By His grace, what the radical life of Christ should look in an American context!

Mark 1:41 – If we wonder who our God is and who our Savior is, His identity is found in this verse. “Moved with pity…touched him”. Jesus touched the leper. He touched the untouchable, the one that even people don’t even touch, yet He touched Him. He was moved by pity/compassion to touch and heal the leper.

So Christ is with us. He had pity/compassion on us and He touched the untouchable as God became a man in order to heal us of the destructive leprosy of sin.

1 Corinthians 3:6 – God gives the growth. We are not able to make the church grow. We are only able to be faithful to the call that God has placed upon our lives to go and make disciples. No one person of faith is any more important to the growth of the kingdom. God is the one who makes the growth.

Our walk with Christ should not be divided like so many things in this world are. We have Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and Greens. We have men and women. We have the upper, lower, and middle class. Yet with God, these things are not to be our focus, but rather God alone is to be our focus. He is the only one capable of sustainable growth.

Psalm 75:3 – God alone holds this world together. Nothing we do preserves this earth, or causes the sun to rise or set. God holds all things in order and we should willingly offer Him our thanksgiving at all times. We should live with continual gratitude.

Joshua 8:35 – Israel has just defeated Jericho and Ai to make their entry into the land of promise. What do they do to celebrate? They build and altar to offer burnt offerings and peace offering, then they read the word of God cover to cover.

Joshua knew that this nation would need to learn to depend completely and wholly on God and part of that is dependent on knowing what God has done and has promised. Such things can only be found in the word of God.

Joshua 9:14 – We would do well to seek the counsel of God on every decision we make, small or large, so that we are continually in His will. God desires that we abide in Him and follow after His will. Joshua is going to learn a hard lesson about God’s counsel in this episode of deception.

This world will seek to deceive us into compromise, into being unequally yoked to it and its ways. We must take care to always seek the counsel of God so that we may avoid compromises that will be costly to us.

What I find very interesting about this is that Joshua had just spent the prior night reading the entire word of God to Israel. Even with daily time spent in the word we are still susceptible to deception.