Joshua chapter 14. We'll read parts of chapter 14 and chapter 15 here today. We're going to start our reading in Joshua chapter 14 beginning in verse 6. Listen to the word of your great God. Then the children of Judah came to Joshua in Gilgal, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite said to him, You know the word which the Lord said to Moses, the man of God, concerning you and me in Kadesh Barnea. I was forty years old when Moses, the servant of the Lord, sent me from Kadesh Barnea to spy out the land, and I brought back word to him as it was in my heart. Nevertheless, my brethren who went up with me made the heart of the people melt, but I wholly followed the Lord my God. So Moses swore on that day, saying, Surely the land where your foot has trodden shall be your inheritance and your children's forever, because you have wholly followed the Lord my God. And now behold, The Lord has kept me alive, as he said, these 45 years. Ever since, the Lord spoke this word to Moses while Israel wandered in the wilderness. And now, here I am this day, 85 years old. As yet, I am as strong this day as on the day that Moses sent me. Just as my strength was then, so now is my strength for war, both for going out and for coming in. Now therefore, give me this mountain, of which the Lord spoke in that day. For you heard in that day how the Anakim were there, and that cities were great and fortified. It may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall be able to drive them out, as the Lord said. And Joshua blessed him, and gave Hebron to Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, as an inheritance. Hebron therefore became the inheritance of Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, the Kenizzite, to this day, because he wholly followed the Lord God of Israel. And the name of Hebron formerly was Kirgith-Arba. Arba was the greatest man among the Anakim. Then the land had rest from war. And then chapter 15 verses 1 through 12 gives you sort of the large scale look at the land that would be given to the people of Judah, the outlying points, the boundaries as it were. And then we come back to the story of Caleb again in verse 13. Now to Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, he gave a share among the children of Judah, according to the commandment of the Lord to Joshua. Namely, Kirjeth Arba, which is Hebron. Arba was the father of Anak. Caleb drove out the three sons of Anak from there, Shishai, Ahiman, Talmai, the children of Anak. Then he went up from there to the inhabitants of Debir, Formerly the name of Debir was Kirjithseffer. And Caleb said, he who attacks Kirjithseffer and takes it to him, I will give Aksa, my daughter as wife. So Othniel, the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb took it and he gave him Aksa, his daughter as wife. Now it was so when she came to him that she persuaded him to ask her father for a field. So she dismounted from her donkey and Caleb said to her, What do you wish? She answered, Give me a blessing. Since you have given me the land in the south, give me also springs of water. So he gave her the upper springs and the lower springs. Thus ends the reading of God's word. Well, this is part two. And if you were not here last week, you'll remember, you'll need to know if you were here last week, you'll remember that we talked about how in the first part of the book of Joshua, the people went in to possess their possession. And yet, at the beginning of chapter 13, we see that there was still much land to be possessed. See, God gave them their possession, and yet they still had to go and possess it. And the time came, once the big battles were fought in the north and the south, the strongholds of the inhabitants of the land of Canaan had been broken. Now the people would have the land divided among them, and the people would need to go and take possession of those lands. They would have to drive out the people who remained. And Caleb is given as that Latin phrase, exempli gratia. We put it EG in our writing, right? He is the EG of the rest of the book of Joshua, the example for the rest of the children to follow as they would go in and take possession of their particular city. Now, of course, their battle in that day was a fleshly battle. They had to kill or be killed. And yet, while our battle has changed, our battle is spiritual. We're given to take the land, that is the whole world, by proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, we see that the principle is still true. If we do not take possession of land, of the world, it will, in fact, be taken from us and from our descendants. And we see that happening through the Book of Kings, right? The people ultimately did not step up and possess the possession, but they let the Canaanites live and there were continual problems with the worship of false gods, ultimately resulting in the people losing their inheritance as they were sent into captivity. And of course, for the people in that day and for us now, it's not an easy battle. It's much more comfortable many times to simply live and let live. to assume that, well, the folks who live next to us, in their case, they're nice enough, we'll let them live. We think, well, we're believers, we live next to unbelievers, but that's just the way it is, and things probably won't change, and we can live next to them. We can simply wait for the Messiah, as Caleb could have said. But the reality of the matter is that if we do that, the forces of this world, the love of this world, The things of this world will overtake perhaps us and surely our descendants. So the battle, the struggle is very real and we need the motivation of one like Joshua to help us remember to go take the land and to be motivated to go take the land by proclaiming the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. Well, last time we looked at how Caleb claimed the promises. He recalled the history of how God had given him grace to follow the Lord and he was grateful And then in verse 12 we see that he comes to Joshua and he asks specifically for this particular mountain. And we want to look and see today at how it is exactly that he is a model in terms of going to take the land. And I want you to see several things that Caleb did that we are to emulate. The first thing I want you to see is that he requested the promised land and he requested his responsibility. You remember here that he's asking for the land of the giants, those biggest of the enemy that still remain. He had seen them when he spied out the land many years before, and now he hadn't had his fill of them. He wanted yet another shot at driving out these inhabitants of the land. So he comes and he requests, look at verse 12, he says, now therefore give me this mountain of which the Lord spoke on that day. If there was ever a person in the children in the nation of Israel who deserved a decent American middle class retirement, it was Caleb. And yet Caleb doesn't ask for it. He asks for the greatest challenge that remains. And in this we see his energy, don't we? 85 years old, but he hasn't had his fill of his calling because God still left him here on the earth. And as long as God leaves him here on the earth, He's going to keep going forward. So you see his energy in this request. It's easy for us to come up with all kinds of excuses, isn't it? For us not to press forward and to take the land. And often we say we're weary or we're too busy. Well, Caleb comes and he comes with great energy. And you, brothers and sisters, need to follow in his footsteps. And as you do that, you're following in the footsteps of none other than Jesus Christ. We see the tireless energy of Jesus here on the earth. Of course, he became tired, but he spent himself for people, giving himself to the point of exhaustion. And Caleb was ready to do the same as he engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Well, as he makes this request, the other thing you see about his request when he says, this mountain, you see his confidence. He loves the challenge of facing the swaggering Anakin. He seems to want that challenge more than anything else. He comes with a confidence, but not a cockiness. He's the kind of person who saw the glass as being half-filled, and needing to be filled the rest of the way, and believed that God could do it. And so he asked God to allow him to participate in that. So as we go forward, we need to remember that God has already given us the possession. He's given us the land as an inheritance. He's promised to bring people. And we ought to be confident because all we're called to do is possess our possession. And yet it requires energy and it requires confidence. Do you have that sort of confidence when you talk to others? And, of course, we're having an evangelistic function in several months, three nights of evangelistic preaching. Do you believe that God really will bring people and that he'll bring hearts? Well, Caleb, you look at him, he had a certain confidence that God would do what he had promised. Look at it again in verse 12. He recalls what things were like, and then at the end of verse 12 he says, There's confidence there, but it's confidence with humility. Notice that he doesn't make God his errand boy. He doesn't say, then this will be the result. There's a certain faith here when he says, it may be that I shall be able to drive them out. He wasn't putting God in a box. He's simply calling on God to do that which God had promised. It's not a mathematical sort of faith where he says, if I input one plus one, then two must be the result. We could come to an evangelistic endeavor like this And we could say, well, we're going to do our part. We'll invite people to come and hear the gospel. And if nothing happens that we want to happen, well, we'll know this idea doesn't work. It just doesn't work and we'll give up. Will this work? Will we see fruit from inviting people to come and hear the gospel? I don't know. Maybe not. Caleb comes and he recognizes that it may not necessarily be God's will for him personally to be the one who drives out those Anakim. He simply says, it may be that the Lord will be with me. And yet, don't you see in that a certain confidence that God does delight to bless his people and to bless their efforts? He's not putting God in a little box He's recognizing that God's free to do what God will do, but he wants to be part of it, and he's pretty sure that as he engages by faith that the Lord will bless his endeavor. What else was he going to do? Not trust God? What else will you do? Not trust God? Not obey? That's really the other kind of alternative, isn't it? And when you look at it that way, all we can do is throw our energy into requesting this opportunity that we might be able to serve God. Well, first of all, you see that he requests this opportunity. The second thing I want you to see is in chapter 15, verse 13, that he drove out the giants. Not only did he request the opportunity, but he drove out the giants. It's put here for you very simply. I'm sorry, it's verse 14. Caleb drove out the three sons of Anak from there, Shishai, Ahiman, and Talmai, the children of Anak. We don't know exactly what he did, how he engaged in this work, but no doubt it was difficult. No one else really seemed to want the job, but Caleb did, and he went about the hard work of driving out these giants. He stepped forward to claim that which was promised to him, and God the Father was pleased to give it to him. We see Jesus Christ doing the same thing, don't we all? Jesus had the guarantee. that he would be rewarded by the Father for the work that he did on behalf of his people. And we see a sampling of that, a type of that here in Caleb, who went forward by faith. He obeyed the command that was given to him. Now, just a couple of things to observe from his driving out the giants. Notice that he took this responsibility individually. He took this individually. He didn't wait for the federal government to come and drive out the anarchy. He stepped up and he did it himself. He didn't wait for others who were around him to do it. He stepped forward and did it himself. We often extol the virtue of being a corporate body of Christ. And it is a blessed thing that we operate and that we live and we move and we work together. But there is a certain place in laboring in the kingdom for you as an individual to take action. And I think it is significant that we do have Caleb here taking action individually. This is not something that we are engaging in, in a sense, right? We are, but it's something that we can only do if you, singular, do it. The land could only be taken if you, Caleb, go to take the land. He didn't rely on others, he did it himself. So he's the one who took this piece of the land. We're told that he himself went up and he drove out these three sons of Anak. And in our evangelistic endeavors, it will require you, individually, comfortable with it as you are or not. It requires you taking action to go and to take the land by talking to people, by inviting people, by caring for people, by having people in your home such that you can invite them to come. and to hear the gospel. It will require effort on your part. And as we think about the strategy that we have, in a very real sense, embraced as a congregation, one of the things we see is that it requires you going out to where you are. There's a sense in which we're not well-equipped to reach people who are close to the church. Several strategic things work against that. One is that the church is the people of God, and for the most part, the church doesn't live close to here. We're not near the Jerusalem, as it were. But you have gone out and you live in different places. Secondly, just pragmatically speaking, we're arranged by our schedule as a commuter church. We meet in one solid block of time on the Lord's Day. We gave thought to changing that, and we decided, no, this is where the Lord has put us. People live far away. This is the most efficient and best way for us to worship together and minister one to another. However, that's less than ideal in terms of a number of different things, and when you have more of a community church, a more ideal sort of way to meet would be in two separate meetings. But we are particularly structured to reach out, not so much to the local community, as much to those who live in your neighborhoods. So we need to be careful as we think about our evangelistic endeavors, remember where we're most advantageously positioned, tactically speaking, to reach. It's not here. It's where you live and it's where you work. It's the places of inheritance to which you have been assigned or to which you have chosen to go. And you have to take the responsibility to take the gospel to those places and then to invite others to a church that is friendly and accommodating to those who live farther away. Tactically speaking, those are the ones we're equipped to reach. And it requires the Caleb's, like you, to go and to minister and to invite and to bring those people in to hear the gospel. And that, of course, involves perhaps picking people up, driving them, perhaps feeding them, caring for them. and then listening to them and their needs. And you can do that in your homes. And we'll get together and we'll see the gospel preached for three consecutive nights. And the Lord may very well be pleased to use that, but I'm quite confident of this. That's not the only thing he will use. The thing that he will use perhaps even more is your witness on a day-to-day level and week-to-week in your interaction with people. So Caleb took a specific strategy and that strategy involved his his own blood, sweat, and tears. He took that responsibility on himself and the Lord was pleased to bless him. And we need to ask that God would give each of you boldness and grace as we would go out to take the land where we are best positioned to take it. So pray for one another in that and then pray for me as my part of the struggle in a sense is to preach the gospel those three nights. Pray for me and for my family, that the word of the Lord would go through boldly and convincingly through me." Well, the third thing we see here is not only that he requested the opportunity, that he took the land, thirdly, he involved his family. He involved his family. Now, if you just use your sanctified imagination and you think back to verse 12 of chapter 14, you can almost Imagine Caleb, 85 years old, probably doesn't have a lot more time left on this earth. He has his pick of any of the land that Judah's being given. He can have the corner office as it were. He can have the luxury suite. And he steps up and what does he ask for? Well, he asks for the greatest challenge that remains. And again, with your sanctified imagination, you can sort of envision the children and maybe the grandchildren peering over his shoulders going, Grandpa, what are you thinking? What are you signing us up for now? Don't you realize that you're 85? You're giving, you're claiming the hardest responsibility and you're going to die and you're going to leave the rest to us. We have the opportunity to take the most fertile vineyards, you know, the places with the in-ground swimming pools that are already set for us. And you pick this mountain with the greatest enemies? And the answer is yes. And you see then in chapter 15 how he leads his family into this endeavor. They have one of the most interesting marriages in all of scripture. Caleb was so convinced that God wanted them to take the land that he puts up his daughter to be the wife of whoever would take Kirgizsephir, which is, again, one of the most impenetrable cities. And Othniel steps up to the challenge and he takes the city. and Caleb gives his daughter, Axa, to Othniel to be his wife. You might say, well, that sort of an arranged marriage seems a little crude, doesn't it? It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that we would want to engage in, and yet we need to understand that culturally, things are a bit different. Matthew Henry writes this, he says, although it is the office of parents to settle their daughters in life, they are not permitted to exercise tyrannical power and assign them to whatever husbands they think fit without consulting them. And he proposes that because of the way the proposal is made, that Aksa must have been involved in this. And sometimes when we read a passage like this, we look at it and we think, well, Othniel is the big winner in this, right? He's promised a reward if he would engage in the battle, and he goes and he's rewarded. But perhaps a better way to think about this is Caleb having great concern for his daughter and wanting to provide only the best for her. Who's the big winner? Well, probably ultimately, Axa. Think of all the other guys that she could have perhaps married. Her father sets up a competition, as it were, to make sure she gets only the very best. Those that would go forth by faith to take out a stronghold. How could she pass up an offer like this? You see, don't feel sorry for poor Aksa. She's getting the very best. She's the one who wins the trophy. And so Caleb, in doing this, he presents a reward for those in his family who would step forth by faith to take the land. Well, you see the application that's here for us. We need to be involved in bringing our children to participate in this. Children, when we seek to take the land and tell people about the glorious things that Jesus Christ has done for us by going to the cross, by rising from the grave, and by ruling today, it's a thrilling thing, not just for parents, not just for grandparents, but for children. to be involved in. Out of the mouths of babes, the truths of God are proclaimed. And children, we want you to be inviting your friends to come and to hear the Gospel as well. And parents, you need to be encouraging your children, no matter what age, to be involved in this process. Because it's through proclaiming the Gospel, inviting others to come and to hear the Gospel, that they too will be blessed. You see, it's quite a faulty line of thinking for us to think that if we simply believe the right things, hold the right convictions, and pass them on to our children, that they will take those on to the next generation. We do need to be doing those things, but if we're not out taking the land, if our children don't see us engaging in evangelism, What reason do they really have to believe that Jesus is King and that His reign extends to every corner of the earth, even the home in which the unbeliever around the corner lives? Our children need to see this. If we don't go out and possess the land, the possession will be taken from us. And we can look around in the Reformed Presbyterian Church and people like me who come from families that have been in this particular church for generations We can, on the one hand, give thanks that God has been gracious in preserving these truths and handing them down to us. And yet, I can also go back up the family tree and see where many, many, many, even most, have not only left the Reformed Presbyterian Church, but even the faith itself. Why is that? Well, I believe in part it's because parents who were believers were content simply to try to keep the truth for themselves and pass it on to their children. And what happens practically speaking? Well, the same sort of thing that happened in Caleb's day. You're out there perhaps on your own, some distance from other believers, perhaps even in the local church, others of like mind in other churches in the presbytery. And what happens? Well, the economic pressures begin to get to you. You go where there are jobs to be had, where the gospel may not be proclaimed in truth. You begin to develop friendships, and you begin to adopt the ways of the world. And perhaps there's someone who's reasonably nice in the neighborhood or in the community. One of the children marries them. The same sort of thing happened in Caleb's day, and the same sort of thing has happened in the generations leading up to ours. which is in part why the church has not continued to grow. You will not keep your children in the church and your grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They will not be kept in the faith unless you are actively involved in going out to possess the possession. It's simply the nature of how God has made the world to work. So you need to embrace Jesus Christ by faith and boldly follow in Caleb's footsteps by asking for the opportunity, by going and taking the land, proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ to your neighbors and involving your children in that process. Well, the final thing to see here is that Caleb served as an example to Israel and the church forever. I've made this point already, but you see that he comes at this crossroads in the book of Joshua where the land is getting ready to be divided. And the first part of chapter 15 gives the big dimensions of Judah's inheritance. But then beginning in verse 20, you see that the Lord begins to give the inheritance within those outer boundaries. He starts naming cities where people would live. And so Joshua is to be an example to those who would go and who would live in the city. I want to give careful attention to this reading and add a little bit of a twist to it to give you a sense of the people, what they would have been thinking as they were listening to the land that would be allotted to them. Listen beginning in verse 20. This was the inheritance of the tribe of the children of Judah according to their families. The cities at the limits of the tribe of the children of Judah toward the border of Edom in the south were Kabzeel, Eder, Yager, 26580 Evergreen Road, Kena, 29011 Merrick, Dimona, 16729 Cedarama Drive, Adada, 2667 Oxford Drive, Kadish, 4495 Harold, Hazor, 1915 Baldwin Avenue, Ifnan, 1380 Glen Cross Drive. Ziff, 19421 Hilton. Tellem, 958 Woodingham. Bealoth, 27436 Everett. Hazor, 1901 Plymouth Road. Hadada, 13287 Grand Haven Drive. Kiriath, 4825 Woodland Avenue. Hezron, 80 Algonzi Avenue, Amam, 3781 Smith Court, Shima, 2397 Louise Street, Mawada, 27675 Cheyenne Drive, Hazar Gada, 2334 Perrysville Avenue, and so on and so forth. You see, it would have been quite an exciting thing in one sense for people to wait and to hear my address. You see, this is where I fit in. I'm to be a son of Caleb, I'm to follow in his footsteps, and my address is in the list. You see, this isn't something that's simply for Caleb or the people on the outside, but this is for me where I live. This is my calling as one of the children of Israel, as a son or daughter of Jesus Christ. This is my calling. And it's going to take boldness. When I go into that address, when I go into that city, it won't be easy because wicked people of other persuasions of different worldviews will be there. People who don't want to hear this truth. And yet Jesus has said, this is your possession. So go and possess it. Take the weapons of warfare that God has given to you. Have your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. And pray for all the saints as you do this, that God would give us boldness and grace as we would interact with other people. This is the calling that's before us, brothers and sisters. This is the reason this passage is given, so that we might be encouraged, built up, that we might have a desire to be sons of Caleb and to step forward and boldly take possession of that which God has given to us. So in the coming weeks, we want to continue to pray that God would bring unbelievers and we'll be laboring to equip you with things like flyers, handouts, other ways in which you can engage in the struggle. And let me just encourage you by saying that God is pleased to work in this way, even in our own day and age. You might feel like, well, this really isn't my gifting, this isn't my strength. You think Caleb felt like it was his gifting in an innate way to take out giants? I don't think so. He went forth by faith. to do that which he knew he was called to do. And I would just uphold before you one example in the modern day, a man, a couple that many of you know, John and Pam Hansen, who live in Fairland, Indiana. They live about a half an hour, if not more, from the Southside Indianapolis Church in our presbytery. They've lived there for some 20 years, and they're not extraordinary people. They have six children. They're very busy. They have aging parents on both sides of the family that they've been taking care of for some 15 years now that have involved renovations to their home to make room for aging parents, all kinds of medical care that they've had to provide for their parents. They've homeschooled. They've had children in public school. They're busy in a number of different ways. But one of the things that they've committed to doing over the last 20 years is to host a Bible study once a year in their home. and they simply try to get to know their immediate neighbors. Even if they're not engaged with them in any other way through the course of life, they just try to get to know their neighbors with the goal that once a year they'll have an evangelistic study. Often it happens, sometimes it doesn't happen. But you'll also begin, as I give you some names of other families, to recognize these others who, over the years, they've seen come to faith in Christ. People who live just across the street. You may know the Service family. You may know the Elder family. You may have, at conferences, met the Ecret family. You may have met the Hardwicks. And there are others as well. Now, if you think about that, that's four families that I know of that are in the South Side Church. That means that once every five years in all of their endeavors, they've seen someone come to faith or come to faith and then go on to join the church. That means four years out of five, they haven't succeeded. But faithfully, over 20 years, they have endeavored to possess their possession. to take the land. And the Lord has been pleased to bless that and to cause a small community of believers to be gathered right there around their intersection, their little lot in life in their tiny little town. And the Lord has used that as a blessing to many people. And the irony of it is, last night we were gathered for a graduation party and one of our young people had a t-shirt on that said Triton High. And Triton High is the school that's in that community. You see, our young people have had the blessing now, in part because of the faithfulness of the Hansons, to labor year by year, to have a Bible study. The Lord has raised up other families who've been involved in presbytery activities. And we might even go so far as to say that the evangelistic endeavors of the Hansons, simple as they have been, have clothed our own young people. You see, the influence reaches far and wide. simple faithfulness, desiring to take possession of the possession. And if you need help in taking possession of your particular nook or cranny of life. Look for it among other believers. Invite others to participate with you in a study as you invite others into your home. That is, invite others from the church. Do what it takes, but simply be faithful to be a son or a daughter of Caleb. And the Lord will bless that, because God has promised that he is the one who is faithful. This is the great work that we are to be about as sons and daughters of Jesus Christ. And as we look forward to our evangelistic work later this summer, I pray that you would be personally involved, that you yourselves would be sons and daughters of Caleb, ready to stand in the gap and take possession of the possession. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this great privilege. We thank you for the joy and the challenge And Lord, as we think about the other things that we can do with our time in life, we think of things like the carnival that's going on just down the road. And Lord, we thank you for the small delights of life like that. But Lord, what hopelessness if that's all the joy, if that's all the fun that we have. Lord, we thank you that you've given us a great adventure in which we can partake, that you've called us to take possession of the whole earth And we thank you for the great privilege and the joy that that is. And Lord, you know that we need boldness to do it. And so we pray that you would give us that boldness, that strength, and the wisdom to go out well-equipped with the full armor of God to be able to proclaim the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. And it's our desire, Lord, that you would change us, that you would change our children, and that you would change others around us and bring them to Jesus Christ. Lord, we pray that all ends of earth would proclaim your praises, that all might know you. And Lord, we pray that you would do some of that in our midst, that you would bring people to yourself. And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen.