Circumference of God ~ Jon Courson

By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days.
-Hebrews 11:30

To claim the Promised Land, God’s strategy for His people was fairly simple: drive a wedge through the middle, dividing the north from the south. There was only one problem, however. To do this, they had to take Jericho — a city which seemed absolutely impenetrable because of the thick double walls surrounding it. Certainly as the Israelites marched around the walls once a day for six days, the people in Jericho must have looked down on them and laughed. ‘That’s their army?’ they must have scoffed. ‘That’s their strategy?’ On the seventh day, however, the heretofore impenetrable walls came down.

Listen, gang, the walls came down not brick by brick, but by faith.

‘There’s a wall between my eighteen-year-old daughter and me’ cries the brokenhearted mother. ‘We’ve gone to counseling; we follow the workbooks; we try all the techniques — and, although a brick or two might get chipped away, within a month there are three more in their place.’

‘The walls between my son and I are keeping me out of the Promised Land of what I know a Christian family should be,’ says the weary father. ‘I try to reason with him, but there’s a wall between us.’

Perhaps you are looking at a wall in your own family which seems impenetrable, a wall which appears as though it will never come down. The key? Not counseling, not dialoguing, not role-playing. The key is faith.

‘But I’ve been marching around, working on, going through this situation for a long time,’ you say.

Great — because the longer the wall has been up between you and your husband, or you and your father, or you and your daughter — the more you know it can’t be brought down by your own effort. Walls come down when God moves in — but until God moves in, you’ll just chip away, and frustration will fill your heart. Have faith in God, for when you finally realize that human skill or ability is insufficient, when you finally say, ‘Lord, if anything’s going to happen, it’s going to be because of You,’ — that’s when the wall will fall.

Oh, it might take a week or a month, a year or a decade. But by faith in God, the wall will come down. How? In a way you would never have guessed, planned, or predicted. The older I get, the less impressed I am with people's abilities to solve problems, and the more amazed I am at God’s faithfulness if we’ll just believe Him. If you think that’s a cop-out, join the jeerers of Jericho. But if you want to see a miracle, march with the Lord, and see what He’ll do.