If you have a Bible this morning and you wanna read along with our scripture reading, we're gonna take two, so I'll give you a moment to find both, because one's pretty short. We'll start in the book of James, chapter two, and we'll look at the last two verses of that chapter. And then we're gonna turn to the book of Joshua, chapter two, so give you a second to find both of those. I'm always, as you're looking to find the scriptures, I'm always or often surprised just how the Lord leads in regards to preaching of his word. All week long, I've been studying something, thought I was gonna preach it today, and late last night, my thoughts were changed. And, It's always interesting to me how one thought scripture leads to a different one, and a different one, and then the Lord led us here to this scripture. And in all the seeking out what the Lord would have me to say, I just want it to be what y'all need. That's the desire of my heart is that You're here this morning and I trust the Lord that there may be something that would be of benefit to you or needful for you to hear. I don't know, I don't try to guess ever. I don't target people other than Brother Phil, I guess. But I just try to ask the Lord what I'm supposed to say and so I hope this morning that the thoughts would be of some help to somebody here this morning. James chapter two, verse 25 and 26, and then we'll turn to Joshua chapter two. It says this, likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works when she had received the messengers and had sent them out another way? For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also. I will turn to Joshua chapter two, and I really struggled on knowing where to cut off here, and so I'm just gonna start in verse eight, and I may stop in verse 14, or I may keep going here. Joshua chapter two, verse eight, it says this. So the context of this is about Rahab. I would think most of you know this story. The children of Israel have been wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. Moses was their leader. Moses has died. He has passed the reins of leadership to Joshua. Now there, this generation is responsible for going into the land of Canaan, the promised land, which had been promised hundreds of years earlier, and fighting to win it. And so as Joshua is commanded, he sends spies out to spy out the land and get a sense of what they need to do. The most fortified city that's known about in Canaan that is very famous, obviously, with all the children's songs and Sunday school teaching is Jericho. And I won't get into extensively this morning what was done at the Battle of Jericho, but needless to say, it was a pretty daunting task to think that you were gonna conquer Jericho, especially using the means that God had for them. So two spies go to this town, and they connect with, in order to carry out the work of the Lord, the unlikeliest of people, a prostitute. That's who they connect with to do God's work. And this is a little bit of the exchange that they have about what God's plans are, and we're gonna pick up where Rahab is really exclusively the one talking here in verse eight. And before they were laid down, she came up unto them upon the roof, and she said unto the men, I know that the Lord hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did unto the two kings of the Amorites that were on the other side of Jordan, Sion and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt. Neither did there remain any more courage in any man because of you. For the Lord your God, he is God in heaven above and on earth beneath. Now, therefore, I pray you, swear unto me by the Lord, since I have showed you kindness, that you will also show kindness unto my father's house and give me a true token, and that you will save alive my father and my mother and my brethren and my sisters and all that they have and deliver our lives from death. And the men answered her, our life for yours. If you utter not this our business, then it shall be when the Lord hath given us the land that we will deal kindly and truly with thee. I'll just stop our reading there for now and we may pick up some more scriptures in this chapter in a few moments. If I could title the message this morning, On my heart, it's the great risks of acting in faith. The great risks of acting in faith. I don't remember if I've shared this before, perhaps have, and forgive me if I have. Probably a year ago, I preached a sermon about the devil and showed you a book called The Screwtape Letters. In that book, it's obviously a fictional book where one demon is training another demon on how to deceive people. And has a lot of literary intrigue, I guess. And in there, one of the things that was a challenge to my heart was something that this demon was telling the other demon to do to a person of faith. How to prevent them from really serving the Lord. And he, I won't get close to explaining it as well as he does, but in essence he says, what you wanna really do in the heart of a Christian is cultivate all of the feelings of faith to where they have a lot of feeling about faithful things. So whenever the preacher gets up and he talks about walking on the water, that you feel such passion that that is the right thing to do is to get out of the boat and walk on the water and all the descriptions and He even talks in there that you wanna encourage them to amen, get them really impassioned for it. But then simultaneously, detach that feeling from any concrete action. Because the demon points out to the other one, the faith that their God, he calls it the enemy, The faith that their God is pleased with is not a hollow faith. It's a living faith, an embodied faith. And their God would prefer them to take one step out of the boat than to have all of the passions, all of their life, and live on the boat on the ocean. He wants action. And that definitely threw my spirit off balance. It's convicting. Simultaneously, and this is again why I recommend the book to you, make them critical of the people who act by faith. So when you see somebody doing something, and yet as Peter does, he steps out on the water and he's coming to Jesus, which, pausing for just a moment, that whole story still utterly amazes me. Like not even just the physical act, I still cannot understand, and I've said this to you before, I still cannot understand that as Jesus reassures them, he's walking across the water, they think it's a ghost, they call out to him, he says, don't be troubled, it is I, be not afraid. And so Peter wants to validate that that really is the Lord. And so the way that he's going to prove to himself and to others that that really is the Lord is he says, if it is you, Let me come to you and walk on the water. That response to me is just, I don't even know what to make of what Peter is doing there, other than to say he was a godly man of action. He didn't just say, well, tell me again. He didn't just say, come closer so I can see you. all things which we routinely pray when we desire to have the reassurances of the Lord. He didn't say that. He said, if it is you, bid me come to you. And then you think for a moment the risk of that. If it wasn't the Lord and was in fact a ghost, whatever that means in that context, Peter's gonna die. and yet he steps out anyway. And yet, there's a tendency that can come within us to become critical of the fact that once Peter's out there, his faith wavered a little bit and he began to sink. And yet I still, I can't get to that point to be critical because I'm still safely on the boat criticizing the guy. And so one of the things that this book talks about is, how at the same time that we are, that you need to encourage the feelings of faith, you discourage any concrete action, and then to seal the deal, cause them to be critical of people who step out of the boat and actually take action. Because then that will just further secure the fact that they're not going to walk by faith. Now thankfully, the God that we serve often has a more gracious heart towards our imperfect faith than we do towards ourselves and one another. God is not often looking for mountains of faith. Certainly, He wants to encourage great faith, but what He's just looking for is any faith. that manifests itself in action. The scripture that we read to you in James, it tells us there. It's not talking about salvation. It's not saying that we need to believe and do good works and thereby come to know God. but it's talking about pleasing the Lord as one who already knows God. That the way that that is done is through faith, and James begins to flesh that out by saying to us, and yet it is not a faith that is of feeling or thought or belief. It is a faith that is yoked to because inherently, faith is going to lead to action. Faith for faith's sake is not within the arsenal of God. Faith is always going to be the one that provokes us to service to God. And yet, as we're gonna learn through this story and what many stories that we look to throughout the scriptures, Hebrews chapter 11 is full of it, is that inherent to faith, and what I think often is the stumbling block for us to actually walk by faith, to do something as a result of the faith in our heart, is that faith from our vantage point is inherently full of risk. One of the things in recent years that I've felt a need to restrain a little bit is sometimes when expressing the truth or expressing the leadership of the Lord, not to be so expressive that I'm 100% sure. Because I think sometimes in the attempt to convince people that truly this is God's leadership, we've overstepped the mark by expressing the degree of confidence that we have. Faith is inherently risky. Faith is inherently full of unanswered questions. I'm going to step out of the boat, but I don't know what happens from here. I don't know if he calms the storm. I don't know if I'm able to walk. I don't know if Jesus is gonna rescue me. I don't know if my faith is gonna diminish. I don't know if other people are gonna follow me. I don't know anything, but I do know I need to act and step out of the boat. And so when the Lord is leading you to do something for his cause, to involve yourself in trying to reach the lost world or serve your brother and sister, realize that if you're waiting to act until you have full confidence, Satan has hoodwinked you into believing that faith is something that it is in fact not. Faith is not the absence of questions. Faith does not have a 100% guarantee. Faith is that there is some evidence that I have. Sometimes it's the word of an enemy in Rahab's case. Now, lest we go too far, the unlikelihood, like, I don't know how else to say this. We're talking about a prostitute. We're not talking about a man of great faith that has some title or we're not talking about an Israelite virtuous woman like Mary. We're talking about a pagan prostitute. And think of the long series of sin that she has been enveloped in for so long, not only in deed, but just as a part of the sinful culture of the Canaanites. Imagine all of the pagan activity that she's performed. And yet, when she is exposed to the God of heaven, When she comes to learn about what he did to the Egyptians and what he's doing through his people, somehow amidst all of that, she became a believer in him. And when presented with the opportunity to act, I mean, think of the gravity of what's going on here. You know, there are some situations of faith that I'll call our electives. We can choose to step into them or not. We can choose to act. So the Lord may, I'm just coming up with a simple example. The Lord may compel you to witness to a coworker. And maybe it's over the course of months that God is really setting this person upon your heart. In some ways, it's an elective. It's not foundational to your life. It's not gonna alter from our vantage point and understanding. You're not taking your son up to the mountain and raising the knife. It's an elective. It's something that God wants you to do. But then there are other situations where what our faith is being confronted with is foundational to our life. That's one of the things with Rahab. The Israelites are coming and they're going to destroy Jericho. And she has choices to make. Now, this would be the case for any of us with a lot of the decisions that we make. Often I talk to young people and I say, listen, the person you marry, you're gonna marry somebody. And if you do, that matters a whole lot. And the implications of your decision have ripple effects not only in your life, and in the generations to come, and in the generations after that, and the generations after that. What you do matters, and is insignificant As Satan and our own hearts may convince us that our decisions are, I want you to know that if the decision of a pagan prostitute had the effects upon the rest of Israel's history like it did, then in like fashion, the decisions that we make when walking by faith are significant and important. and we ought not to trivialize the decisions of our life because they're not trivial. They matter to God and they matter to others. Think about her decision and the impact that it was going to have because when she comes to these two spies, the thing that is driving her is the protection of other people. She recognizes that what she chooses to do by faith towards these spies is going to affect the people that she holds most dear. And listen to me, there is a picture in that that is more than a thousand words of value that what you and I do when we elect to live by faith has a cascading effect upon the people closest to us and beyond. And as we weigh the risk in the moment of doing it, choosing to live by faith, recognize that there's also a cost to not doing it. So here's what the faithless heart, here's what the pressure of Satan will tell us. If you step out of the boat, here's what could happen. If you house these men, here's the bad that could come upon you. If you choose to commit more of your time, energy, and life to the Lord and seek Him with passion, here's all the things that you're sacrificing and giving up. And so when Jesus uttered the words that we need to lay down our lives and come and follow him, but I love these things, I don't wanna give up these things, and so in our minds what can happen is we can embellish the loss that would be required if we decided to walk by faith. But loss goes two ways. There's a loss and there's a risk And there's no doubt about it if we choose to walk by faith. And some of that is full of pain and some of that is experience loss. I wanted to do that and I'll never be able to. And there's a pain in that that is real and I'm not gonna say it's not. But to make sure that we also balance out the scale and realize there's a great cost. And there's a great loss that we forfeit when we don't walk by faith. Imagine, so I think, I think there's a tendency in my own life to, like, I don't want to be put in a position to have to make a decision, so I just kind of stay out of it. So like, you know, if there's, I can't even think, if there's a public situation and somebody's needing help and there's 20 people around, I'm just kinda hopeful somebody else will go take care of it. I'll just kinda sit to the back and I don't wanna have to engage and make all the hard decisions. And so sometimes a substitute for faith and living by faith and acting in faith is an aloofness. If I'm not present, then I won't even know what decisions need to be made, so I don't have to make them. And so one substitute that people can make is, if I just don't engage with God, then God will never require me to do anything. And so I'll stay disengaged. And to that person, what I'll say is, you're suffering great loss. because truly what you're doing is you're rearranging in your own life of things that don't matter. It's like rearranging chairs on the Titanic. Your life in the end is not gonna have value unless it's God-breathed value, unless you're under the influence of the Lord doing his work that has eternal effects. And so all the important things that can seemingly be done by remaining aloof from the cause of God and doing all the perceived important things to the world is like rearranging chairs on the Titanic to make it more comfortable. Listen, the ship is going down and those are gonna have no value. Aloofness, being detached from the spiritual realm, you're losing a lot. There's a great loss. and not being engaged in the lives of other people, in the needs that God is wanting. There's a great loss to have. Rahab, I don't know the situation as to why they came to her house. I don't guess it really matters. She didn't push them down the road and say, well, my neighbor is used to dealing with people from other nations. You know, I'm in no position, I'm not a governor, I'm not a person in power, I'm not a person of importance. No, they came to her door. So, let me say this. When God comes to your door, it's a hard privilege. It's a hard privilege. It's hard because it would be easier just not to have to fight the battle and let somebody else do it. But man, isn't it a privilege that the God of the universe sent somebody your way? That God cares enough to make, I mean, isn't that kind of like parenting? I have a being, a soul, a person that I am responsible for and the things that I do and don't do may have an eternal effect upon their existence. And isn't that a humbling thing the first time you hold your own child and the gravity of what's going on really begins to come over you and you say, I am responsible for this being. They are in my care. Their future lies largely in my hands. And immediately I can remember getting home and all the people left and then kind of being, not kind of being, being terrified. Because I don't call anybody else when I need help. This is mine. So what if this morning, and I wanna pose this for just a moment before I move on, is the Lord calling you to step up? Like is there a conviction in your spirit that God is wanting more from you in your faith and in your actions? And it's not stirring up beliefs and it's not feeling better about things. It's that God wants you to act in faith for him. and if you're stifled by the risk, listen, I sympathize with that, but I would not dare say that that is not inherent to walking by faith. You can't lessen the blow. You can't ease the requirement. The fact of the matter is, you've gotta step up, and it's hard to take the step, but thank God that he is gracious in helping us to do that. Rahab, she receives the men. She's somebody that would seem of little consequence, but she's not. She's not of little consequence. And her actions are not of little consequence. And the effects of what she's doing matter to many people. And she negotiates this agreement with them and says, listen, I'll save your life, you save mine. And so they tell her later on in the chapter, they say, okay, here's the deal, you put this scarlet, I can't remember what it was, just this scarlet cloth up in your window, you tie it up there, everybody in your house will be safe. But if for some reason they're not in there, their blood is on your hands, not ours. And so she brokers this deal with them, and they agree. And I say all that to say, Her act of faith literally saved her whole family. And our actions can do no less. So let me pose a hypothetical to you and then I'll move on with one last thing and I'm done. What if the intensity of your commitment to walk by faith So I'll say that again. What if the intensity of your commitment to walk by faith, again, emphasizing not feel the faith, walk by faith, live it, do it, act. What if the combination of all of those actions, one day, God is going to use to preserve your children's children's children? So people you're never gonna meet. What if the exercise of your faith, no different than many of us today who no doubt are in the house of God because of the influence of those that we've never even met, that were devoted, that lived lives of faith and acted in ways that had ripples effects upon those people which brought us up and which raised us, which caused us to live in the house of the Lord and sit under the influence of people What if their actions were removed and because of that, the devotion of those that led us to the Lord was also removed? How many of us have been affected by the intensity of faith of those gone before us to whom we never even knew? And what if the same thing is to us with our posterity? What if what God is going to use is a life in you of service to his cause to affect people whom you will never meet? Would that change your motivation? Would that change the action if God came to you in a dream one night and said, hey, if you'll begin to live by faith, act, You've got great grandkids who will serve the Lord. And if you don't, they won't. God alone knows that's a hypothetical. There's more complexity in the situation than that, and I realize that. But what if that were the case? See, here's the incredible thing that we learned about Rahab. Her act of faith had a local impact. It literally saved her family. I'll point out to you as well, the day she makes this deal, three days pass for them to get back to their camp because people have started searching for them. So there's a three day gap. Then they get back to the Israelites, to Joshua, tell him all about it. And there's this whole story about them crossing the Jordan River. I don't know how long that took. Let's say it took three or four days. After they crossed the Jordan River, they had relaxed the requirement in the law for all males to be circumcised of that generation. And so, all the young men from zero to 40 had not been circumcised and were in violation of God's law. So Joshua says, before we go into the Promised Land, we need to perform this on all the men who have not yet been circumcised. And so they go through this from zero to 40, all the men, notice the men of war, all the men of war have to be circumcised, and it tells us in chapter five that then they gave a period of rest so that they could recover from the circumcision before they went to Jericho. So let's just loosely lay out a month. that from the time she receives the promise until the time that they can see Israel on the horizon, it's been about a month. In your life, when you're awaiting God's assurance, in dog years, how much is a month to wait? You know what I'm saying? How long does it feel? A month. I'm saying if there's something that is of, in her case, life. So imagine if you have a loved one on their deathbed and you don't know if they're gonna make it or not and from day to day it's going up and down and you don't know how they're gonna do. A month seems like a year. because of all the, and you have moments where, yes, they're gonna pull through, yes, we're gonna be, yes, we're gonna be fine, and that's how faith often works is, yes, I remember what the spy said, there's that scarlet cloth, I know we're gonna be okay, and then a couple days later, when you see all of the arms of your military men, and they're getting ready to go fight, and you start thinking, okay, it's starting to get real. Imagine all the ups and downs of her faith. a month-ish passes while she just has to wait for the fulfillment of the promise. Which is the thing that I think might be one of the most challenging things about being an American Christian is the instant response we get from everything else and how that has not changed in the least God's timeframe and how he works. No matter how much that we have made things more efficient, no matter how much that we have sped things up in quality, in quantity, in speed, no matter what, none of that has changed the way that God operates and that it often takes place from a human vantage point over much lapse of time. And in that lapse of time, you know therein lies one of the greatest struggles of faith is not only am I having to face the risk, but I'm having to face it continuously. There's no resolution immediately. And so the natural unfaithful heart disengages because they cannot endure engaged waiting by faith. It's hard. That's what she does. She waits. There's a local salvation that comes, right? Locally, her little family is saved, and praise God for that. All the while, there's something bigger going on as well that God's doing because of her act of faith. If you were to turn to Matthew chapter one, and you were to read the lineage of Jesus, here's what you would learn. The word that they translated, the Greek name for Rahab is Rechab, R-A-C-H-A-B. I think it's verse three. It actually is Rahab. Rahab was the mother of Boaz. Boaz married a little Moabitess girl named Ruth. So if you never knew this, the mother-in-law to Ruth was Rahab. And both of them, both of those Canaanite, pagan, non-Jewish people were placed in the lineage of Jesus Christ. And do you know why? Because of their faith. That's why. God looked down and saw their faith. And not only did he bring about, in both of their situations, an immediate salvation that occurred for both of them and those around them, but also God used both of their faith to impact the coming of the Messiah some thousand plus years later. And so can you not see, as we were speaking just a moment ago, that when people walk by faith and their act, or rather their faith is actually put into action, that compounding their faith is the fact that God accomplishes things in time, during our lifetime for the people and the welfare of those around us. But God also does things for his glory and for the welfare of many others that will come hereafter because we act in faith. This morning, I don't know what to make of it. and this is going back from a long time ago, this is just coming to me from studying this, I don't know what to make of the fact that every time that the Bible speaks of Rahab, it says Rahab the harlot. Like, obviously, that's necessary to the narrative of the story, so it makes sense, but why is it in Hebrews chapter 11? Why is it in other places in the scriptures like we read to you in James, why is it that she's called Rahab the harlot. It's almost, this is theorizing here, it's almost like it's saying, if Rahab the harlot, if the harlot can exercise that profound of faith, what about those who are not harlots? What about us? This morning, I recognize there is a... If your religion is fearless, it's not the religion of Jesus Christ. Here's what I mean. If you and I can do our Christian duties every day, every week, every month, every year, and amidst those, there is not at times a crushing of us between fear and obedience, and they're just crushing us. That's not the faith of Jesus Christ. Inherent to being a Christian is walking by faith, and inherent to walking by faith is acting without all the answers. And when acting without all the answers, There's a crushing that happens within. There's a fear that happens within. But that nonetheless is biblical, God-pleasing faith. Because in all this, and I'm done, God sees the crushing going on within. God sees the fear. God sees all the reasons that we can give ourselves not to step out of the boat. And because God knows what it's like to walk by faith, because God himself did it himself, in earth, in his own body, he is a rewarder of those because he knows the very real palpable fears of walking by faith and the cost of doing so. And so the Bible tells us that he's a rewarder of those. You know what I think the reward is? I don't think it's some thing. Callan is very much this way. He wants my approval at his little age. Like he's wired that he's looking at my facial expression. He's wanting to know. I did good. I didn't do good. And there is this, there's this mutually delightful experience that we have when he has done what he is supposed to do. And I extend my approval in both of us, there is this joyous delight in one another. You know what I think? I think that's the reward. Knowing, Lord, I got out of the boat. I started to sink. I'll give you that. But I did it, like a little kid. I did it. I got out. Next time, I don't want to sink, and I don't want to look at the waves, and I don't want to do all that. But Lord, I did it. His good pleasure this morning. I wanna encourage anybody who is on the precipice of acting of faith to do it. I wanna encourage you to walk by faith.