"All That You Command Us We Will Do, and Wherever You Send Us We Will Go…"

In Joshua one, the Gadites, Reubenites and the half tribe of Manasseh heard from Joshua the rehearsal of the promise of Moses that they could inherit land on the east of Jordan (vs.12,13). At that time, Joshua also rehearsed the conditions on which Moses had granted their petition (Num. 32:29,30, Josh. 1:14,15). In verse sixteen of Joshua one, we read the commitment made by the men of these tribes. It is the commitment that should be made by every woman of the twenty-first century church.

“All that you command us we will do, and wherever you send us we will go…”

I love the first word of this ancient statement of faith…all. So many people in so many circumstances today have become cafeteria line Christians, choosing what portions of scripture to put on their spiritual plates and which to leave behind because they find them distasteful, ordinary or difficult to digest.  But Christianity is not a cafeteria line for the picky soul. It’s an all or nothing proposition. All is the challenge of our inheritance.

I explained this concept to my children when they were small using obedience analogies from their lives at home:

If I take a nap in the afternoon, I might ask you to do three things: be quiet, finish your homework and have yourself a snack before you go out to play. When I wake up and walk back into the kitchen I can see you outside playing on the swing set.  I assume that you have done all of those things. I can see your empty Cheetos bag in the trash. I slept for the entire half hour, so I know you were quiet.  But I look at your math book on the counter and the notebook page is empty. I search for the completed assignment to no avail. I call you inside and ask you if you did the math. Your reply is something like this:

“Well, no, but I did two out of three of the things you asked. That’s two-thirds, Mom. That’s 66.666…%. I obeyed all but one thing.”

By this time, even my child could see the folly in calling partial obedience anything but disobedience. When I pick and choose, I am pleasing self. I am obeying my own desires rather than submitting to the will of God. In this sense, obedience really is an all-or-nothing proposition.

The above post is taken largely from “More Than Conquerors: Studies in Joshua” the 2009 Lectureship book from the Bear Valley Bible Institute in Denver; Building Your Own Altars, by Cindy Colley.