just outside the temple, and it spun like a big carousel. In fact, people would just walk by almost thoughtlessly “give it a push” to “keep the prayers going.” Their belief is that making the wheel turn is the same as saying verbal prayer. But just pushing that thing as you walk by, there’s not much “heart” or “thought” in those prayers, right? 

Sadly, that’s about the way some “Christians” serve God, isn’t it? There’s no real heart in what they do: they just mumble the hymns or listen mindlessly to the songs; there’s no real fervor to their worship. They daydream during the messages; they aren’t listening for a word from God! They may “put in their time” in the nursery or a church event, but they’re just “going through the motions.” We’ve all probably been there at some point.  

God says that kind of heartless service is NOT what He wants from you! He says I want your worship in “sincerity and truth.”

— “sincerity” is the Hebrew: “tamim,” it means “complete, whole, entire.” In other words, with our whole heart! 

— “truth” is “emeth.” It has a root meaning of “firmness.” The truth is FIRM; it doesn’t change. 

This is similar to what Jesus says in John 4:24, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth”! BOTH of these are important:

— You must have the TRUTH about God to worship Him rightly. You can get all teary-eyed, or get yourself all worked up a religious “frenzy,” worshiping some god of your own imagination — and people do all the time! But that’s not worshiping God. As we saw, He is not just “any god,” He is Yahweh, THIS personal God, the God of Abraham and Moses, and the Father of the Lord Jesus, who is “the way and the truth and the life” and no one comes to the Father except through Him. You must worship God in TRUTH, for Who He really is. 

— But on the other hand, it’s not enough to only know “facts” about God, either. The DEVIL knows all the “facts.” James 2 says “the demons also believe, and shudder.” They know all the truths about God — but their hearts are not given to Him. They don’t love and worship Him. 

So we must have both: we must worship God in “sincerity and truth;” “spirit and truth.” BOTH are important. 

So Joshua shows Israel, as well as us today, that to serve God means to worship and serve Him as our Lord & God, and to do it in both spirit and truth. That’s the “positive” side. But there is another side of it as well:

B. AND put away the gods which your fathers served.”

This is what you might call the “negative” side of it: the one side of it is to POSITIVELY serve God; the other side of it is to NEGATIVELY not serve other gods; to put sin, idols and things God has prohibited, OUT of your life. And again, this is true for us today as well. 

ILLUSTRATION

A man I know was on mission in India a few years ago, and he shared the gospel of Jesus with a man there. The man seemed to understand the message, and he asked: “Does this mean I have to give up my idols?” That was a perceptive question, wasn’t it? Of course the answer is YES! You can’t just “add Jesus to the list of all the gods you worship” (and that IS the temptation for the Hindus; they believe in 100 million gods, so what is one more called Jesus?) So you must give up all the others, and serve Jesus ONLY. As Joshua says, you must “serve Yahweh,” and also “put away” the other gods from your life.

This is still true today.  Maybe you’ve heard people say something like: “Oh, you don’t have to give up anything, just come follow Jesus!” But that is just not true!

— Don’t tell that Joshua and Israel here: they were commanded to put away their idols and serve God.

— Don’t tell that to the Rich Young Ruler! Jesus told him to sell all that he had, and come follow Him! (Matthew 19:21)

— Don’t tell that to Simon Peter: he preached “Repent ye therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out.” (Acts 3:19)

BOTH of these are vital elements of really serving God. We must turn to Him and serve Him — but we must also “put away” (to use Joshua’s language) of some other things from our lives in repentance. We must have both of these to really follow Him. 

EXERCISE/ILLUSTRATION:

Bring a coin with you, and show it to your class. Show them the “heads” side (for example George Washington on a quarter) and then the “tails” side (which varies, depending on the quarter/coin) and ask: “Which of these two is the quarter?”

(Of course, the answer is that it takes BOTH of them to be a quarter. It’s like the old saying: “it’s two sides of the same coin.”) 

Then emphasize to your group: that is how it is with serving God. There are “TWO sides to the coin” of serving God:

— one the one side, we need to be actively serving Him in “sincerity and truth;” 

— but the “other side of the coin” is that there are certain things we need to turn away from as we follow Him. The gospel is both “repentance and faith” (Acts 20:21); “serving God and putting away the gods of your fathers” as Joshua said.  “Both sides of this coin” are vital in truly following God.

But understanding all this is not enough; we must actually make the personal CHOICE to serve Him, as Joshua indicates next:

II. The Personal Choice to Serve God (:15-24)

:15 “If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

16 The people answered and said, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the LORD to serve other gods; 17 for the LORD our God is He who brought us and our fathers up out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage, and who did these great signs in our sight and preserved us through all the way in which we went and among all the peoples through whose midst we passed. 18 The LORD drove out from before us all the peoples, even the Amorites who lived in the land. We also will serve the LORD, for He is our God.”

19 Then Joshua said to the people, “You will not be able to serve the LORD, for He is a holy God. He is a jealous God; He will not forgive your transgression or your sins. 20 If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, then He will turn and do you harm and consume you after He has done good to you.” 21 The people said to Joshua, “No, but we will serve the LORD.” 22 Joshua said to the people, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen for yourselves the LORD, to serve Him.” And they said, “We are witnesses.” 23 “Now therefore, put away the foreign gods which are in your midst, and incline your hearts to the LORD, the God of Israel.” 24 The people said to Joshua, “We will serve the LORD our God and we will obey His voice.”

There’s so much here; we could have spent the whole lesson just on point I, or just on :15 here. But the details of these last verses all boils down to this: Having told the people what it means to serve God, Joshua now tells them that they must make their own decision to choose to serve God. He said in :15 “choose for yourselves today whom you will serve.”

The ability to choose is one of the most important qualities that God has given to us as human beings made in His image. 

???DISCUSSION QUESTION???
“What are some important choices we have to make in life???

(Obviously the choice of salvation is one; also the choice of the person we will marry is an extremely important one; the choice of a college/other education; choosing whether to give in to certain temptations/ethical shortcuts; the choice of a home/car/other major purchases — the list can go on and on.)

The point is, God has given us the precious ability to choose. Joshua’s charge here reflects that. We have the ability to make meaningful choices.

DISCUSSION/APPLICATION EXERCISE

C.S. Lewis has a quote on our ability to choose. You might post this, or since it’s a long quote, perhaps pass it out on slips of paper to each member to read, and then ask their thoughts about it: 

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can’t. If a thing is free to be good it’s also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they’ve got to be free.

Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (…) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”

(Mere Christianity, The Case For Christianity)

So the ability to choose is an important part of the nature God gave us. And no choice is more important than the choice of what God we will serve. So Joshua lays out Israels choices before them:

— You can serve the gods your fathers served beyond the River (“the River” is the Euphrates, so he’s referring to their ancestors before Abraham and their pagan gods in Mesopotamia)

— You can serve the gods of the Amorites here in Canaan (Baal, Molech, Asherah, et al)

— Or you can serve “The LORD,” Yahweh, the God of Israel.

???DISCUSSION/APPLICATION QUESTION???

“What are some of OUR choices today for who/what we will serve?”

(The Lord of course, but also so many other religions: Allah/Islam; Hinduism; Buddhism/other eastern religions; atheism/materialism/money; many choose just to serve themselves/their desires; or popular opinion; you/your group can think of many.)

The point is, we face the same basic choice that the people of Israel did in Joshua’s day. And it is the most important, most consequential choice we will make. 

So at the end of :15, Joshua shared his own personal choice in a line that has become famous: “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD/(Yahweh).” He says this is my choice. I will serve the LORD. 

Then in :16-18, the people respond and say that they will choose the LORD too, because of how He had brought them up from Egypt and gave them the Promised Land; they would serve Him too. He was their choice. (Interestingly, Joshua almost seems to try to “talk them out of it”! He says, He’s holy; He’s jealous — and to an extent, he was right. They would be very fickle and turn from the LORD in the days ahead. But we all fall short — that’s why we should be so grateful for the grace God gave us in Jesus. The truth is, we’re all “promise breakers,” but in Christ, “if we are faithless, yet He remains faithful,” as II Timothy 2:13 says). 

But just like Joshua, and Israel, each of us must make our own personal decision to follow the Lord. 

— You might ask some of your group members to share their PERSONAL TESTIMONIES: when did THEY make their own choice to follow Christ? You might ask if any of them struggled back & forth about it; what were they wrestling with as they made their choice?

— Then encourage your group members: if they have never yet made that personal choice to follow Christ, to take that seriously, and do it soon.

ILLUSTRATION:

Sheldon Vanauken was a poet and writer, whose beloved wife became a Christian, but he struggled with making that decision to follow Christ. He corresponded with C.S. Lewis about it. Finally he wrote:

“To go on (undecided) seemed impossible … a choice was necessary: and there is no certainty. One can only choose a side. So I — I now choose my side.’” (Richard E. Simmons III, Reflections on the Existence of God, p. 272)

Vanauken’s choice was to believe in God and follow Christ. Each of us must make that decision, for ourselves, at some point. Have you? 

It is notable also that Joshua told Israel “choose for yourselves TODAY/this day”! 

???DISCUSSION/APPLICATION QUESTION???
“WHY would it be important for them — or us — to choose God TODAY?”

(Several reasons:

— The decisions we make today impact the rest of our lives. If we choose God today, then the whole rest of our lives will reflect the benefits of that. 

ILLUSTRATION:

Recently an older man who came to Christ saw a young child being baptized, and said, “I wish I had come to Christ as a child. How different my life would have been.” 

— Also we don’t know how much time we have to make our decision. The only time we know we have is today. That’s why II Corinthian 6:2 says “Behold, now is “the acceptable time,” behold, now is “the day of salvation.” 

— Also right now the Lord’s Spirit may be speaking to our heart, drawing us — but we can’t take for granted that He will continue to do that. If we repeatedly harden our heart, it can get so hard that we don’t hear Him any longer.)

You/your group can share these/other ideas. But the point is, we need to choose to serve the Lord TODAY! 

CLOSING ILLUSTRATION

We do not know what time we have on this earth. I just finished reading a biography of my favorite baseball player, Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who was a Christian. He had just gotten his 3,000th hit in his last at-bat in 1972, he had hoped to play a couple more years. But there was an earthquake in Nicaragua, and he knew some people there; he wanted to help. So he gathered relief supplies and was going to help deliver them to the people. On Friday December 29 he saw Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillen, and he told him he’d bought a monkey and named it “Sangy” after him. Then he said, “Adios Amigo” — and it was the last time he ever saw him. His plane, laden with relief supplies, crashed just after takeoff that Sunday, December 31st, and Roberto Clemente and the crew all perished in the crash. 

We hear of this kind of thing all the time, don’t we? The point is, just as James 4 says, we do not know what tomorrow holds. That’s why it’s so important for us to choose for ourselves TODAY whom we will serve. And to make that choice to serve the one true God, Yahweh God, the God of the Bible, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to pay for our sins, and rose again to be the Living Savior of whoever would call upon Him. If you have never made that choice, I pray that you will make it TODAY!

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