As for Me and My House

There were about ninety men in a hall with a bad ceiling and somebody had put out a microphone that nobody was using properly, and on the Saturday afternoon they went round the room.

He was fifty one. He is not a man who says things in rooms. And when it got to him he stood up, which nobody had asked anybody to do, and said the sentence.

As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Ninety men. Some of them said amen. A man he had never met came and found him at the coffee afterward and gripped his hand for slightly too long.

He drove home in a state he has never been in before or since.

His house did not follow.

Not out of rebellion. His wife has her own quiet thing that she has never made a display of and he suspects is deeper than his. One daughter is entirely uninterested and always has been. The other went for a while in her twenties and then stopped and does not discuss it. There are grandchildren now and none of them go anywhere.

And he has carried, for eleven years, a private and unshakeable conviction: that he stood up in front of ninety men and made a claim about six people, and the claim was false, and it was false because of him. That he was supposed to deliver that house and he did not deliver it.

He has never told anybody this. He said the sentence once, in public, and has said nothing about God to anybody since.

You may have said a sentence like that. And you may have taken it as an undertaking with deliverables, and you may have been failing it in silence ever since.

Read the whole sentence

Now let me put the actual verse in front of you, because you have been carrying half of it for eleven years and the half you have been carrying is the second half.

Joshua is old. He has the whole nation in front of him. And this is what he says.

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.Joshua 24:15

You are a man who declared an allegiance, and you were never the guarantor of anybody's answer. Joshua 24:15 hands the choosing away in its first clause before it states one man's position, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept your allegiance true through eleven years of quiet.

Choose you this day

The sentence begins by handing the choice away.

Choose you this day whom ye will serve. That is Joshua, at the end of his life, with all the authority any man in that nation has ever had, explicitly putting the decision into other people's hands and naming the actual alternatives without softening them.

And then he states his own position. But as for me and my house.

Now here is the thing you have never noticed in eleven years. That is not a prediction and it is not a guarantee and it is certainly not a report on what the people in his tent believe. It is a declaration of allegiance made by the head of a household, out loud, in a room where everybody has just been told they are free.

If it were an undertaking to deliver his household, then the first half of the verse contradicts it, because you cannot hand somebody a free choice and simultaneously promise their answer.

You declared an allegiance and you were never underwriting anybody's decision. Joshua 24:15 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a farewell speech and stands it in a hall with a bad ceiling.

And I have to say the hard part, because this is the landing category and the rule in it does not bend: nothing here is exercised over another person's will, and that includes a daughter's.

Your wife has her own quiet thing. One daughter is not interested. One went and stopped. Those are three people with wills that God Himself declines to override, and any version of this article that handed you leverage over them would be handing you a counterfeit.

You are released from a delivery you were never contracted for. Scripture puts the choosing in the hands of the ones choosing and the declaring in the mouth of the one declaring, and the Spirit of God has been in that farmhouse through eleven years of your silence.

The eleven years of silence

And now the actual cost, which is not what you think.

You think the cost is that your house did not follow. It is not.

The cost is that a man who once stood up in a room and said a true thing has said nothing about God to anybody for eleven years, and his daughters have grown up and had children of their own in that silence, and the silence has been read by everybody in that house as him having nothing to say.

He has a great deal to say. He has simply been serving a sentence for a contract that never existed.

You are able to speak in your own house without owing anybody a result. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is exactly what the shape of Joshua's sentence permits, and His Spirit is the one who has kept you standing through eleven years of quiet.