Take Heart! God Goes With Joshua 1:1-9

Take Heart! God Goes With
Joshua 1:1-9
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
August 16, 2026

After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord spoke to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’s assistant, saying, “My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites. Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, as I promised to Moses.  From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the River Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory.  No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you. Be strong and courageous, for you shall lead this people to possess the land that I swore to their ancestors to give them. Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful. I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

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In the hymn you just heard the choir sing (“Promise of Joy” by Joseph Martin), you heard some beautiful imagery: a rainbow hiding inside a teardrop, a stream in the desert, peace somewhere down inside the storm. It occurs to me that every one of those pictures works the same way. The gift is inside the hard thing. Not instead of it. Inside it. The rainbow doesn’t replace the tear. The stream doesn’t make the desert stop being a desert. It just . . . runs through it anyway.

Which—if you were here last week—should sound familiar. A voice in the storm. Four in the morning, wind still howling, and a voice. That’s been the whole point so far. And this morning it’s a promise made to a scared man on a riverbank, looking across at a land he never asked to be in charge of.

Joshua, chapter one. And I have to tell you, the opening of this chapter gets me every time. Five words. “Moses, my servant, is dead.”

That’s it. That’s how the book starts.

Moses. Think about who Moses was to these people. The only leader they’d ever had. The man who stood in front of Pharaoh, the man who lifted his staff over the sea, the man who (Scripture actually says this) talked with God face to face, like you’d talk with a friend. Forty years of wandering, and through all of it, one constant. Moses.

One verse. Gone.

And across the river? The promised land. Which sounds great until you remember that “promised” is not the same as “familiar.” Nobody’s been there. There’s no map. And the last scouting report mentioned giants. So.

Now, a little while ago—before our kids headed off to their own worship—we blessed our students and teachers for the new school year. And while we were doing it, honestly, I was thinking: those kids might understand Joshua chapter one better than anybody else in the building. Look at what we just prayed them into. New classroom. New teacher. A locker combination they are absolutely certain they’ll forget by Tuesday. Some of them are walking into a whole new school where they don’t even know how to find the cafeteria yet. The year they’d finally figured out? Done. Over. Fourth grade is behind them, and there’s a river between them and whatever’s next.

Moses is dead, so to speak.

And really, the only difference between those children and the rest of us is that they’re young enough to admit they’re nervous. We’ve just gotten better at hiding it. (I’m not sure that’s progress.)

Because every one of us is standing on some riverbank this morning. I’d bet on it. So let me hand you two questions to carry with you for the rest of the service. You don’t have to raise a hand. You don’t have to tell your spouse, or me, or anybody. Just name them—quietly, honestly, between you and God.

First one: what Jordan River have you crossed recently? The move. The diagnosis. Retirement. The divorce. The first year without them. You made it across—you’re on the far bank—but you’re still finding your legs. I see some faces. You know.

Second one: what Jordan River is ahead of you? The one you can hear from where you’re standing. Maybe the one you’ve been standing beside for a good while now, just . . . watching the current.

Hold onto those. I’m coming back for them, I promise.

Alright. Now listen to what God actually says to Joshua out there on that bank. There are two refrains, wound around each other, over and over.

Verse 6: “Be strong and courageous.” Verse 7: “Only be strong and very courageous.” Verse 9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous.” Three times in just four verses.

And wound right through it, the other refrain, worded a little differently each time. Verse 5: “I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you.” Verse 9: “The LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”

You see it? There’s our part, and there’s God’s part. Our part: be strong and courageous. God’s part: I will be with you. And here’s the thing I find strange—and wonderful—about our part. It’s a command. God doesn’t ask Joshua how he’s feeling about all this. Doesn’t take his emotional temperature. Courage shows up in this passage as an order. Which tells you two things, I think. It must be possible. And it must not be a mood.

And why say it three times? Well—apparently once is never enough. God repeats Godself. Not because God forgets. Because we do. Joshua’s going to need to hear it again at Jericho. And again the morning after the first battle goes badly—and one will. And, friends, that’s why we say the same refrain in this room every single week of this series. You see, sometimes words have to be re-heard to stay true in us. I need them re-said to me, anyway. Maybe you’re stronger than I am.

Last week I borrowed two words from a theologian named Paul Tillich, and I told you they’d be back. Here they are. Courage, Tillich said, isn’t a feeling. It’s an action—in spite of. In spite of the wind. In spite of the current. And notice—the text never says Joshua stopped across the Jordan. Feelings don’t take orders.

Feet do.

Which brings me—and I grinned when this occurred to me during sermon prep, so bear with me—to a lion.

I chose a lion as the symbol of this “Take Heart” series. Lions are familiar symbols of courage. We spoke of a lion last week: Aslan, the Christ figure in the Chronicles of Narnia series.

Let’s think about another lion this week. Remember the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz? Poor guy is convinced he’s broken, defective, because he feels afraid. So he joins the little pilgrimage down the yellow brick road to ask the wizard to give him some courage. And here’s the joke the story plays on him—and I’d call it a holy joke: the entire way there, he keeps doing brave things while scared out of his mind. He faces the witch. He charges into her castle to rescue Dorothy—knees knocking, tail between his legs, going anyway. And at the end, the wizard pins a medal on him and tells him the truth. He never lacked courage. He lacked the definition. He thought courage meant not being afraid. Turns out courage meant the thing he’d been doing the whole time: going forward scared.

That’s Tillich with fur on it. In spite of.

But—and I need you to stay with me here, because this is where the gospel says more than Oz does—look at what the wizard actually gave him. A medal. “It was in you all along.” Courage as self-discovery. And listen, that preaches. That’ll hold you up for about a week. Right up until your river gets deep enough.

Joshua doesn’t get a medal. Joshua gets a companion. God’s answer to Joshua’s fear is not “look within, son, you’ve got this.” It’s “I will be with you wherever you go.” The Lion got a definition. Joshua got a Presence. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had seasons where a definition wasn’t going to cut it. You and I are not sent across our rivers with a pep talk about untapped inner bravery. We’re sent with Someone.

Okay—how close is this Someone? Because “God is with you” can float around as a greeting-card phrase if we let it. Here’s where the Hebrew gets almost physical. Lean in with me a minute.

When your Bible prints “the LORD” in those small capital letters—and it does, all through this passage—it’s translating God’s personal name. Four Hebrew letters. YHWH. There are no vowels in ancient Hebrew, the original language of the Old Testament. Israel considered that name, YHWH, so holy they wouldn’t say it out loud at all. And rabbis and teachers down the centuries have loved to point out what those four letters sound like if you try to pronounce them with no vowels. They don’t make a word. They make a breath. Yh . . . wh. In. Out.

The name of God—in this old, beloved reading—can’t be spoken. Only breathed.

Now, is that a preacher being poetic? Maybe a little. But Scripture makes the connection all by itself, so I don’t feel bad. The Hebrew word ruach means breath, and wind, and Spirit—one word, all three. The Greek does the same exact thing: pneuma: breath, wind, Spirit. And when the risen Jesus gives his disciples the Holy Spirit in John’s Gospel—you remember what he does? He doesn’t hand them anything. He breathes on them.

So when God tells Joshua, “I will be with you wherever you go”—how close is “with”? As close as your breath. You’ve carried the presence of God in and out of your body—somebody who’s better at math than me can check this—something like twenty thousand times since yesterday morning. And most of us never noticed once.

The psalmist noticed. Psalm 139 is basically Joshua 1:9 turned into poetry:

Where can I go from your Spirit (your ruach, your breath) where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to heaven, you’re there. If I make my bed in the depths—there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea—even there your hand will lead me. Your right hand will hold me fast.

The farthest limits of the sea. That’s the psalmist’s Jordan. And the discovery—I love this—is that there’s no far bank where God isn’t already standing. “Wherever you go” turns out to have no exceptions. None.

Would you try something with me? Feels a little odd, but humor your pastor. Just once, all of us: one slow breath. In . . . and out.

That’s how far away God is.

One more thing. And this one’s for those of you whose riverbank doesn’t feel like an adventure at all. It feels like a loss. Because let’s not rush past verse one. Moses is dead. Joshua isn’t just facing a new land—he’s grieving. An old leader. An old chapter. An old life.

There’s a writer named Parker Palmer who wrote a book entitled Let Your Life Speak. In it, Palmer uses an image that has never let go of me. When a door closes in our lives, Palmer says, the world doesn’t end. The whole world is still there—wide open—behind us. But too often, we don’t turn around. We stand there facing the closed door. Staring at it. Replaying it. Pressing on it like maybe it’ll give. Sometimes for years. And everything God has next for us is at our back the whole time—and we can’t see one bit of it, because our nose is pressed up against the door that shut.

You know your door. The job. The marriage. The health. The person. And hear me—I’m not making light of it. The door is real and the grief is real. When Moses died, Israel wept for thirty days, and God didn’t rush a single one of them. Grief gets its season. It should.

But then there’s verse two. Which is God—gently, I think . . . I hear it gently—taking Joshua by the shoulders and turning him around. “Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise—cross over this Jordan.” Not “pretend it didn’t close.” Not “it didn’t matter.” It mattered. Arise anyway. Turn around. The land is in front of you.

And so am I.

So. Those two questions. Take them back out.

That Jordan you already crossed—look back at it honest for a second. Did you really cross it alone? All the way over—wasn’t there breath in your lungs you didn’t put there? Wasn’t there a hand holding you tighter than you knew at the time? Some of you didn’t see it until years later. But you see it now.

And the Jordan ahead of you—hear this—the promise hasn’t changed tense. It’s not “I was with you.” It’s I will be.

Remember our part and God’s part? What’s our part? Be strong and courageous. Feet moving. Knees knocking permitted—encouraged, even; it means you’re paying attention. What’s God’s part? “I will be with you.” Wherever. No exceptions. Close as breath.

To our students starting school this week—pray for them when you get home, would you? And to every grown-up in this room starting something, or ending something, or standing on a bank staring at the water: you may cross scared. That’s allowed. That’s normal. The Lion did. Joshua did. I have. Just don’t you cross it believing you’re alone—because the God whose very name sounds like breathing is already breathing in you, mid-river, all the way to the other side.

Church, take this to the bank:

When the storm rages . . . Take Heart: God Shows Up.

When the future threatens . . . Take heart: God Goes With.

Amen.