ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 5 · Joshua 24:15
As for me and my house. The indwelling first, then the table, then the door. Eleven passages from the sphere index, five on the heart and six on the household.
Four weeks of charts. Genealogies, empires, two thousand years of the church against everything that hosted it.
This week the course walks into a house, and it stays in the household for three weeks before it goes anywhere near the Constitution. That order is deliberate. If a nation is downstream of its people, then the argument has to pass through the rooms where people are actually made, and those rooms are smaller than a country.
Joshua is at the end of his life. He has gathered the tribes at Shechem, walked them back through their own history, and now he puts a choice in front of them: if it is evil in your eyes to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve. Then the sentence that ends up on kitchen walls. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD (Joshua 24:15).1
Three things sit in that chapter that almost never travel with the quotation, and each of them changes it.
The first is who he is talking to. These are covenant people, on the land, after Jericho, and verse 23 tells them to put away the foreign gods that are among you.1 Among them. In the camp. The most famous sentence about a faithful household is spoken to people with idols in their tents.
The second is what Joshua says four verses later. The people answer well: we also will serve the LORD, he is our God. And Joshua tells them they cannot. You are not able to serve the LORD, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins (Joshua 24:19).2
He does not say your sin is small. He says the God you have just volunteered to serve is holy, that you are sinners, and that on those terms the arrangement cannot work. It is the same diagnosis Romans 3 gives, delivered by a man at the end of his life to a people at the top of theirs.
The third is what happened. Israel served the LORD all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived him (Joshua 24:31).3 One generation past the man who said it. Then Judges opens, and the second chapter records the result: there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel (Judges 2:10).3
The verse is quoted as a guarantee. Say it over your household, raise them right, and they will serve the LORD.
Joshua's own household is not the counterexample; his nation is. The man who said the sentence saw it hold for exactly as long as he and his generation lived, and the book immediately after his records the collapse.
There are parents in this room whose children have walked away. Some of them did everything the verse is supposed to require. A class that teaches Joshua 24:15 as a formula tells those parents their child's departure is a report card on their obedience, and that is both cruel and false.
It is also the same error this course refused in week one, about nations: Josiah turned to the LORD with all his heart and Judah went into exile anyway. Week nine will refuse it about men, where a good outcome proves nothing about the instrument. The household is the second place the same line runs, and the line is Deuteronomy 29:29. The obedience is ours. The outcome is his.
So what is the verse doing?
It is a declaration, present tense, about the speaker. As for me and my house. Joshua is not predicting his grandchildren. He is announcing which side of the room he is standing on while everyone watches. That is a smaller claim than the wall decoration makes, and it is one you can actually obey this week.
The study guide for this course lists eleven passages under these two headings, and the order they are in is the argument.
Five of them are about the heart, and they come first. Christ dwelling in your heart through faith (Ephesians 3:17). A new creation, the old passed away (2 Corinthians 5:17). It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me (Galatians 2:20). United with him in a death like his (Romans 6:5). And the Spirit who will be in you (John 14:17).4
Not one of those is about parenting. They are about a person being made new, and they are listed before the household passages because a house cannot transmit what nobody in it has.
Deuteronomy 6 makes the order explicit, and it is the verse the whole week turns on. These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. Then, and only then: you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).5
On your heart, then to their ears. A parent teaching a word that is not on his own heart is running a rehearsal, and children are the best detectors of rehearsal that God ever made.
The other six passages describe a household rather than a curriculum. Two of them, Joshua 24:15 and Deuteronomy 6, this lesson has already spent. Here are the remaining four.
A house of prayer, which is what Christ called the temple when he threw out the men who had turned it into a business (Mark 11:17).6 Love and unity, with humility and patience, bearing with one another (Ephesians 4:2). Hospitality to strangers (Hebrews 13:2). Peace and reconciliation, forgiving each other as the Lord forgave you (Colossians 3:13).6
That list is what a Christian home is measured by. Not whether the children turned out. Whether the door opens to strangers. Whether people in it forgive each other. Whether anyone prays out loud in it when nothing has gone wrong.
Those are all present tense and all inside your control, which is exactly what makes them a real assignment rather than an anxiety.
Joshua told the truth in verse 19. They were not able, and we are no more able than they were. The household passages are not a program for becoming able.
Christ lived the perfect life we could not live, in a household, under a mother and a father, obedient to them (Luke 2:51), and then went to the cross and rose on the third day, and the debt was paid in full with nothing left for us to add.7 That is why a parent whose child has walked away is not under condemnation, and why a parent whose children are all in the pew has nothing to boast about.
God chooses, and the Father draws. No one comes to the Son unless the Father draws him (John 6:44).8 Which means your child's faith was never yours to manufacture, and it also means it is never out of reach. Salvation is his work from start to finish. We receive it; we don't author it. Not for ourselves, and not for anybody at our table.
Scripture stays the final authority over this too, including over the wall decoration. If the verse says something smaller and harder than the poster, we take the verse.
And what it says is still enough to fill a week. As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. Today. Out loud. Where the family can hear it.
leader say that to a congregation that has just agreed with him?
What goes wrong in a home when that order is reversed?
an open door. Which of the three is hardest in your house, and what would change this week if it were not?
Next class: Christ in the church, and what a gathering is actually for.