Kopion 2016

Read Joshua 5:13-6:16
"The first glimpse of Jericho was both awe-inspiring and frightening. While wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, the Israelites had never seen anything approximating the skyline of Jericho. The closer they got, the smaller they felt. They finally understood why the generation before them felt like grasshoppers and failed to enter the Promised Land because of fear.
A six foot wide lower wall and a fifty foot upper wall encircled the ancient metropolis. The mud brick walls were so thick and tall that the twelve acre city appeared to be an impregnable fortress. It seemed like God had promised something impossible, and His battle plan seemed nonsensical. Your entire army is to march around the city once a day for six days. On the seventh day you are to march around the city seven times...After seven days of circling Jericho, God delivered on a four hundred year old promise. He proved once again, that his promises don't have expiration dates. And Jericho stands, and falls, as a testament to this simple truth: if you keep circling the promise, God will ultimately deliver on it.
What is your Jericho?
Jericho is spelled many different ways. If you have cancer, it's spelled healing. If your child is far from God, it's spelled salvation. If you have a vision beyond your resources, it's spelled provision. But whatever it is, you have to spell it out.
It's easy to get so busy climbing the ladder of success that we fail to realize the ladder is not leaning against the wall of Jericho. We lose sight of our God-ordained goals. Our eternal priorities get subjugated to our temporal responsibilities. And we pawn our God given dream for the American dream. So instead of circling Jericho, we end up wandering the desert for 40 years....I 've never met anyone who doesn't want to be successful, but very few people have actually spelled out success for themselves. We inherit a family definition or adopt a cultural definition. But if you don't spell it out for yourself, you have no way of knowing if you have achieved it. You might achieve your goals only to realize that they should not have been your goals in the first place. You circle the wrong city. You climb the wrong ladder."
Mark Batterson-The Circle Maker