Twenty years ago, the building this church now meets in was a storage facility for frozen pizza. On this milestone anniversary, Pastor David Payne preaches “Lasting Impact” from Joshua 3-4, making the case that a life worth living is one that outlasts the years you actually get to live it, on earth and in heaven. He opens with a reflection on something most people skip when reading Scripture: the genealogies. Far from being filler, David argues they exist to show every person their place in a story that started before them and continues after them, a truth anchored in both Romans 15:4 and Acts 17:26-27.
From there, David tells Israel’s story of crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land under Joshua’s leadership, a river in full flood, a million-plus people, and a miracle so specific that the Lord didn’t just part the water but dried the riverbed itself so it could be crossed on foot in a single day. But the sermon’s sharpest turn comes from something easy to miss in the text: before the miracle, Joshua tells the people to purify themselves, because “the miracle someone else needs might be on the other side of your own consecration.” David connects that directly to the church’s twenty years, naming staff, launch team members, and everyday people whose faithfulness became the miracle someone else needed.
The second half walks through Joshua 4, where twelve men are commanded to carry massive stones out of the Jordan to build a memorial, and Joshua secretly builds a second, unseen pile of stones in the riverbed itself. David draws out two challenges from this: mark the moments of God’s intervention for the sake of those who come after you, and when the enemy reminds you of your history, revisit your heritage instead, the same way David the king and Rahab, both flawed, both included in the lineage, chose to remember the miracles rather than the miserable. He closes with a charge that what any one person is part of is always bigger than the role they play, and an invitation for anyone ready to surrender their life to Jesus for the first time.
BIBLICAL REFERENCES
Romans 15:4
Acts 17:26-27
Joshua 3:5
Joshua 3:6-17
Joshua 4:6-7
Joshua 4:9
