The Narrow Road and the Two Ditches

Joshua 1:7

If you’re not living in victory, you’re living beneath your privilege. Now, the Bible admits the possibility of defeat, but it never assumes the necessity of defeat. And if you’re not living in victory, you’re failing to live up to your birthright as a Christian.

Every good highway is mounded up and so there’ll be a ditch on the right and there’ll be a ditch on the left. Now you’re to stay on the highway, but you’re not to get off to the right; you’re not to get off to the left. God says to Joshua, “Joshua, you’re going somewhere, and I want you to have a good trip. I want you to have a prosperous trip wherever you go, so don’t turn to the right and don’t turn to the left.” God’s instruction for you when you got saved in order to bring you to Christ was, “Stop, turn right, and go straight.” As a pastor, I spend a lot of my time pulling good people out of ditches, because they have started out on the holy highway, and yet they somehow turn to the right or they turn to the left.

The holy highway is the way of faith. First of all, there is the word of faith. Secondly, there is the work of faith. Thirdly, there is the wait of faith. And all of those are experiences you’ll have on the holy highway. And if you’re not careful in each of those experiences, you’re going to get in a ditch.

You must hear the word of faith. Look in verse 8: “This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous [your way is the holy highway], then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.” And so, first of all, in any faith you must hear the word of faith – this book of the law.

Romans 10:17: “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Faith is not emotion. Faith is not praying about something till you feel warm around the heart and wet around the lashes and you get goose bumps and liver shivers. That’s not faith. Nothing wrong with emotion, but emotion is no guide.

Ill.—trying to find the Reno airport.  I really felt like I could get there one way, in spite of GPS.  But only once I went by the ‘word’ being spoken to me did I make it.

And intellect is not faith. You, you have sometimes an idea, this is a good idea. Now the Bible is not contrary to intellect, and the Bible is not contrary to reason. You don’t have to check your brains at the door when you become a Christian. But faith goes beyond reason. It may be rooted in reason, but it goes beyond reason. And where reason cannot wade, faith must swim.

The Bible says, “Lean not to your own understanding….” Now, if you are to stay on the holy highway, and you’re to live a life of faith, remember you must hear the word of God. Now, actually, there are two ways that you can hear the word of God, and both of them there in verse 7. There’s the written word. We call that the logos, L-O-G-O-S, logos. It means the written word. But there’s another word that’s also translated word, and it is rhema, a rhema. Now what is the rhema? That is the spoken word, like Jesus spoke this word to them. That’s not the logos; that’s the rhema. Now, one is the written word and the other is the word, the spoken word, the word revealed by the Holy Spirit. And God will speak to you both ways. God will speak to you out of the Bible, but God will also speak to you by the Holy Spirit.

For example, how do you know if you’re supposed to be a missionary in Colombia? You going to pick up the Bible and read it and is says, “Go to Colombia?” Not in there. So God has to speak out of the Bible. God has to give you the logos, but God also has to give you the rhema. And God speaks both ways. For example, in Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 17 the Bible says, “Take…. the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” The word logos is not used there. The word rhema is used there. That is, God speaking to you. Now look in verse 7 if you will.

Law = That’s the logos. But now look in verse 8: “This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night…” That’s the rhema where God begins to speak to you as you meditate on the word. God takes a word out of the word. Now, you see, the written word and the Holy Spirit they work together as you meditate on the word of God. And remember this: that the rhema will never contradict the logos. They will confirm one another and compliment one another. And this is the reason that you meditate on the word of God so God can speak to you after you read the word of God. It’s not just enough to get the facts, the logos; you’ve got to get the rhema, the Spirit of God taking the written word and making it real in your heart. And so he says in verse 8: “…to meditate therein day and night….”

There’s an old oriental fable about some men who were crossing the desert. And suddenly, a stranger appeared to them and said, “Before long you will cross a dry river bed. When you cross the dry river bed, get off your horses, go down to the river bed, and collect some stones. Get very many. Put them in your saddlebags. And in the morning you will be very happy and very sad.” So the stranger disappeared. They passed the dry river bed and they thought they would try it. And so they got down and picked up some of the pebbles in the nighttime in the dry river bed and put them in their pockets and in their saddlebags and went on. The next morning, when the sun came up, those stones had turned to rubies and diamonds and emeralds and precious gems, and they were very happy…..but very sad that they had not picked up more.

When we get into the word of God, we get stones of truth that God turns, through meditation, to jewels, precious treasures. We’re sorry we just didn’t get more of the word of God. And we get the logos, the word. And, and then it becomes the rhema, and God begins to speak to us out of the word of God as we meditate on God’s word and let God speak to us.

Now, over and over again, the Bible tells us we’re to meditate on the word of God. Psalm 1, verses 1-3: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD [that‘s the logos]; and in his law doth he meditate day and night [that’s the rhema]. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of waters, water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.”

Or Psalm 19 and verse 14: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.”

Psalm 119, verse 97: “O how I love thy law! It is my meditation all the day.” Now, God speaks to us in our conscious mind and God speaks to us in our subconscious mind. Now, you have a conscious mind and you have a subconscious mind. Have you ever talked about the fact that you go to sleep? Well, where do you go when you go to sleep? You say, “I’m going to sleep.” Well, where are you going when you go to sleep? Well, when you go to sleep, you go out of your conscious mind and, and you go into your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind takes over. It’s got to run the business for you while you’re asleep. I mean, it’s got to take care of you and keep you breathing, keep your heart pumping, keep everything going. There’s also a part of you that just kind of watches over you subconsciously while you’re asleep. And so you have a lot of things. And if you’re not careful, you’ll turn the burdens of your conscious mind over to your subconscious mind before you go to sleep. You have problems. You don’t deal with them, and you go to sleep with those things on your mind. Your subconscious mind is saying, “Hey, I’m not equipped to deal with all this. I’m going to hand it back.” And you wake up. Your conscious mind takes it over and you wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it because your subconscious says, “Hey, that’s not for me.” And it just kind of hands it back to you. If you do that kind of living, you wake up sometime in the morning more tired than before you went to bed because you’re just kind of wrestling with those things in your subconscious mind that goes between your conscious mind, your subconscious, back and forth. But have you ever gone to bed and maybe just had a problem and you committed to the Lord before you went to sleep and in the middle of the night it worked out? We call that sleeping on it and, and God just seems to speak to you while you’re asleep.

Make peace before bed.  Quote a verse.  Watch what happens.

“In his law doth he meditate day and night…”

I said you’re on a holy highway, and there are two ditches. And the devil doesn’t care which ditch he puts you in as long as you stay off the holy highway. Now, in the word of faith, what is the ditch to the right? The ditch to the right is presumption, presuming that you’ve heard God when you have not heard God. Now how can you do that? Well, with the logos, for example, you can take a verse out of context. You can take a verse of Scripture, be reading the Bible, and say, “Hey, I’ve got a word from God.” You have just taken a text out of a context and used it as a pretext, and, and you say, ‘I’ve heard from God.”

“Judas went out and hanged himself. Go and do thou likewise. And what thou doeth, do quickly.” That’s all Bible, but that’s playing fast and loose with the Scripture. It’s the ditch of presumption, presuming that you have heard the word of God, that you’ve heard the logos, but you’ve not really studied the Bible, or that you’ve heard the rhema. Now, friend, a verse or a voice – you’d better be very careful. You say, “God told me.” That’s scares me to death when people tell me that.

Jeremiah 17 and verse 9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

1 John chapter 4 and verse 1: “Beloved, believe not every spirit; test the spirits, try the spirits whether they be of God, because many false prophets are gone into the world.”

That’s the right hand ditch, presumption. There’s a left hand ditch. The left hand ditch is insensitivity, where you’re not listening. It’s not that you get a false word; you just don’t get any word at all because you have not reported for duty and you don’t listen to the Lord. Maybe you’re not reading the Bible and God is not speaking to you. Maybe you’re not having a quiet time and you’re not meditating on the word of God. You come to the prayer time and you say, “Listen, Lord, your servant is speaking,” when you ought to say, “Speak, Lord, your servant hears.” Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”

That’s the word of faith.  Next is the work of faith, verse 8: “that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written….”

James chapter 2, verse 17: “…faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.”

What is the ditch on the right hand side of the work of faith? It is hyperactivity. It is overzealousness. It is being righteous over much. We somehow get the idea that activity pleases God. It may not. It is obedience that God is looking for, not primarily activity. It’s just as dangerous to run ahead of God as it is to lag behind and not to follow Him.

The other ditch is just the opposite. On the left is passivity where you become passive and you say, “Well, bless God. God is just going to do it all. I am just resting in Jesus.” And they believe that resting in Jesus means doing nothing. And they believe that when you walk in the Spirit, you just kind of quit thinking. No! You’re to rest in the Lord, but not rust. Don’t you see how the devil would love to make a fanatic out of you in either way? Either put you over here in the ditch of hyperactivity, running around knocking things over and calling it serving the Lord, or over here just sitting in the ditch of passivity doing nothing and calling it resting in the Lord. Joshua did not take Jericho from a rocking chair.

Word of faith, work of faith…

Thirdly, there is the wait of faith. V. 9 “Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage: be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed;; for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” The Lord is your companion on the holy highway, but, generally, you’ll find there is a time span between the promise and the possession. God is telling Joshua, “I have given you this land for a possession, but if you’re not careful, you’ll lose courage. If you’re not careful, you’ll be dismayed.” You see, when you wait on God after you’ve heard the word of faith and you have begun to do the works of faith, then sometimes you don’t see things work out as you think they ought to and you tend to get off the holy highway again. You tend to turn to the right or you  tend to turn to the left. Now if you turn to the right, do you know what you do? You begin to manipulate things. You begin to try to make things happen because you can’t wait on God. And Satan will tell you, “Hey, God has called you and nothing is happening, so make it happen.” God called Moses to be a missionary. God called Moses to lead His children out of the land of Egypt into the land of Canaan. And Moses, rather than waiting on God, began to manipulate things and he killed an Egyptian. He started out to be a missionary; he became a murderer. He made a mess of everything and he stopped the work of God for about 40 years by trying to manipulate.  He did it again by striking the rock to make water come out.

Another example is Abraham. God gave Abraham a word. God said to Abraham, “Abraham, I am going to make you a father of many nations. Through you the whole world is going to be blessed. I’m going to give you a son in your old age.” But Abraham could not wait on God. He began to manipulate things. He and Sarah got together and said, “Well, we have this maid named Hagar. She’s fertile. I’ll go in. I’ll sleep with her. She’ll conceive. We’ll have a son. We’ll call it the son of promise.” What a dreadful thing he did.

He was on the holy highway. But now the devil puts him in a ditch. And that’s the ditch of manipulation. And I think we’ve all been there, pulling our radishes up by the roots, seeing how they growing, and then jamming them back in the ground and trying to make something happen rather than waiting on God. That’s one ditch. That’s the ditch to the right hand.

Do you know what the ditch on the left hand is? It’s hopelessness, just giving up. Joshua is warned against this in verse 9. “Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage: be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed; for the LORD thy God is with the whithersoever thou goest.”

The balanced Christian life stays in the middle of the road.