Sometimes we get too comfortable where we are. We think that God is blessing us and we have more than enough for a pretty good life. There is no need for more conflict or for pushing ourselves to do more for God or learn more about Him. We’re sitting pretty nicely right now. Don’t rock the boat.
The Israelites were the same way. But, I think we see two different forms of it. 1) They were so comfortable that they would not strive more because of all the blessings that God had prepared for them, and 2) they were so comfortable that they would not even help others who hadn’t even received the same blessings that they had.
What happens here is that Joshua tells them that they are sitting around doing nothing when there is still land out there to be conquered. There are still seven tribes who haven’t received their inheritance. And nobody was doing anything about it.
Sometimes we can be the seven tribes. We figure that things are going pretty good for us and even better for people around us so we can just ride on everybody else’s hard work and success. Even spiritually, if we’re surrounded by people doing great things with their life, it’s easy just to feed off of them like a parasite. That’s what these seven tribes were doing. They were feeding off of the other tribes’ inheritances instead of going out and getting their own. They were too comfortable.
Sometimes we can be the other tribes. We have put in a little hard work and gotten some good things out of it. Spiritually, we do devotions sometimes. We live good enough that people view us as good Christian guys, not like a ton of other guys out in the world. We’ve talked to a few people about what we believe, so we’re good. We’re covered. Mission accomplished. We think of ourselves as having achieved some kind of status which leads us to become comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that we stop helping others reach a level of growth that we have. We become satisfied with ourselves in where we are that we don’t even reach out and help others who don’t study the Bible, who don’t serve God, who don’t even have a relationship with Him. We should be helping others receive their inheritances from God. And our inheritances is not simply a relationship with Him, it’s a growing, intimate relationship with him which leads to a world of other actions and blessings.
Let’s not sit around. Let’s push ourselves to become better, to grow in our relationships with God and all the while, bringing others with us. This is what we were created for.
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