As For Me And My Family

Fear the LORD and serve him wholeheartedly. Put away forever the idols your ancestors worshiped when they lived beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt. Serve the LORD alone. But if you refuse to serve the LORD, then choose today whom you will serve. Would you prefer the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates? Or will it be the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live? But as for me and my family, we will serve the LORD. Joshua 24:14-15

ABRAM’S ANCESTORS LIVED in Ur of the Chaldees where they worshiped the moon god. Later, his descendants lived in Egypt, where the sun, the Nile, and many other false gods were worshiped. When his descendants prepared to enter Canaan, where the Canaanites worshiped many pagan gods, Joshua called on the people to get rid of all their household idols. Some of these families must have had images and statues associated with pagan deities that they had brought with them from Egypt.

Joshua called them to renounce all false gods and to serve the Lord exclusively. And their glad answer was yes! Even when Joshua warned them that they wouldn’t be able to live up to their grand commitment, they said, “No, we will serve the LORD!” (Joshua 24:21).

Clearly the spirit was willing on this day, but the flesh proved to be weak over the days and years to come. And so is ours. We don’t want our families to bow down to materialism, but those catalogs keep coming in the mail. We don’t want to serve the gods of sexual perversion, but we find it hard to censor the television shows or movies we watch. We don’t want to worship the god of image and success, but we find ourselves wanting to put out the impression of the perfect family like we see every day on social media and read about in Christmas letters.

So what should we do? We refuse to give up. We decide that our family will serve the Lord today. And we make the same choice tomorrow. We ask for his power to keep choosing to serve him in all the days to come.

Lord, as much as we would like to close our eyes to the false idols that have made themselves at home in our lives, we know we can’t. We’ve got to choose this day. So make us relentless in identifying our false idols. Give us the will to cast them far away so that they don’t work their way back into our home.