Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Help From God or Help Yourself? | Historical Books | Joshua 1:10-18

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

Does God help those who help themselves? Are you your brother's keeper? Do you give as Jesus gave to you? In today's episode, Patrick shares how Joshua 1:10-18 encourages us to be grateful and generous with the gifts God has given us. Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Joshua 1:10-18

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. I'm going to read you three sentences, and I want you to try and guess which one isn't found in the Bible. First, God helps those who help themselves. Second, God loves a cheerful giver. Three, God feels indignation every day. You might have guessed the last one is the one that's not in the Bible.

but you'd be wrong. Psalm 711 reads, God is a righteous judge and a God who feels indignation every day. You see, because God is good and loves to protect and help those who are oppressed and downcast, he's always indignant. He's indignant about all the ways people hurt other people in creation. Now, I'm also betting that most of us guessed correctly that number two, God loves a cheerful giver, is in the Bible, and it is, 2 Corinthians 9-9-7. So what's the odd man out?

God helps those who help themselves. If you guessed wrong, don't beat yourself up. No one has the entire Bible memorized. And several surveys show that many Christians believe this sentence or something like it is in the Bible, but it's not. And I might go one step further. It shouldn't be in the Bible for at least two reasons. The first is that that statement is just false.

Jesus said that he didn't come to save the healthy, he came to save the sick. He came to help those specifically who cannot and would not help themselves. And that's fantastic news, because it turns out that's actually all of us. The Apostle Paul, who was a early convert to the way of Jesus, he wrote letters to a number of early churches, including one to a church in Ephesus. Ephesus is located on the western edge of modern day Turkey. Now, in that letter, he expressed a similar idea. He said, for it is by grace that you have been saved through faith.

And this is not from yourselves. It is the gift of God. Not by works so that no one can boast. Do you hear his point? We don't save ourselves. We don't add anything to our salvation. Jesus didn't pick you or me because we were especially righteous or hardworking. No, Paul says, this is not from yourselves.

And that means, quote, no one can boast. You see, the first reason God helps those who help themselves, shouldn't be in the Bible is that it's simply not true. God helps the helpless. And if he helped you, that means that you too are helpless apart from him. So you have nothing to brag about. But there's a second reason that God helps those who help themselves shouldn't be in the Bible. And that's because that false verse has the power to make us proud and even irresponsible. We become proud because we look at all the blessings in our lives and we conclude, I have all these blessings in my life because I worked hard. I helped myself. I pulled myself up by the bootstraps. Of course, that's the kind of thing

that can't withstand a moment of thought. It may be true that you work hard, but just ask yourself this. If you met someone who had four times the wealth you have and they grew up in a family that had four times the wealth of the family that you grew up in, would you conclude that they've worked four times harder than you to get four times as much as you? Well, of course not. You'd say they lucked out and were born into the right family and that gave them advantages. And isn't the inverse true? If someone has a quarter of what you have, does that mean that they've worked a quarter as hard as you have? You see, the idea that God helps those who help themselves, well, it makes you proud of what you have, and it can make you arrogant towards those who have less, and that's precisely what creates

irresponsibility. Rather than taking responsibility for our brothers and sisters with less, as the Bible calls us to, instead we end up judging them. Instead, we say, God gave them what they deserved. If they didn't help themselves, then it's their own fault that they're struggling. We become a lot like Kane, who was a son of Adam and Eve, and he killed his own brother. And when God comes along to ask him about his brother's whereabouts, this is how he responds. He says, am I my brother's keeper? Obviously, Kane thinks that the answer is, no, he's not his brother's keeper. But it's equally obvious that God thinks the answer is yes. You, dear listener, are your brother's keeper. So if you neglect your brothers or sisters need because you think they got

what they deserved and you got what you deserved, well, you're acting irresponsibly. You're acting proudly. You're pretending that everything you have and everything you are is because God helps those who help themselves. But the truth is that God helps those who can't help themselves. And so we should do likewise. Knowing that truth is why we take it on ourselves to take responsibility for others. It's why we actively help others who can't help themselves. A remarkable feature of the book of Joshua, which we're reading through right now in 10-minute Bible talks, this feature is that the people of God actually act with faithfulness toward

him. Now, I say that's remarkable because this often isn't the case in the Old Testament. More often than not, God's people rebel against him. They run the opposite direction. Now, the first way it becomes evident that the people are doing the right thing is right in the first chapter. You see, before the story told in the book of Joshua, the people of Israel conquered the land to the east of the Jordan River.

And two and a half tribes of Israel, they ended up taking that land as their inheritance. These were the Rubinites, the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh. Now, as Joshua's story begins, the people are crossing over the Jordan to the west side, and they're going there to conquer the lands west of it. So what do the two and a half tribes with land already do? Perhaps they say, God helps those who help themselves, and that's why we have land and you don't have land. Of course, that would be a falsehood.

They had land because God gave it to them, because all of the tribes conquered it together. But here's the crazy thing. These two and a half tribes, they don't even consider the falsehood. Instead, they take responsibility to help their brothers as God first helped them. Joshua tells the two and a half tribes in chapter 1, verse 14,

you are to help them, them being all the other tribes going off to conquer more land. He says, you are to help them until the Lord gives them rest, as he has done for you. And until they too have taken possession of the land, the Lord your God is giving them. After that, you may go back and occupy your own land, which Moses, the servant of the Lord, gave to you east of the Jordan, toward the sunrise. Then they answered Joshua, whatever you have commanded us, we will do. And wherever you send us, we will go. And they follow through on this promise. You are like these tribes of Israel. What you have in life is not your own. It's a gift from a good, loving God

who helps those who help themselves. And if he's done that for you and Jesus, how can you not desire to do the same for others?