The one thing that we can be sure of about Joseph was that Joseph was a man who heard from God. His legacy is that he was a strong man because he was a man who heard God. Are we hearing God? God looked for a man that could hear his voice. That’s what God is looking for today--a man or woman who is fully committed to him and hears his voice. When we are fully committed to God, we are in tune with his voice and his word.

We can't always control what is happening around us, but we can always control what is happening inside us. The scripture teaches us that the fruit of the spirit is self-control, not circumstance-control. We need to get the attitude of Psalm 118 says, “this is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” The Lord makes the day, but what we make out of the day is what makes us. When we allow other people or circumstances to make or break our day, we are outsourcing our peace, joy, and confidence. We can't always control what happens in the day but we can control how we respond to it.

When we think about picking up a sword, we often think about attacking; however, scripture says to pick up the sword so we can stand. The Sword of the Spirit is the word of God. It is the right-now word that meets us where we are. When we’re under attack, the word of God is there to strengthen us.

Often we feel our spiritual fight is unfair; that we are always in the position of defending ourselves against the attack of the enemy. The enemy isn’t fair; he attacks every area of our life. But be encouraged that we are strong in the Lord, and he has given us spiritual weapons to fight back. We have the shield of faith that extinguishes the flaming arrows of the evil one. Faith in this context means trusting God when we don’t have answers. Often we focus on why we’re fighting the fight, but faith means trusting God in the fight when we don’t have answers.

In Joshua 3, the children of Israel are in a great battle. They are in a spiritual fight. God was with them and had delivered them from Egypt. But, they could not get delivered from Egypt within them. They couldn’t defeat the attitude, the mindset of fear, anxiety, and idolatry that were in Egypt. There was an entire generation that did not experience the promises of God because they could not defeat the spiritual battle.

There is nothing wrong with owning possessions, just as long as our possessions do not own us. The second guest, who recently purchased five yokes of oxen, let busyness get in the way of attending the banquet. There is nothing wrong with being busy, unless busyness steals what God wants to do in our lives. Finally, the third person blames their spouse as the reason why they cannot come. There is nothing wrong with relationships, but we don’t want relationships to stand in the way of everything that God has for us.

We are commanded to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, and mind. We must do so in order to live a life fully surrendered to the Lord. The word of God, his plans, and purposes will change the way we live. Our heart is essential in our faith and when it comes to our salvation. We are made righteous through our faith, through a believing heart. That’s why the enemy is working to take ground in our heart, to deceive or mislead us to harden our heart, to hurt our heart, to break our heart so that he can have our heart for his purposes.

Many of us may feel like we’ve been in exile this year. We may have thought we’d be in a better place by October 2020, just like the children of Israel who felt discouraged in this scripture. Psalm 85 was likely written after the Israelites returned from exile back to Jerusalem after 70 years. They thought that they could return to a pre-exilic state, but there was no going back. Nothing was going to be normal. Similar to the Israelites, we too may be facing disappointment.