Prayer: Be with us and bear with us, our God as we offer ourselves in service to you. Help us always to choose you in faithfulness and in trust. O God, grant that in all that we do, in every choice and commitment we make, we might please and honor you. We love you Lord, you have been so good to us and we thank you, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

How many choices have you made already this morning? I will bet that you have made several, probably some you did not think about very much. You made choices about whether and when to get out of bed. You chose whether and what to have for breakfast. There was the choice you made about what to wear today (some of you likely made that decision before you went to bed last night). If you drove here, you chose a route by which to travel.

Did you make any faith decisions this morning? I believe you did when you chose to come to church. You have chosen by your presence here to make a decision about how you would express your faith in God. You have chosen to be in this place at this hour. As you leave here you will be asked as you live your life to make decisions about how to serve God with faith and trust. The choices we make will go along way in helping us to understand ourselves as people of God. Our spiritual forebears show us how.

At Shechem, Joshua asked the people to exam their faithful choices and to make a decision about the god they would serve. Why did he do that? He did it because when the nation of Israel has crossed over the Jordan River into Canaan, where their ancestors Abraham had lived, their memory grew a little dull and they forgot to remember some things. They forgot to remember that God had let them out of Egypt, raised up leaders from among them, kept them fed and watered for forty years and helped them settle in the land, all of which is cause for them to serve and honor God.

Except they forgot. The people had become distracted by the bright lights of Canaan and began to keep symbols of Canaanite gods in their homes.

These gods had become distraction to them and they forgot that they were a people in covenant, in a sacred agreement with the god of Israel. They said they would worship no god, except the one to whom they had made an oath of faithfulness. They made the promise, but they were having trouble keeping it.

Beginning with the leaders of the tribes, the elders, the heads of the tribes, the judges and other officers of Israel. Joshua reminds the people of all that God has done for their ancestors and for them, he reminds them that God has kept the promise to make them a great nation, and blessed them along the way.

In effect Joshua says, “since God has done all this for you, you are obligated to respond” (Texts for Preaching – Year A. Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 1995, p.555). Here is how.

Joshua then presents the choice directly. Revere/worship/trust/adore God. Serve God honesty and sincerely. Serve God faithfully. Don’t just serve any God, but give your allegiance to God who liberated and protects you. Then he offers them the choice in words that I knew before I knew they were in the Bible.

“Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the River of the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are now living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24.15).

These words are an oath of faithfulness made by one who is sure of who and whose he is. These are “line in the sand” words. These words have inspired people of faith facing abuse and oppression to stay strong. They inspired the Protestant reformer Martin Luther saying, “here I stand I can do no other”. They have inspired every other person of faith and courage, and conviction to say, “like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved.” I choose God.

The people said, “we will serve the Lord too. We will not again forget to remember the One who loves us and is our God. We will not serve other gods. We know who this God is. It is the same God who freed us from slavery and protected us as we journeyed. “Since God has done such great things for us, we now wish to respond by means of our commitment” (TP, p.555). For all that God has done for us we will serve this God.

You cannot serve God. God is too holy, too jealous and you are too weak. This God judges idolatry and blasphemy harshly. If you say you will then, you don’t, God will not be pleased”.

But the people are clear and they are ready to renew the covenant they made as they traveled toward the Land of Promise. Then God said, “Now if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples” (Exodus 19.5). And the people said, “Everything that the Lord has spoken, we will do” (Exodus 19.8). Now they are saying, “we will serve the Lord. We will be faithful to the God who is faithful to us”.

“Then”, Joshua says, “let go of other gods and give yourselves fully to God.” Can we hear God say to us through the leader Joshua, and through our own experience, “let go of everything that gets in the way of choosing to give yourself fully and faithfully to God.” We can do it. And they did their best. But we know that the history of Israel is like ours. It is about stumbling and falling and getting up and starting over again.

Joshua knows that the truth is that we will serve some force beyond our selves, and in some ways our choice is like that of the Israelites. We will serve some person or some institution which will be like a god to us.

We live with the choices we make, and we live with the promises we make. We may stand on one side of the line, thinking we have made the best possible choice, but God has a way of moving even further along. More than 20 of us spent over two hours yesterday talking about how our worship service can help us move this congregation to the place of faithfulness God wants us to achieve. We know that if the leaders are not committed to excellence in worship and to faithfulness and dedication in all that we do here, the rest of the congregation will not be either.

Can we live faithfully in our promise to give the best of ourselves to the worship of God? Are we able to trust God on bad days and on good days so that every day we can honor and praise God?

When we were baptized, we declared and oath that we were ready to live as people for whom Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. But whether we are baptized or not each of us has made a promise to God about something.

In January, newly elected political officials will take an oath of office. They will solemnly promise to preserve, protect, and defend the US Constitution, or to the Constitution of the state of Ohio, or to Franklin County. An oath like it will be repeated all over the United States. Men and women will make an oath and a promise. The question for us always, is will they keep their promises? We shall see.

When I was in seminary, members of my class and I were required to complete a series of exams called Basic Patterns of Expectations tests. We called them the dreaded BPE’s and they were awful. They were as anxiety producing as the Proficiency Tests students in Ohio take in the 4^{th, 9th, and 12th grade years. Instead of reading, math, and social studies, we had to prove our proficiency in biblical studies, world religions, church history, and theology. The work was hard, but what got us through was our understanding that God had called us to ministry, the church had affirmed our calls, a means had been made for us to attend school, and we had chosen to say yes to the invitation to study at that particular school. We had made a choice, and we wanted to be faithful to the choices and promises we had made.}

But we also understand, that what was happening to the nation of Israel because like them we sometimes forget to remember promises we have chosen to make. Each time I went in to take my BPE exam, I would say the same prayer, “God, if you let me pass this one exam, I promise you I will study harder for the next one. I promised but I would get distracted by other things, there were people to talk with, books other than the ones assigned, there were movies to see. I was distracted and I forgot to study as I knew I should, but I did study enough to pass those tests the first time.

We really do understand. We make promises with the best of intentions – to be good students, good parents, good spouses and partners. We promise to be committed leaders in the church and good workers on our jobs. But sometimes we get distracted and we forget and when we do we make unwise choices and people get hurt and work is left undone. Of course I know that even when we enter into situations with the best intentions, things can happen. Relationships end, jobs are gained and lost. Some unwise choices cannot be undone. That is why I am grateful that in all of the beginnings and endings we experience in our lives, God is gracious and often gives us the chance to choose to start again.

Still we are called to give ourselves fully to God as we live in faith. Faith can be understood as Hebrews understands it as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1), and it is. But there is another way for us to think about what faith means. Think of it as FACING AHEAD IN TRUST and HOPE.

We will make choices, some good and some awful. We choose to live in faith when we declare our allegiance to Jesus Christ in our worship, our work, our offerings, our service. We choose to serve one another as the passage from Galatians encourages us to love one another. There may be times when we disagree, but that is precisely the time for us to remember that the best way we can serve God is by refusing to destroy one another. Choose this day whom you will serve.

We can choose to live and love in faith because the God whom we serve is faithful. We can choose to love because we can choose to follow Jesus Christ, who laid down his life for us in faith that the God who sent him to us would raise him up again.

How faithful is God through Jesus Christ? God is faithful enough to accept our invitation to come into our lives and stay with us not matter what. So in faith and hope we can choose God, find Christ, be sustained by the Holy Spirit, and pray, “Come Lord Jesus, be with us in our longing; come stay with us in our needing. Come be with us in our doing, come struggle with us in our searching, come Lord Jesus and rejoice with us in our loving” ^{(Ted Loder from “Touch Me” in Guerillas of Grace, San Diego, LuraMedia, 1984, p.89).}