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There have, I suppose, in the course of history, been multitudes of speeches made by multitudes of speakers. Most of them have perished beyond recall, but some of them have been so influential in their day that they have been preserved for us in the pages of this historian or that. And among those speeches, it often happens, those that have been preserved for posterity, that one or two, perhaps, phrases have occurred that have leapt out of the page and caught the imagination both of those who have heard and those who have read. Such speeches, I suppose, in our own day, were the speeches of Winston Churchill, as in the dark days of Europe he rallied the British Isles in their fight against the monstrous powers of the Axis nation.
And of course, out of those many speeches that in those days people listened to with bated breath, have occurred some phrases that have caught the imagination, and as the years have gone by, have been used in this context and that context and the other context. The particular phrase comes to my mind at the moment. Never in all the history of mankind has so much been owed by so many to so few. If we're thinking of speeches that have made their impact on the world, therefore, and have had a life beyond their original delivery, this speech that Joshua gave in his farewell sermon to his na- his nation deserves to rank exceedingly high among them.
You see, as we have been studying this week, Joshua had been the nation's savior, the captain of their salvation. Joshua it was that had brought them within sight and within possession of the glorious inheritance that God had promised to them through his servant Abraham. Many an Israelite, particularly in the days when they were living in the slave labor camps of Egypt, had been told by their nurses and their mothers the ancient stories of the Bible, the stories that God had given to their father Abraham. And they had told the children in the nursery and around the campfires in the slave labor camps after the day was done and their hands were red with the handling of the bricks, and their backs were aching.
Their mothers had told them these glorious stories from the Old Testament that the God of heaven had promised them a glorious inheritance, flowing with milk and honey, and the little children had listened with opened eyes and open mouths, as they listen still in our Sunday schools. Of course, when the boys and girls got to teenage and the young men and women married, they listened perhaps to those stories with a great deal more cynicism. What were these stories of an inheritance incorruptible? This story of an inheritance flowing with milk and honey. How were you to, uh, how were you to face it in a modern day when you were grown up men and women and no longer children in Sunday schools to be entertained with stories of Father Christmas and Red Riding Hood.
Was it real? The supposed promise of God of this great inheritance. And Joshua was the man that had made it real. Raised up as the captain of their salvation, he had brought them from a veritable desert into the promised land, and their feet stood there amidst the grass and the flowers and such wealth as they had never conceived of as possibly being their own before. Joshua had brought them in. He'd shown them it was real. And now in his farewell speech, he brings before them the condition upon which they could continue to enjoy it.
Choose you this day, said he, whom you will serve. I say the speech deserves to be ranked amongst the great and famous speeches of the world, for not only did it set the direction of his nation's spiritual experience all down the following centuries, but that little phrase out of that speech, choose you this day whom you will serve, so encapsulates what lies at the heart of true religion, that it has come down the centuries, re-echoed, spoken by a thousand and one preachers, heard by millions of ears, and proved effective in untold thousands of people's lives.
It's been the verse that God has used at those critical moments in life when people have come to see that all this talk of heaven in the Bible is no fairy tale. Not something to be laid aside with your nursery rhyme book, your pretty pictures of Red Riding Hood. Jesus Christ our Lord is risen from the dead. He has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. The resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord stands amongst the most heavily evidenced event in the whole of human history.
And it shows us that there is an inheritance indeed, incorruptible and undefiled, that fades not away. Oh sir, oh madam, sometimes in your quiet moments of thought, you've longed for it to be true, haven't you now? You all say to me, all this talk of heaven is escapism. No, sir. I'm not talking about heaven where cripples go to because they can't stick life anymore. I'm talking of a heaven which is a reality to which life's highest joys point.
Yes, in your moments when you have experienced some exquisite joy and discovered the wonder of life, whether you be a physicist peering down your microscope and standing aghast at the wonder and glory of this creation, or whether you've been a musician thrilled to the very marrow of your bones with the wonders of music, and there's come over you a feeling, and all this, and all this, and is it to come to nothing in the end? Is life merely sound and fury signifying nothing in particular, all to end in meaningless, unintelligent dust and ashes.
There's arisen a great longing in your heart, indeed perhaps a consciousness. No, man was not made for a few brief years. The call of eternity has been heard in your instinct, reinforced by the great historic fact that Jesus Christ, our Lord, who died for our sins according to the scripture and was buried and rose again the third day according to the scripture, has ascended into heaven, brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. There is an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fades not away.
The beauty of this world was not given us to mock us. The music of this world was not given to tantalize us, giving us pictures of wonders that we scarce begin to enjoy when life's illnesses and decay remove us. God doesn't play games with us. He's our pointers to the realities of a glorious eternity. A veritable eternal bed, when God shall satisfy every legitimate desire and more beside, infinitely more beside.
There is an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, reserved in heaven. Just as Joshua stood to then to declare to his fellow nationals what the conditions are for enjoying it, so now how easy it becomes to borrow his words, as indeed the blessed Holy Spirit who inspired Joshua stands in our midst tonight to take that same word and speak it to our heart. Listen to it then. If it would be in that eternal inheritance.
Choose you this day whom you will serve. We come, therefore, to the very crux of our human relationship with God, our Creator. To the very pivot, pivot on which turns the question of our salvation, whether we shall be saved and enjoy heaven eternally, or whether we shall be lost and forever beyond recovery.
Pray what is it? Here it is. Choose! Choose! Choose you this day! Who you will serve. Now, God himself could make it clearer, couldn't he? If we would be in God's heaven. It depends on our choosing. Choose you this day whom you will serve.
It is, of course, a wonderful thing that God has placed so much upon our choosing and given us the genuine ability to make that choice. God could have made us as machines, could he not, if he had chosen? And some people there are who wonder why God didn't make us as machines. Indeed, I have known friends of mine who, when they have eventually perceived what an infinite eternity of bliss on the one side, or an infinite eternity of woe on the other, depends on human choice. I have turned around and complained and said, why did God allow such a vast amount to hang upon the decision made in a lifetime?
My friend, what I, what alternative had Almighty God himself? He could have made us without the power of choice, couldn't he? Like animals, like machines, superior robots. But do perceive what would have been the implication of that. If we had been made like animals, we could not have been moral beings, could we? To be moral beings with moral responsibility, it is an indispensable condition that we have power of choice. If one of these nights a bumblebee enters your open car window, as you are doing ninety miles an hour down the M two, stings your eye and leads to disaster, and you are killed, that will be unfortunate.
But I tell you straight, the magistrates will not haul the aforesaid bumblebee into court to determine whether it's guilty or not. Poor beast. It bumbles as it was made to bumble, and never did have the beginnings of a choice. Tell me straight, would you prefer to be a bumblebee? To be a cow eating grass in the field? Never to know what moral choice is. Never to know. Never to know the haunting sense of the guilt of sin. The alternative there, if you, if you wish, be an animal.
To be human is to have choice that makes morality possible, and more. God could have made us machines, couldn't he? But had he done so, the greatest thing in all human experience would never have been there, and that is, of course, love. Sir, if you go home next Tuesday, deposit yourself tired and wearied in the lounge, and the door opens and in comes a Japanese, uh, Mitsubishi robot and puts its arms around your neck and says, oh, how I love you, what will you do?
I kick it in the ribs. Stupid thing. Why don't you accept its love? You say the thing has been programmed to love me. Oh, nonsense. How can you program anybody to love anybody? The divine majesty will not buy your love so cheap as to make you a machine. He wants no heavenly robots. Made us human beings, and it meant, therefore, if ever we were to be loved and to love and to know what it means, it means that we would have to have free choice. Oh, now God himself wants you to love him because you couldn't do anything else.
Heaven is not going to be filled with people there because they've been press-ganged there. Heaven will be filled with people that are in heaven because they wanted to be there, and they love God. Though they had the choice to do oppositely, they were brought of their free will to love God. All the wonder of the God's wisdom. You say, how could he make me love him and give me the free choice to do it. Ask any Christian you like, and you'll find the answer is this: I love him because he first loved me.
It is not a mechanical compulsion, and yet, and yet, was it not overwhelming? Who could discover the love of infinite God as expressed in the gift of his son at Calvary without feeling the overwhelming power of a love of God who commends his love towards us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. There is then a choice, and a very solemn choice it is. It is a choice that God himself for all eternity will respect.
Whether we say no or whether we say yes, and whether we say yes or whether we say no. We learn this from some of the events that happened in the life of Jesus Christ, our Lord. He was, as you'll know, God incarnate, and the Bible record tells us that on one occasion he was crossing the lake of, uh, Nazareth of Galilee in a ship when there came a violent storm, and rising in his divine majesty, he commanded the wave and the wind to cease, and they ceased, and there was a calm. Arrived on the shore with his disciples, they were met in the road by two men demon-possessed and out of their minds.
So fierce were those demons that the locals dare not go through that part of the country. And our blessed Lord, so the story says, used his divine power and cast out the demons and brought the men to sanity. Then the people of the district came out. They were told what had happened, told of the wondrous powers of the God incarnate Savior over the physical elements, over the very forces of hell itself. And they pondered the cost. The demons our Lord had cast out of those two men had been sent into the swine owned by the local farmers, and the swines had rushed down into the sea and perished in the water.
And the locals surveyed the cost, what it would mean to have a man like Jesus Christ in their neighborhood. And they came to their decision, and they made their choice. And they came to God incarnate and said, you've lost us our pigs. Please go. And the God whom the wind and the wave cannot resist, the God before whom spirits must yield, turned on his heel at the request of his creatures, and wait.
Oh friend, it would break your heart to tell it, but that is the love of God. He's given you free will. He will respect it to the limits of eternity. And should you do it, oh God forbid, should any one of us do it, turn to Jesus Christ and deliberately say, go off him. Jesus Christ will eventually go. With so much depending upon the way we use our choice, shall we not listen again to the words that Joshua spoke, and as God speaks them again in our ear, if you and I would see God's eternal heaven, choose you, choose you this day, whom we'll serve.
You'll notice the individuality of the command. Choose you. None can decide for the other. We play our football in teams. We work in our factory as team. When it comes to the destiny of our souls, we must before stand individually before God. Choose you.
You, sir. And you, man. And you, child. And I who stand before you. Now must we. Now indeed shall we. Choose. And you'll say before the clock gets round to the end of our service, whether we will or not, we shall have chosen, shall we not? To be invited to a party, to choose whether you will go or not, and not to bother to choose, is however to choose, isn't it?
Because in the end you don't get there. Choose you. You shall indeed. Every one of us shall. Before we go our ways tonight. We shall have chosen whether to serve God or some other idol. Choose you, says Joshua, at this day. And we pick up even now, after three thousand years, we pick up the urgency in that great national leader's voice.
Truth is there. For you don't reach that kind of experience of men and women from being a national leader like that, but what you discover that the gravest obstacle to men and women's salvation and their healthy spiritual state is this. The almost incessant and invariable tendency to procrastinate, to put it off, to idle, to imagine that somehow or other, we don't know quite how, but we hope that one day we shall turn up in God's heaven. So it cannot be.
We should not wander into heaven mistakenly, you know, going out for a walk one afternoon and suddenly ending up in heaven without intending it. Would we be there? The voice of every prophet, the voice of our blessed Lord himself, and of the Holy Spirit show us there is a choice to be made. Choose! And it has been made. Now. Oh friend, we trifle with eternity. If irresponsibly we say, but not tonight, not tonight, not tonight, some other day.
Choose you. This day, says Holy Scripture, whom you will serve. And here God points out to us very, very plainly what genuine conversion is. It is rightly said by ten thousand preachers, it ought to be said by more, that salvation on the one side is a completely free gift of God.
It is not by works. It is not by merit. It is a free gift offered free, gratis, and for nothing. For all who intro a repentance in the faith will humbly receive it. Yet, salvation means this, that I turn from serving one master, and thereafter I commit myself to serve another. Paul, talking to his Christian friends in Romans, writing to them on an occasion, says as followers- as follows, I do thank God for you, my brothers, my sisters, and the reality of conversion as witness to in your lives.
Oh, I thank God for it. Consider what you were before you found Christ. You were servants of sin, slaves to it. But now you have been saved, now you have been converted, now you have been born again, and that means this, that you have become the servants of righteousness and the servants of God. That's it. And ultimately, there's a choice between the two services. You serve sin, or you serve God. There's not an option that says you can be saved from ser- serving sin, but you don't need to serve God.
No, no. There is no such salvation. Conversion is that we turn to God from our idols to serve the living and the true God and to wait for his son from heaven. We'll say to me perhaps that I'm not all that bad, am I? We'll speak as if I were some shocking, blackened sinner.
But not really. I remember some many years ago being on a train just after the war in Britain, and I was traveling somewhere, I know not what, and opposite me sat a young gentleman, a student, I think. And in those far off days, we shared our rations. It was just after the war. He shared his sandwich with me, and I shared my cup of tea. Anyway, eventually things turned to talking about spiritual matters, and I happened to use the word sin. Oh, said he, sin. I don't believe in sin. Nobody takes my clothes of sin, said he. I said, did it know? No, he said, that's an old fashioned concept. I see. I said, tell me, old chap.
Suppose you were clever enough to make a motor car, and he thought he was. I said, suppose you made a motor car, and five times out of ten, when you sat behind the wheel, the old car went where you wanted it to go. But five other times, pull the wheel in whatever direction you wanted, it wouldn't take any notice and went off where it wanted to go itself. What would you do? He said, I should scrap it. I said, I thought so. I said, but suppose the dear thing nine times out of ten where you went where you wanted it to go, and only once in ten went where it wanted to go itself. What would you do to that? Oh, he said I should scrap the thing. He said, if I made a motor car, I should want it to go ten times out of ten where I wanted it to go.
I said, I thought so, and if it didn't go, scrap it, wouldn't. I said, you better watch out that God doesn't strap you too. The Bible charges us, we were made to do God's will, and God's charge against us is that all we like sheep of God's way, we've turned everyone to his own way. Well, just imagine the enormity of our sin, made by the transcendent Lord.
With no other raison d'être, no other reason for existence, we were made to do his pleasure, and we've had the impertinence to go our own way, regardless of him and his word. It isn't that the things we've done may themselves have been ever so terrifically bad, they may have been delightfully sophisticated. But if the bent of our life has been just to do our own way, then have we forfeited the very reason for which we were made.
Oh, friend, if tonight finds you still going your own way, pray be careful. For if you persist, God will have no option one day but to put you on the scrap heap of eternity. Choose you this day whom you will serve. What I admire about Holy Scripture, about Joshua's speech here, and what our blessed Lord said on similar topics in the New Testament, was the sheer honesty of Scripture.
And when the people, under the thrill of the eloquent preacher Joshua, responded by... And when the people, under the thrill of the eloquent preacher Joshua, responded by saying, oh yes, we'll serve the Lord, why? Everybody's doing it, so why shouldn't we? No, no, no, no, says Joshua. I'm not talking about stirring some temporary emotion. Serve the Lord. Do you realize what you embark on when you embark upon the life of serving God? You cannot serve God, he says, for God is a holy God and a jealous God.
And if you pretend to serve him and you play him false, he will discipline you severely. Let our hearts try to take it in, the wonder and the awesomeness of it, that God Almighty should love me. You see, in English, there is a sense in which you can work- use the word jealous of a bad emotion. But in older English and in the Hebrew from which this is taken, the jealousy is a very good attitude.
This kind of jealousy is the jealousy that a man feels for a woman whom he loves more than he loves himself. It is indivisible from love. It is the other side of love. A man who really loves his wife will be jealous if anybody else takes her away. Find me a man who, uh, is informed, do you know your wife Marguerite has gone off with a next door neighbor? And says, has she really? Well, you know, that's typical Marguerite. I don't mind that really, she'll come back one of these days.
Well, then yes, you can decide about the gentleman in question. He didn't love Marguerite. A man that was madly in love with his wife would be consumed with jealousy if anybody removed her. I tell you the wonder, God loves us like that. Oh, why should he love me like that? Why should he bother if I perished? How will you explain it? That I mean all that to God, that you mean it all to God, that he would get jealous over you.
Has he not millions of angels? And an archangel? Has he not millions of believers in him? Why should he get jealous? If someone or other took one of his people from him, but so it is. He's a jealous God. Therefore, if tonight, oh, let's get the matter clear. If tonight we decide to serve him, we shall receive the Savior. We shall be born again. We shall become one of the family of God. We shall be assured of heaven. It is all by grace. But if having done that, we go cold of heart and wander from him and are disloyal, God will be jealous.
The New Testament tells us bluntly, he will chastise us. No true believer will ever be lost. He will never abandon one, will God, who has trusted him through Jesus Christ our Lord. But be, be, be, do be well advised. If we trust the Savior and become a child of God, and we grow cold and worldly of hearts, and we wander from him and live for ourselves or live for the world, the God who saved us, the God whose love is a jealous love, the Bible says, will now chastise us until he bring us to a better frame of mind, and he will do it so that we shall not at last be condemned with the world.
You cannot play with the love of God. The love of God is not a toy thing. All the love of God is real. It will give you a whole heaven, but the love of God is a love such as gave Jesus Christ to the terrors of Calvary, that sin might be put away and we be forgiven and made holy. Our Lord said the same, didn't he? Sit down, said he. Don't you rush into conversion. Sit down if you will be my disciple, and first of all, you count the cost. For if anybody comes after me and doesn't surrender everything he's got, to me that is, and to my Lordship, he cannot be my disciple.
Oh friends, I preach you a God who gave everything he had. And his son demands this, that when we receive him, we hand everything over to him. Choose you then, this day, whom you will serve. Why should I serve him anyway? On that great historic occasion, Joshua reminded the people of history, what lay in their past.
He talked of Abraham, their great forefather, founder of the Hebrew race, how once upon a time he lived in Ur of Chaldees. Beautiful and resplendent it had been, it a glorious civilization. Its remains, as we watch, see them and look at them in the various museums of the world, still make us catch our breath with wonder at their, their skill, their artistry, their beauty. There came a point when Abram saw that sophisticated and wonderful as that, uh, civilization was, it was built on decaying foundation. And the God of glory appeared to him and showed him the eternal city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
And Abram caught sight of the wonder and reality of the great eternal city of God, built upon the foundations of what the Bible in its theological terminology would call justification by faith, built on personal faith between every man, woman, and child, personal faith in the Savior. And Abram went out, and for the rest of his life, set his compass steering upon the great imperishable eternity. Joshua reminded them of what God had done for them in Egypt, where once they had been slaves, chained to the endless labor and misery of their servitude, and how God in his power had broken those chains and set them free.
And as we hear it, we think of the great redemption that there is in Christ. Our chains may not be the chains of unreasonable employers who keep our noses to the grindstone in the factory. We've got more serious chains, the chains of s- guilt that hold us to our past. The chains of evil habit, the chains of fear, the chains of cowardice, the chains of pride and envy. And oh, if they keep us forever, oh, pray what you'll be like. Pray consider it. When pride and cowardice and lust have.
eaten their way into your very being now for the last ten million years of eternity. And you'll be chained in your own very personality. Christ has come to break those chains, to set us free, to be the men and women that God designed us to be, setting us free from all servitudes, external and internal, and making us at last genuinely free human beings conformed to the image of the Savior. Joshua reminded them of what Balaam had tried to do to them, how when they were on their way towards their inheritance, oh, Balaam, that wicked old rascal of a rogue, of a spurious religious priest, had been hired by the king of Moab to use his occult practices to try and curse Israel.
And God himself had come out of the shadows and told Balaam straight, curse Israel? You'll never curse Israel, for God has determined to bless them, and God is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should repent. If he said he'll bless them, bless them he will. But God's faithfulness remained unshakable. Why should I serve God? Oh friend, commit yourself to God today. He'll be loyal to you though hell itself rose up against you. Oh, hear the wonder of his blessing. He that hears my word and believes on him that sent me, says the blessed Lord Jesus, has everlasting life and shall not come into judgment, but is passed from death unto life.
Nothing shall ever separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Why should I trust him? Joshua said to Israel, has he not brought you into an inheritance? You didn't build the house, the fields weren't yours, but God has given it you free and for nothing. And I rehearse it in your ears again. Oh friend, there is an inheritance. Believe not me, believe God, believe his incarnate Son. There is an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and it fades not away.
It could be yours. For God waits to give it you as a gift, and with it now the part payment and the guarantee. For only receive his son, and tonight his son will give you the gift of God's Holy Spirit, the guarantee that one day you shall be brought to and possess the eternal. Choose you. Choose you this day, whom you will serve, and pray be courageous enough, will you not, to mark it.
When Israel decided, yes, and knowing all, now today we decide, we choose, we will serve the Lord. Joshua said, wait a minute. He wrote their words in a book. Then he raised a big stone, said he, this stone has heard your decision, remains forever a witness that you have made. Choose you this day. Would it help you to have the example of others? Then begin with me, no better than any else, but in light of all that God has done in Christ, I tell you my decision.
If never I had done it before, though I did it more than fifty years ago, I do it now. Here before you all, ladies and gentlemen, I do it now. As for me, I will serve the Lord. Oh, what a fool I should be not to. Write it in a book, if you like. Raise the stone and hold it against me forever. I have decided to follow Jesus. You sir.
You, madam. As for you, what will you do? Oh, what wonderful it would be if we could go around every one of us and now get the response of every heart. We cannot be, but God reads our hearts. As now we make our response to the Savior. Oh, you say, Mr. Preacher, I did it many years ago. Some of you, praise God, did it this fifty years ago and more. You say I could take you to the very spot where I decided, I said I will serve the Lord.
Yes, and you raised the stone, didn't you? And your name was carved on it, so to speak. How's the old stone getting on? You said standing firm, my good preacher, and everybody can read what's written on it. Joan Dog's body decided nineteen twenty five in the month of April to serve the Lord. Some of our stones have got a little bit wobbly in the course of time, like the stones in an ancient graveyard. Some of them, perhaps the moss of circumstance, the up and down of experience, has made the writing a little bit indistinct.
If that were so, should we not now in these moments come to the Lord and say, Lord, yes, I decided to serve you years ago. My stone of testimony has got a bit wobbly. Lord, tonight, help me to put it up straight. Help me to scrub the old moss off it, put aside the weeds so that all can see and know I belong to Christ. It could be that some of us have never decided before. It is beyond my powers to persuade you.
You, sir, you, madam. But now once more, in the name of God, in the name of the Savior who died for you, I call upon you. Choose you this day, this moment, whom you will serve. And if only we shall make that decision, along with others who have long since made it, we shall find what Philip Dobridge found those long years ago, and sing it meaningfully with all our hearts.
Oh, blessed day that fixed my choice on thee, my savior and my God. I, heaven, that heard that solemn vow that thou renewed shall daily hear, till in life's latest hour I bow and bless in death bond so dear. Happy day when Jesus washed my sins away. Choose you this day who.
whom you will serve.
