#11 Joshua

11. Joshua 1:8

This book of instruction must not depart from your mouth; you are to recite it day and night, so that you may carefully observe everything written in it. For then you will prosper and succeed in whatever you do. —Joshua 1:8

“I recall and repeat often now the first Scripture passage I ever memorized,” wrote evangelist Arthur Flake in his book Life at Eighty as I See It.
He was referring to Joshua 1:8. “I memorized this more than fifty years ago. It is still fresh and invigorating, and I love it.”

I, too, have a clear recollection of memorizing this verse. I was attending a small Navigator Discipleship Bible Study in my college dormitory. When this verse was assigned for memorizing, I thought it too long and cumbersome. But it finally worked its way into my long-term memory, and it’s never left.

It contains a threefold command:
(1) This book of the law must not depart from your mouth. We must keep speaking it, reading it, repeating it, hearing it.
(2) We’re to meditate on God’s Word day and night. The original Hebrew word came from a verb meaning “to mutter,” as if muttering to yourself. We’re to let verses of Scripture roll around in our minds all the time. We meditate on something by memorizing, visualizing, and personalizing it. We mutter it around in our minds by day and go to sleep at night letting its words sink into our subconscious.
(3) Having read and meditated on God’s Word, we put it into practice and obey it.

Joshua 1:8 ends with a twofold promise:
 (1) If we read, meditate, and obey God’s law, we will prosper; and
(2) we will succeed in whatever we do. As we meditate on God’s Word, our minds are improved. They are God conditioned. We begin thinking more as He thinks, looking at life from His point of view. As we’re transformed by the renewing of our thoughts, we become successful in those things God appoints for us to do.

Take time to read Psalm 1 in light of Joshua 1:8. Perhaps you’ll agree with me that King David took Joshua 1:8 and did what it said, meditating on it, visualizing it, and personalizing it, using the image of trees planted by rivers of water. From that meditation he wrote Psalm 1. In other words, David showed us how to do it! Psalm 1 is his meditation about meditating on Joshua 1:8.

Meditation is the skeleton key that unlocks the greatest storeroom in the house of God’s provision for the Christian.... [It is] holding the Word of God in your heart until it has affected every phase of your life.... Beware of getting alone with your own thoughts. Get alone with God’s thoughts. There is danger in rummaging through waste and barren desert-thoughts that can be labeled—daydreaming or worse. Don’t meditate upon yourself but dwell upon God.... Make this a built-in habit of daily living. 

—From a Navigator’s booklet