Get UpLevántate

He started with Joshua on the night before Jericho. Israel had finally crossed into the promised land, and the first thing in front of them was a city with a wall. "Come on, God, can you have something easier than that?" Joshua was probably up all night making plans. Then a man with a drawn sword was standing in front of him, and Joshua asked the obvious question: are you for us or for our enemies?

Neither, the man said. He was the commander of the Lord's army. Pastor Estuardo turned the question around on the room. The point wasn't whose side God was on. "What side are you on?"

Joshua fell on his face and worshiped, and Pastor Estuardo noted that angels in the Bible never accept worship. He believes this was Jesus. Joshua didn't ask why he had to take off his sandals. He just did it. The commander hadn't come as an advisor. He had come to take control of the mission, and Joshua's plans had to bow to that.

Then he asked it plainly: are you giving him his place? In your family. In your marriage. In your life. "You don't have to answer me," he said. "But when the Holy Spirit is asking you this, we need to respond."

Jericho fell. Israel marched around it seven times, and even the lazy ones and the critics went along. Then the walls came down. Then came Ai. He joked that in English it sounds like AI, artificial intelligence. Ai was a small city, so Israel only sent about three thousand men, and they came back running. Joshua threw himself on the ground: Lord, what are you doing? God's answer was short. "Get up, Joshua."

Someone named Achan had taken silver, gold and a robe from Jericho and buried them under his tent. One man's hidden sin had cost the whole camp. "What are you carrying that you should not be carrying?" Pastor Estuardo asked. "What is in your tent?" Israel had also gotten overconfident and underestimated the enemy, and he warned the church against the same thing. It's often the small things that destroy.

Then he told a story about himself. Years ago, when he turned forty, he begged God for a message and got two words: don't give up. Later, lying in bed in the middle of a hard season and ready to quit, his wife stood there and asked him, "Where is that word that was preached?" The word is for the preacher first, he said.

He left the church with three words, in English, because that's how the Lord gave them to him.

Break in to the places God has promised you. Break out of discouragement and every thought of defeat. Break through, the way an army goes in after its own soldiers, whatever walls stand in the way.

He finished at the pool of Bethesda in John 5. He called up a volunteer, Bartolomé, and had him sit on his "mattress." A man had waited there for thirty-eight years. Jesus walked straight to him and asked one question: do you want to be healed? It was a yes or no question. The man said, "I can't. No one will take me."

Pastor Estuardo said he was reading a Barna report that called millennials and Gen Z the generation most separated from God. A paralyzed generation, he called it. And he said paralysis lives in how we think, too: dreams that stopped, goals that stopped, ministries that stopped.

Jesus didn't argue with the man. He told him to get up, and the man got up. "He's not asking you if you want to," Pastor Estuardo said. "He is ordaining you." Then he led the church in saying it out loud: I am victorious. I am forgiven. I am a child of God. He is the Lord of my life. The band started to play.