We’ve all heard the question: “How do you boil a frog?” And the answer is: “One degree at a time.” Now … scientifically, it turns out that that’s not true. When the water gets hot enough, the frog will jump out of the water.
How do you destroy a person’s soul? Answer: One sin at a time.
We don’t like talking about sin … and we certainly don’t want to be preached at about sin … but guess what? Whether we want to talk about sin or hear sermons about sin or not … it doesn’t make it go away just because we ignore it. Denying its existence or refusing to talk about it doesn’t change the reality and the facts about sin. Sin separates us from God … and that separation from God destroys our hope and a number of other things … like our peace … our joy … our trust … our faith.
In some cases, sin is like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Sometimes sin is silent, crouching at the door, ready and waiting to pounce upon its victim. Sometimes it’s like a termite … small, insignificant … one termite by itself isn’t much of a threat … but if you’ve ever had to deal with termites you know that if you see one termite, there are thousands more eating away at the walls and foundation of your house, amen? By the same token, how much damage can one termite do? But when they bring in all their family and friends, the damage that they cause can be quite extensive and very expensive. And here’s the thing about termites … you never know the extent of their damage until it’s too late, am I right?
Sin can sometimes pounce upon you and destroy you in one fell swoop … or it can quietly, silently eat away at your heart and soul. Every time we do something that we know is wrong, every time we rationalize or ignore sin … it takes another bite out of our hearts … another little nick out of our souls.
Oh … you might not feel the consequences of your sin … not right away, anyways … but over time your sins will begin mount up and you will begin to notice a sense of uneasiness in your heart … a restlessness in your soul … just on the very edge of your consciousness. You can’t put your finger on it but you sense that it’s there … and it doesn’t go away. Even if you choose not to look at it or acknowledge it, the termites of sin will keep chewing and gnawing away … to the point that eventually you can’t ignore it anymore … something’s wrong … something’s out of kilter … out of sync … you know it … you feel it … and you begin to wonder what it could be.
After all, you’re a Christian, right? You love God … so why don’t you have the same enthusiasm to serve God that you once had? Where has the joy of serving God gone? Whatever happened to that sense of well-being, that sense of peace that you had when you first began walking with the Lord? You don’t seem to be as hopeful about things as you used to be. Something is off … something is definitely wrong … but you just can’t seem to pull it out of the shadows … you just can’t seem to get your arms around it … to get a fix, a bead on it.
Here’s the thing about sin … you can ignore it all you want … deny that it exists … and it won’t change a thing. In fact, sin loves it when you deny it … when you look away … it does its best work when we’re in denial. But let me ask you … are we ever really in denial? If there’s no bear in the pantry, then I have nothing to ignore … nothing to deny, right? I don’t even have to think about the pantry. Why would I? In order to deny that there’s a bear in the pantry, I pretty much have to acknowledge that there is a bear … or something … in the pantry. You can try to ignore that suspicious mole on your neck, but you had to have noticed it at some point in order for you to decide to ignore it. Otherwise, why would you have to choose to ignore that thing on your neck. Like a termite, you can ignore that it’s there all you want but it’s there … gnawing at you …chewing away … and some part of you knows it. I mean, who chooses to avoid looking at their neck … unless there’s something on your neck that you choose to avoid, you know what I mean? You with me so far?
Here’s the thing about sin … you can ignore it … you can rationalize it … we usually do … but if we were to get honest … we know it’s there … and, unless you’re a complete and utter sociopath, your sins will continue to gnaw at you like a termite … to grow and spread like a cancer on your soul. And I promise you … one day it will reach a point where you can no longer ignore it.
How do you boil a frog? One degree at a time. How does a person lose their joy and their hope, their peace, their trust, their faith? One sin at a time. Sometimes sin is a prowling lion in search of a prey to devour … sometimes it sits silently at the door … sometimes it gnaws away at you bit by bit … and sometimes it creeps into your soul like a cancer. Whether is pounces, prowls, gnaws, or creeps, as one Israeli soldier by the name of Achan found out … sin destroys our hope, our joy, our peace, our trust, our faith because it destroys our relationship with God … who is the Source … capital “S” … of our hope, our joy, our peace, our faith.
Achan and his family were among the thousands of freed Hebrew slaves that God was leading through the wilderness to the Promised Land … a land that God promised would be flowing with milk and honey. He and his family followed the cloud of smoke during the day … the column of fire at night. They had seen God’s Spirit, His Shekinah glory, descend on the Tent of Meeting many, many times. He and his family had eaten and been sustained by the bread of God’s own storehouse … drank the sweet water that sprang from the rocks. Like his ancestors before him who passed through the Red Sea on dry ground, he and his family crossed through the Jordan River on dry ground and entered Canaan with the rest of Israel.
Achan was one of the soldiers who marched around the impressive and impregnable walls of the city of Jericho. For six days he marched behind the seven priests as they blew the rams’ horns in front of the Ark of the Lord. After the Israeli soldiers had marched around the city of Jericho seven times on the seventh day, Achan shouted at the top of his lungs with the rest of the Israeli army. He watched as God smashed down the walls of Jericho like Styrofoam with his own eyes.
God had kept His promise to deliver the city of Jericho … along with its king, its fighting men, and all it treasure … in to the hands of the Israelis … and He did it without the loss of a single Israeli solider … and Achan was there and got to see it all with his own eyes.
Achan and his family and the rest of Israel celebrated and honored God for this tremendous inaugural victory. The Bible says that: “… they burned down the city, and everything in it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord” (Joshua 6:24).
God had kept His promise and now the Israelites were keeping theirs. Before the fall of Jericho, God had instructed the Israelis to … “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city. The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction … keep away from the things devoted to destruction, so as not to covet and take any of the devoted things and make the camp of Israel an object for destruction, bringing trouble upon it. But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the Lord; they shall go into the treasury of the Lord.”
Now … that seems rather harsh and barbaric … killing every man, woman, and child … every living thing, including the livestock … and then setting the entire city of Jericho on fire … but they didn’t do it to be cruel … they did it as a thank offering to the Lord for their victory. Under the sacrificial system in the Old Testament, you were required to make an offering to the Lord in the form of some type of sacrifice whenever you sinned. By the same token, if God blessed you, you would offer Him some token of appreciation in terms of a sacrifice that was burned on an altar. Whenever God gave the Israelites victory over their enemies, they would offer up the spoils of war as a token of their appreciation to the One … with a capital “O” … who gave them victory. You will notice too that they didn’t keep the gold and bronze and iron for themselves but put it in the treasury of the Lord’s House.
Well … not everything made its way into the treasury of the Lord’s House. One robe, five pounds of silver, and a bar of gold weighing one and a quarter pounds somehow found their way under Achan’s tent. Who am I kidding? We all know how if found its way under Achan’s tent … and so did God.
As Achan patted down the earth with his hands and covered the freshly dug hole under his bed, I’m sure that Achan thought that he had gotten away with it. I mean, there was so much treasure, right? Who was going to miss a robe or a few pounds of gold or silver?
In theory, Achan’s plan worked. None of the Israelis knew that it was missing. Joshua had no idea what Achan had done. None of Achan’s comrades in arms had any idea what Achan had done. They were pumped. They were ecstatic. The first city in the promised land … the mighty walled city of Jericho … had fallen without the loss of a single drop of Israeli blood. All they had to do was obey God, march around the city for a week blowing trumpets, shout, and then watch God turn the mighty walls of Jericho into gravel.
Riding high on the adrenaline of their first victory, the Israelis set their sights on the city of Ai. According to the spies that Joshua sent ahead of them, taking the city of Ai was going to be a piece of cake. God was clearly with them and Ai was a much smaller and less intimidating city than Jericho was. In fact, Joshua’s spies suggested that he leave some of his soldiers behind for a little R and R … rest and relaxation.
But it didn’t turn out to be a piece of cake. In fact, it turned into a disaster … a complete route. “The men of Ai killed about thirty-six [Israeli soldiers], chasing them from outside the gate as far as Shebarim and killing them on the slope” (v. 5). This was not only bad, it was humiliating. The enemy had left the safety of their walls and chased after them as they ran like frightened rabbits.
When they carried their slain comrades back to the camp, there were no shouts of victory … just the wailing of the women and children. There was no celebration … there was no pride in their step … no flush of victory in their faces … no hope in their hearts. The Bible says that the hearts of the people had “melted and turned to water” (v. 5).
One question punctuated their grief and humiliation: Why? And there was only one answer: God had abandoned them.
You see, in Joshua’s day … well, even today … victory was a sign that God was with you … on your side. Victory wasn’t always about the number of soldiers your side had or the level of military hardware or technology you had at your disposal. The fall of Jericho was proof of that. There was no way that they could have taken Jericho on their own … and then to take it so easily … well, God was the only explanation for such a great and easy victory. Victory … like the one that the Israelis had just experience at Jericho … meant that God was with you. Defeat meant that He was not. So, here was the nagging question underneath all their grief and shame: If God was with them at Jericho, why had He abandoned them at Ai?
When the news of their defeat reached Joshua, he went into a rage. He tore his clothes and fell face down on the ground before the Ark of the Lord. The elders joined him, and they remained face down on the ground before the Ark of the Lord from morning until night. They poured dust upon their heads as a sign of their grief. Their actions were a reflection of what was going on in the hearts of all the people. Why had God abandoned them? The thought that God had abandoned them in a land filled with walled cities and fierce warriors was terrifying. They had refused to enter Canaan 40 years earlier because Canaan was a land that devoured its inhabitants (Numbers 13:32). And now their hopes were dashed by their worse fears … God had abandoned them and they were now going to have to either retreat or go forward without God … both very unpleasant prospects.
What you do in a situation like that? What do you in a situation like the one we’re in today? What do you do when every victory, every advance we seem to make, is followed by even worse news? How do we go up against a virus that we can’t see but can wreck such devastation? We do what Joshua and the elders of the camp did … we humble ourselves before God and we pray, amen?
I love the honesty and humanity of the Bible. Joshua tries to lay the blame at God’s feet. “Ah, Lord God! Why have YOU brought this people across the Jordan at all? To hand us over to the Amorites so as to destroy us? Would that we had been content to settle beyond the Jordan!” (Joshua 7:7). Whoa! Is this the same Joshua who said that they could take the land that God had promised them when Israel refused to cross the Jordan 40 years earlier? How often have we blamed God for our misfortune? How many times have we wished to return to the misery we knew rather than face the fear that lies before us?
Then Joshua pulls a prayer out of Moses’ play book. “O Lord, what can I say, now that Israel has turned their backs to their enemies! The Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land will hear of it, and surround us, and cut off our name from the earth. Then what will You do for Your great name?” (Joshua 7:8-9).
Joshua’s prayer is sincere and honest and heart-felt. God had promised them victory. What happened at Ai was shameful, dishonorable. When word of their humiliating defeat got around, it would not only embolden their enemy but would tarnish God’s reputation among the nations. Remember … victory was a sign of God being with you. In the eyes of the Amorites, their god or gods had defeated the God of the Israelites … a sign that would be interpret as weakness on the part of the Israelites and their God by all the other tribes and city states they were to go up against. Joshua and the Israelites had good reason to be terrified. If God had truly abandoned them then they were absolutely doomed.
Here’s the thing, my brothers and sisters … when you pray to God, you better be ready to hear His answer, amen? God puts the blame where it belongs! “Stand up! Why have you fallen upon your face? Israel has sinned; they have transgressed my covenant that I imposed on them” (Joshua 7:10) … and then He goes on to remind them of the conditions that they had agreed to before the fall of Jericho. “They have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen, they have acted deceitfully, they have put them among their own belongings” (Joshua 7:11). It seems that God had kept His end of the bargain, Israel had not … and because of their sin, Israel had become “a thing devoted for destruction themselves” (Joshua 7:13). Their defeat was the result of their actions, not God’s.
That must have been a very strange and unsettling moment for Joshua and the elders. Here’s where it pays to listen closely to the words. God kept using the word “they” to refer to the whole nation of Israel … as if the whole nation had stolen some of the devoted things and put them among their own belonging. “They have taken some of the devoted things,” said God, “they have stolen, they have acted deceitfully, they have put them among their own belongings” (Joshua 7:11). In truth, Joshua and the elders had no idea what God was talking about. They had done as God asked. They had kept the conditions of the covenant down to the letter. They had burned Jericho to the ground and put all the silver and gold and iron and all the sacred things of God into the treasury of the Lord (Joshua 6:19). What was God talking about? How could He even suggest such a thing?
Here’s the thing about sin. It doesn’t just affect you, does it? It affects everything and everyone around you. Achan’s sin brought a cancer in to the community and, like a cancer, it needed to be exposed and eradicated.
Now, this is the part of the story that might seem harsh but, as we shall see, but it is actually a powerful story about God’s grace. To begin with, God tells them that He should abandon them … He has every right to abandon them … but He won’t. Instead, He will give them a chance to make things right. “I will be with you no more,” says God, “unless” … … here comes the grace … “unless you destroy the devoted things from among you” (Joshua 7:12).
Sin may eventually destroy a whole community but God will not destroy the whole community to get rid of the sin. Joshua and the elders may not know whom God is speaking about or what that person or persons took, but God does … so God lays out a plan to expose the sin, but He lays the responsibility of removing that sin on the shoulders of the people. “Proceed to sanctify the people,” says God, for tomorrow they will stand before me. “There are devoted things among you, O Israel; you will be unable to stand before your enemies until you take away the devoted things from among you. In the morning therefore you shall come forward tribe by tribe. The tribe that the Lord takes shall come near by clans, the clan that the Lord takes shall come near by households, and the household that the Lord takes shall come near one by one. And the one who is taken as having the devoted things shall be burned with fire, together with all that he has, for having transgressed the covenant of the Lord, and for having done an outrageous thing in Israel” (Joshua 7:13-15). As I said earlier, it might seem extremely harsh at first but, as we shall see, God’s plan is actually very gracious.
To begin with, I want you to pay attention to the process … God is going to reverse the process of sin within the community. The sin started with Achan … it spread to his family … then it affected his clan … his tribe … and then lead to the defeat of the nation of Israel at Ai and the possible threat of God’s absence in the future if they don’t destroy the sin. God goes from nation to tribe to clan to family to the very source of the sin itself … Achan.
Why didn’t Achan come forward the very moment that he heard what God was planning to do in the morning? Why put everybody, including God, through all of that … calling out the guilty tribe, then calling out the guilty clan, the guilty family? There are two things that make for a really good liar. Know what they are? First, you cling to your lie no matter what. You ride that horse until it drops dead and then you drag it. And the other is that you cling to the hope against hope that you just might get away with it. I mean, who wants to be stoned to death, am I right? Look, before we judge Ol’ Achan, which one of you would step forward and confess knowing that the penalty for your indiscretion is for you and possibly your whole family to be stoned to death and then cremated? I’ve always wondered though … would God have ordered Achan and his family to be stoned to death if Achan had come forward right away? Maybe God would have simply expelled him from the community … but he didn’t, so we’ll never know.
Achan watches as the noose tightens. God first identifies the guilty tribe as the tribe of Judah … gulp! Then God identifies the guilty clan as the clan of Zerahites … double gulp! The noose grows tighter. Then God points His finger right at him! “It is you, Achan, son of Carmi, son of Zabdison of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah.” Well … no mistake and no wiggle room there, amen?
Joshua pleads with Achan. “My son, give glory to the Lord God of Israel and make confession to him. Tell me now what you have done; do not hide it from me” (Joshua 7:19). What a moment. What a spot to be in. The whole nation of Israel … your tribe … your clan … your family … your leader … God … all looking at you. Busted! You ever been busted? I’ve been busted and I’m sure that all of you have been busted at some time or other but very few of us have been busted like this. I know doctors and lawyers who have been arrested and had their guilt and shame paraded across the media … their names and their reputations dragged through the mud … that’s how busted Achan is. His sin, his guilt and shame laid bare for all to see. What choice does he have but to confess?
“It is true; I am the one who sinned against the Lord God of Israel. This is what I did; when I saw among the spoil a beautiful mantle from Shinar, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weighing fifty shekels, then I coveted them and took them. They now lie hidden in the ground inside my tent, with the silver underneath” (Joshua 7:20-21).
Even his confession is one of those left-handed confessions. “Hey, who could blame me, right? Such a pretty robe … and all that gold and silver … really, I didn’t take very much. Common, guys … you’d of done the same thing, am I right?” Only nobody else did. They had their own temptations, but they gave their spoils to the treasury of the House of the Lord.
Here’s the rough part … the consequences of sin. “So Joshua sent messengers, and they ran to the tent; and there it was, hidden in his tent with the silver underneath. They took them out of the tent and brought them to Joshua and all the Israelites; and they spread them out before the Lord. Then Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan, son of Zerah, with the silver, the mantle, and the bar of gold, with his sons and daughters, with his oxen, donkeys, and sheep, and his tent and all that he had; and they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. Joshua asked, ‘Why did you bring trouble on us? The Lord is bringing trouble on you today.’ And all Israel stoned him to death; they burned them with fire, cast stones on them, and raised over him a great heap of stones that remains to this day. Then the Lord turned from His burning anger. Therefore that place to this day is called the Valley of Achor” (Joshua 7:22-26).
Where’s the grace in this, pastor? Well, God gave Achan plenty of time to confess. Here’s the thing about repentance. Many people will confess their sins and expect God to wipe the slate clean … which He does … but He doesn’t always erase the consequences of our sin. Part of repentance is to not only confess our sin but to be ready to accept the consequences for it. Thirty-six men were killed as the result of Achan’s sin. Thirty-six families lost a husband, a father, a brother because of Achan’s sin. The future of Israel was jeopardized because of Achan’s sin. Israel’s relationship with God was threatened because of Achan ‘s sin. The reason that the cross is so powerful to me is that I truly deserve the punishment for my sins that Jesus took upon Himself. If God were to hold me accountable for my sins today, I would own them and I would accept my punishment because I deserve it.
I do struggle with the fact that Achan’s whole family was sacrificed. In those days, a man’s family was considered to be his property … much like his slaves or his livestock. God commanded that all that Achan had be brought to the Valley of Achor … his family, his livestock, and all of his wealth. Achan not only had to suffer for his sin but his family had to pay the price right along with him.
Stones … and trust me, Israel has a lot of stones … were used as markers. When the Israelites passed through the Jordan, God told them to pile up stones in the middle of the Jordan River and at Gilgal as a reminder of the day that He brought them into the Promised Land. When people asked what the stones meant, it also gave the Israelites an opportunity to share the story of God’s glory. The stones piled on Achan’s body would serve as a grim reminder to the people of Israel of what happens when you sin and try to cover it up … your sin and your shame gets exposed and your body gets covered up and every time someone asks about Achan’s pile of stones, his sin and his shame get spoken of and exposed again and again and again … like it is today, amen?
Achan’s dishonorable burial also served as a visual reminder that sin not only affects the individual but the entire community. They were defeated at Ai because of Achan’s sin … which is a sin of the whole community. In order for God to dwell among them, they had to create and maintain a holy environment. Any sin present among God’s people threatens the purity of the community and therefore places that community at risk of losing their relationship with God. “I will be with you no more unless you destroy whatever among you is devoted to destruction” (Joshua 7:12).
What Achan did reminds me of what Ananias and Sapphira did and what happened to them in Acts 5. When we’re not satisfied with what God has given us, we are tempted to covet things. It wasn’t like Achan was poor. The Bible says that he had sons and daughters, cattle, sheep, and donkeys … and for a moment of lust … a moment of greed … he lost it all and placed the entire nation of Israel at risk.
The devil has often led us to believe the delusion that we can cover up our sin or our guilt. Adam and Eve thought that they could cover up their guilt with fig leaves. Cain thought that he could dismiss his guilt by claiming that he was not his brother’s keeper. Joseph’s brothers attempted to wipe out their sin by selling their brother to slavers. Moses tried to bury his guilt in the sand. King David tried to justify his sin by having Uriah killed so that he could comfort his widow. What happened in every case? Their sins were unearthed, exposed, brought out into the light of day.
What’s buried under your tent? Is it a craving of your body? A lust of the soul? Perhaps you have buried a guilty pleasure or secret addiction under your tent that you believe is unknown to everyone but you? Are you being unfaithful in thought or word or action to wedding vows? Have you found a seemingly innocent way to cheat or steal from your employer? Are you living a lie at school, at your work, or at home?
What do you do when you sense that your hope and peace and joy and faith and trust are fading … when your heart and soul are troubled … and you have a feeling that you have something to do with it in the back of your heart gnawing at you? Achan’s fate can show us what to do to avoid his fate.
Step 1 … you have to make a decision. The enemy of your soul wants to give you the impression that you are trapped … that there’s nothing that you can do about your situation … that you are doomed to stay trapped in the cycle of your sins forever … that you are trapped in some kind of spiritual cul-du-sac of secrets and shame that you can’t get out of …
Not true! A lie! You don’t have to be where you are if you don’t want to. You have to get honest, to face the truth … then you have to “stand up” and take action … which leads us to the second step … take action.
We must do like Joshua and the elders and go to the Lord … ask Him to search us and reveal to us the thing or things that are holding us back … the thing or things that are separating us from God or interfering with our relationship with Him. We must be willing to call upon God to search us and we must have the courage to face what He reveals to us, amen?
Decision leads to action … action takes us to the core of our problem. As I said at the beginning, we don’t always know what is wrong. We might have a sense that something isn’t right … we don’t have the enthusiasm to serve God like we once did … we don’t have the joy that we once had … the sense of well-being … that sense of hope. Joshua didn’t know what was wrong … he just knew that something was wrong. The elders and the people of Israel knew something was wrong … but it wasn’t until Joshua and the elders prayed and God showed it to them that they knew what was wrong. God took them straight to the core of their problem.
Once God reveals the source of our discomfort … once God takes us straight to the core of our problem … don’t rationalize it. Sounds obvious … sounds easy … but it is a subtle trap. Rationalization is our favorite indoor sport these days, isn’t it? We no longer talk about things as being “sinful” or “wrong” or in violation of the holiness of God. We don’t even like the word “sin” anymore, do we? When God reveals the problem to you, call it what it is … sin … and deal with it head on, amen? When the people heard what Achan had done, they went to his tent, dug up the robe and the treasure, and they spread Achan’s sin … their sin … out in the presence of the Lord.
Once God places your finger on the problem, you have to come before the Lord and confess it … lay it all out in the open! “Lord, thank you for revealing my sin to me … now I know why I feel the way that I do … why I have the sense that something is wrong … why my heart has been so troubled lately. I admit that I have sinned … that I have been ___________” … fill in the blank … “I see it and I own it, Lord. I’m not gonna rationalize it. I’m not going to hide it. I confess it … I admit it … I lay it all out here in the open where we can both see it and call it what it is.”
Once we make a decision … once we take action … once God points out the core of our problem … we don’t rationalize it … we confess it … we lay it before the Lord … and we ask Him to destroy it … to destroy it before it destroy us … to destroy it before it destroys our relationship with Him. When they took Achan and his family to the Valley of Achor, they stoned them … they burned them … and then they piled stones on top of Achan’s body. When God identifies a sin or sins in your life … let God take it to the Valley of Achor and stone it … burn it … utterly destroy it … and then bury it so that it doesn’t come back.
Remember that I told you that this is a story about God’s grace? The word “achor” means “trouble.” When the Lord exposed Achan’s sin, the people of Israel took Achan and everything he owned to a valley where they stoned him and his family, burned their corpses, and piled stones on top of his body and named the place “the Valley of Achor” … the “Valley of Trouble” (Joshua 7:26).
Fast forward about 500 years. Speaking the words of God, the Prophet Hosea tells Israel that He will bring out the nation’s sins and take them to the Valley of Achor. Israel is stoned, burned, and seemingly buried by the Assyrians. They will be all but destroyed for their sin … but! … God promises to restore them when they repent and return to Him. “Therefore, I will now allure her,” says the Lord, “and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. From there I will give her her vineyards, and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope” (Hosea 2:14-15). God promised that He would make the place where Achan’s sin was revealed … the place where Achan was punished for his sin … into a door, a place of hope.
When you find yourself in the Valley of Achor, God promises you that there will always be a door of hope. Remember, you have a decision to make. You can either try to deny and hide your sin or you can take action and go to the Lord and ask Him to help you get down to the source of your “achor” … your trouble. Once God has revealed what’s buried under your tent, don’t rationalize it … accept it and honestly confess it before God … dig it up … lay it all out in the open before the Lord … so that God can destroy it and you can pass through the Valley of Achor and enter His door of hope … Jesus Christ.
Let us pray …
