“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). I think that when a lot of us read these words, we feel as if Joshua has thrown down the gauntlet, or drawn a line in the sand - everyone on this side of the line is serving the Lord, everyone else can go right to Hell. And we tend to conceive of this choice as some watershed moment. The die has been cast, we’ve crossed the Rubicon, and if at any point in the future we choose to turn back, then we have made ourselves into failures, hypocrites, oathbreakers. But look at what Joshua is actually saying. “Choose you this day whom ye will serve.” Joshua is talking about this day. Not tomorrow. Not ten years from now. Not last week. This day. With all of the tragedies and misfortunes that we must endure from day to day, with all of the glittering temptations and distractions that inundate us from moment to moment, it can be challenging enough to make the choice to serve the Lord even just for this day, without adding on the extra stress and anxiety and pressure of worrying about whether we will have the strength to carry through with our choice day after day after day. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Matthew 6: 34). We have got enough on our plate with today’s evils to be wasting our thoughts on the morrow. We only have to choose this day to serve the Lord. We can make the same choice again tomorrow. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t, But every time we make the choice to serve the Lord on this day, we make it just that little bit easier on ourselves the next time we have to make the same choice. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but I can choose this day to serve the Lord.
