The Challenge of Service

Moses my servant is dead
Joshua 1:2

It is significant to note that the book that records Joshua's life and testimony opens with the death of a servant of God and closes with the death of a servant of God (24:29). No doubt there were many fears in the hearts of the people as their leaders were removed. But the Lord always has His man for the hour and for the situation. God buries His workmen, but the work of God will go on.

Israel was to learn that "all things work together for good to them that love God." How well do I read the book of God's providence? Do I trace His loving hand in all the affairs of life, in the shadows as well as the sunshine? Do I acknowledge that God is working out all things for His glory and for my good?

The Lord uses all types of people in widely varying ways. Too often we excuse our lack of service by lamenting that we are not like someone else. The excuse is vain. The Lord has a place for each one of us and a work for which His grace has uniquely fitted us. Let us faithfully serve Him according to His Will. Moses was used of God to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt and through the long and arduous journeyings of forty years in the wilderness. But Moses, the type of the law could not lead them into the promised inheritance. Only Joshua, the type of the Lord Jesus Christ, could do that. "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh" (Rom. 8:3).

By- Rev R.J. Beggs, Minister of Ballymena Free Presbyterian Church, N.Ireland, UK
Taken from the book "Footprints of Faith" edited by Rev Alan Cairns, a minister of the Free Presbyterian Church of North America

It is almost as presumptious to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
Phillips Brooks

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