God Works the Miracles, We Build the Memorials
Israel is standing in the middle of the greatest day of their lives. The Jordan has been cut off, the priests are still standing in the riverbed with the Ark of the Covenant on their shoulders, and the whole nation has walked across on dry ground into the land God promised them. And right there, in the middle of the miracle, God says to Joshua, "Choose twelve men from among all the people, one from each tribe" (Joshua 4:2).
I am not sure we feel the weight of that. Joshua was one of twelve men. Forty years earlier Moses sent twelve of them to survey the Promised Land, and ten came back with a report so full of fear that a whole generation lost the land over it. Twelve men is the reason Joshua's life sat on pause for four decades. Not four days. Not four weeks. Four decades. And now, on the very day the pause button finally lifts, God says, choose twelve men.
Can you imagine what that stirred in him? God is saying, go back to the moment that has taunted you. Do the exact thing you did the last time everything fell apart. Because friend, sometimes God takes us to a new level, but He first asks us to confront the thing that held us back. Sometimes, to walk into the future He has for you, you have to stare a difficult memory in the face and move through it rather than around it.
Then the twelve are given their instructions. Go back down into the riverbed, to where the priests are standing, pick up twelve stones and carry them over with you (Joshua 4:3). Take something out of the middle of the moment you are standing in, and keep it with you as you walk into your future.
The reason is that in the Bible, stones speak of memories. Noah stepped out of the ark and the first thing he did was build an altar (Genesis 8:20). Abraham heard God say lift up your eyes, all of this I will give you, and he built an altar (Genesis 13:14-18). Moses came through a battle Israel should never have survived and built an altar on the other side of it (Exodus 17:15). Every one of them was saying the same thing. This is a moment I must never forget.
That is still how God wants us to handle our miracle moments. Do not let it be said of us that God did something extraordinary and we stood in the middle of it distracted and lost the significance of what He was doing. The Jordan parts for you. The healing finally comes. The door opens for the business. When something good is happening, take something with you.
Because everybody has memories. It is not whether you have them that makes the difference. It is what you choose to do with them.
Years ago, when I was a young youth pastor, I had supper with a man who walked in extraordinary miracle power. People were healed. Blind eyes opened. So I asked him straight out how his life had seen so many miracles for the glory of God. He said, if you come to my house, I have a room. On every wall of that room there are printed emails, photographs people have sent me, doctors' reports, cards, stories. He said the walls have been covered so many times there are layers now, pins on top of pins, and every one of them is somebody who got healed. Every day I go into that room and thank God for every miracle He has already done. Life is difficult sometimes. But I fix my memory not on the difficulty, not on the trial, not on the problem, but on what the Lord has done.
Now look at who built the memorial. The Bible says Joshua set up the twelve stones at Gilgal (Joshua 4:20). Joshua. The man who had just led a nation across a river, who had worked an impossibly hard day and almost certainly had not slept the night before, is the one picking up thirty kilogram stones at the end of it. He is not delegating it. He is not putting it off until a better day. Because God works the miracles, and we build the memorials. God orchestrates the moments, and we build the monuments. Plenty of people have had a moment when God did something great, and what they failed to do was build the memorial. Families are destroyed for a lack of memorials. Marriages come apart for a lack of memorials. People lose whole moves of God because they lost the memorial.
God told Joshua why. In the future your children will ask, what do these stones mean, and you will tell them the Jordan was cut off in front of you, so that all the peoples of the earth might know the hand of the Lord is powerful (Joshua 4:6, 24). So never stop telling the story of your memory, because the memory is as real as the moment. If I tell you about the day my daughter Lara was born, the first time in my adult life I actually wept, I am not filing away a fact, I am standing in it. And if the memory is as real as the moment, then what you choose to remember today, even about something twenty years old, is shaping how you feel today and what you believe is possible with God. David understood it. His soul is downcast in Psalm 42, and he says, "therefore I will remember you" (Psalm 42:6). He makes a decision about what to call to mind, and as he remembers God his whole inner world shifts.
But let me take it one step further, because it is possible to build the wrong memorial. God found Gideon hiding in a winepress, threshing wheat in the wrong place because he was afraid, and told him he would lead his people (Judges 6:11-14). Yet before Gideon led anybody, God sent him home to tear down his father's altar to Baal and build a proper kind of altar to the Lord there instead (Judges 6:25-26). There would be no victory until the stones were assembled in the right direction.
You have stones too. Many of you have walked through tremendous difficulty. I am not denying it and I am not glossing over it. It is one of your stones. You may have been abused. That is one of your stones. You may have known real failure. That is one of your stones. You are never going to unremember it. The difference between the right memorial and the wrong one is simply this: who gets the glory, and who gets the final word.
God needed a people who could say, we have been through hardship, it has not been plain sailing, but the first thing true of us is that we are God's chosen. Though we are pressed, we praise Him. Though we are persecuted, we praise Him. What happens to us does not change what is true of Him, or of us.
And then there is Jacob, because there is something in his story worth catching. He sleeps with a stone under his head, and in the night God says, all that you see I will give to you. He wakes and builds a memorial, and the stone that goes on top is the one he had been sleeping on (Genesis 28:18). But notice what he is building it to. Not something that had already happened. A vision of something still ahead. He built a monument to a moment that had not arrived yet. That is what happens when the Holy Spirit draws near: He starts showing you memories of what is still to come. So take what God has shown you about where your life is heading and make that your memorial stone. Set it high and let your soul lean in that direction. That is not arrogance, that is honour, and it frees your soul to believe.
Maybe you have been through hardship, but that is not who you are. The doorway to destiny is often difficult. Joseph went through the pit and the prison before he ever saw the palace, and none of it changed who his God was. So rearrange the stones. Tear down what needs tearing down, build what needs building, and put Jesus on the top of the pile. When the miracle happens to you, take something with you.
