Joshua 24:1-27 · The Covenant Renewed at Shechem
No Other Gods
Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Sermon
by King Duncan & Angela Akers
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Have you ever thrown something away and later regretted it? I read a news report recently about a grand piano that was going up for auction. This piano once belonged to John Lennon, the lead singer and songwriter for the Beatles. Before his death, he gave it to a friend. The friend loaned the piano to a local school. Someone at the school—who obviously didn’t know the piano’s famous first owner—sold it off with a bunch of old pianos for a grand total of $3,000. Fortunately, someone realized the piano’s value. It is expected to sell for $3 million at auction. (1)

We all have a few things we wish we hadn’t thrown away. Maybe nothing that is famous and valuable, but things that mattered to us. But most of us have the opposite problem: we keep a bunch of stuff that we should throw away instead.

A journalist named Mathias Barra wrote about the things he learned when he tried the 30-Day Minimalism Game, which you can find on theminimalists.com website. If you’re not a math person, the game seems simple. On the first day of the month, throw away or give away one thing. On the second day of the month, get rid of two things. On the third day, three things. Easy-peasy. But if you do the math, this means that at the end of 30 days you will have thrown away 465 items. (2)

I bet we’d all notice a big change in our homes if we got rid of 465 items in one month, or even one year. It’s hard to throw away things, even when we know it is stuff that no longer serves a purpose in our lives.

Speaking of throwing things away, have you ever thought of how fortunate we are to have modern conveniences like garbage collection and recycling services? I respect people who want to live “off the grid,” but these are two perks of modern life I don’t ever want to give up. In ancient civilizations, people used to throw garbage on the floors of their homes, or out in the yard or the street. Of course, the garbage didn’t just sit there and rot. They had plenty of pigs and rats roaming the streets, which helped with the garbage disposal issue. Now aren’t you thankful for the early morning roar of the garbage truck?

About 500 B.C., the government of ancient Greece made it illegal to throw your trash in the street. They established a law that garbage needed to be disposed of at a dump site one mile from the city walls. And just like today, you know plenty of people were griping about this new law.

“How dare the government tell me I can’t throw trash in the street! They’re trying to take away our rights. Next thing you know, we’ll have to give up our gladiator games.”

U.S. citizens can thank Benjamin Franklin for starting the first garbage collection and street cleaning service in the 1700s, which greatly improved the health of the local population. (3)

Franklin’s innovative methods proved a compelling point: how we throw things away makes a big difference to our health. I want us to think about that as we look at today’s Bible passage, the story of Joshua’s last message to the people of Israel. Joshua had led them faithfully into the Promised Land and was mediator of a new covenant between God and the people. He had given the best of himself to God and to His people.

Now Joshua knew his life was drawing to a close. This was his last opportunity to turn the nation of Israel toward the source of their identity, their salvation, their strength: the Lord God Almighty. His challenge to them begins in vs. 14: “Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness.”

The verb “to serve” is repeated seven times just in these last two verses, verses 14-15. It appears fifteen times in this one chapter. Joshua clearly believes that the purpose of his life, the purpose of everyone’s life, is to serve the Lord with all faithfulness. But before they could wholeheartedly serve their Redeemer God, they had to deal with some garbage in their lives. There was something they needed to throw away.

As Joshua says in vs.14: “Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” This is one of the most powerful challenges in the Old Testament, and it is just as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago. How can Joshua’s challenge apply to our lives?

First, we cannot “serve the Lord with all faithfulness” until we throw away every lesser god that competes for control of our lives. In her book No Other gods, Kelly Minter writes, “For so much of my life I worshipped God: showing up for church, singing hymns, helping in the nursery, reading my Bible, confessing my belief in him. Yet if you could have witnessed what I was controlled by, what motivated and moved me, you would have seen that in many cases it was not God at all, but my idols. Not carved images, but people, career paths, materialism, acceptance, and more. God was getting my worship on some level, but my gods were getting my service.” (4)

Think about that. “God was getting my worship on some level, but my gods were getting my service.” What we serve—what motivates and moves us, in the words of Kelly Minter--becomes our “little-g” god. We may worship God on Sunday but spend the rest of the week serving idols.  It is our actions, what we invest our energy, time, money and talents into, that determines our god.

Entrepreneur Derek Sivers recalls a conversation he had with his coach about wanting to start a new company. His coach responded, “No, you don’t.”

Derek said, “Yes, I do! This is really important to me!”

His coach said, “No, it’s not . . . I can ignore what you’re saying and just look at your actions. Our actions always reveal our real values . . . No matter what you say, your actions reveal the truth.” (5)

Meditate on those statements for a moment: Our actions reveal our real values. Our actions reveal the truth. That’s why our service reveals our true gods. What is it that commands most of your attention, your energy, your time, your skills and your passion? We cannot serve the Lord with all faithfulness until we throw away the lesser gods that compete for our service.

And the lesser god that distracts us the most is our self. It is our own happiness, comfort, pride, security, and ego. That’s why it is so difficult to confront and conquer our idolatry. It is almost as if Jesus knew our dilemma when he said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9: 23)
Joshua also knew that we needed to replace our lesser gods with the power of the One True God. So he tells the people in verse 23: “Now then, throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the LORD, the God of Israel.”

That is the second component of serving the Lord with all faithfulness: yielding our hearts to Him. The Hebrew word here for “yield” can also be translated as “to turn towards” or “to bow down.” And the Hebrew word for “heart” can be translated as “inner (person), mind, will, heart, soul, (and) understanding.” Whew! Did I leave anything out? That pretty much covers every part of us that can be given to the service of the Lord. Nothing less than wholehearted commitment will do.

There is a powerful prayer by a man named Joe Seremane that expresses how much we miss out on when we hold back from yielding our hearts to the Lord.

Seremane writes, “You asked for my hands that I might use them for your purpose. I gave them for a moment then withdrew them, for the work was hard.

“You asked for my mouth to speak out against injustice. I gave you a whisper that I might not be accused.

“You asked for my eyes to see the pain of poverty. I closed them, for I did not want to see.

“You asked for my life that you might work through me. I gave a small part, that I might not get ‘too involved.’

“Lord, forgive me for my calculated efforts to serve you only when it is convenient for me to do so, only in places where it is safe to do so and only with those who make it easy to do so.

“O God, forgive me, renew me, send me out as a usable instrument that I might take seriously the meaning of your cross.” (6)

So how do you know if you have yielded your heart to the Lord? Your values and actions will align with the values and actions of the kingdom of God. And here’s another clue: once our heart belongs to God, then faithful service to Him is a joy, not an obligation.

The Rev. Miles Brandon II tells how he saw this kind of faithful service to God in a young woman he dated in college. She worked as a teacher in a depressed area of Houston, Texas. She lived in a modest apartment and drove a ten-year-old Toyota SUV. She was a committed Christian who participated in various ministries of her church in her spare time.

Many months after they began dating, she revealed a secret to Brandon: she was the winner of a multi-million-dollar Powerball lottery jackpot. She had unimaginable wealth. Yet she was living off her teacher’s salary and using her winnings to support her younger sister and to fund numerous ministries in her church. The money served no purpose in her life except to increase her giving toward good works. Her actions and lifestyle proved that her heart belonged to God. (7)

Is that asking too much of us? Not at all. Not when you look at the cross and consider what God did for us.

In Philippians 2: 7, Paul writes that in our relationships with others, we should have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, even though he was God, took on the form of a servant, humbled himself to the point of death, even death on the cross. He is the ultimate example of wholehearted service to God, and his service brought life and healing and hope to humanity.

Jesus serves as our unfailing example of someone whose inner person—mind, will, heart, soul and understanding—were entirely yielded to God. This was the source of his strength, courage and peace. And because of this yielded-ness, this wholehearted commitment to God, Jesus took on the nature of a servant and was obedient to death on the cross. This is how he served God with all faithfulness. The cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate symbol of servanthood. The cross is a reminder that there is no lesser god who loves us, there is no lesser god who can save us, there is no lesser god that proved his wholehearted commitment to us first like the One True God. I pray that you will experience the truth of God’s love for you, and you will choose to yield everything to Him, so that, like Joshua, you can say with confidence, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  


1. The Hustle, August 3, 2023, by Jacob Cohen, Juliet Bennett Rylah, Lestraundra Alfred, and Sara Friedman.

2. “7 Random Things I Noted While Throwing Away 465 Items” by Mathias Barra, Published in Ascent Publication, Dec 14, 2020.

3. Source: American Forest & Paper Association https://swa.org/DocumentCenter/View/277/History-of-Garbage-PDF#:~:text=In%20the%20late%201700's%2C%20Benjamin,throw%20it%20into%20the%20street.3.

4. No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols by Kelly Minter (David C. Cook: Colorado Springs, CO.), 2008, p. 45.

5. “Actions, not words, reveal our real values” from the book, Hell Yeah or No, by Derek Sivers online newsletter, June 16, 2017, https://sive.rs/arv.

6. “A Usable Instrument” by Joe Seremane, South Africa in Celebrating One World: A Worship Resource on Social Injustice, New York: HarperCollins/CAFOD, 1998.

7. The Rev. Miles R. Brandon II, Vicar, St. Julian of Norwich Episcopal Church, https://stjuliansaustin.org/latest-happenings/you-will-be-with-me-in-paradise-a-sermon-for-christ-the-king-luke-2333-43.

ChristianGlobe Network, Inc., Collected Sermons Fourth Quarter 2023, by King Duncan & Angela Akers