Joshua 6:20 So the people shouted when the priests blew the trumpets. And it happened when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat. Then the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.
Jericho stood as the first and most formidable barrier in the land of promise. Its walls were thick, its defenses strong, and its reputation intimidating. From a natural perspective, it was unconquerable. Israel had just entered the land, and immediately, they were confronted with a fortress that could not be overcome by conventional means.
But God did not give them a military strategy — He gave them an instruction.
They were told to march around the city, remain silent, blow trumpets, and on the seventh day, release a shout. There were no weapons of siege, no visible plan of attack, no strategy that made sense to the natural mind. The victory would not come through strength or skill, but through obedience to God’s voice. Faith had to move even when the method seemed unusual.
Day after day, they walked in silence. There was no visible progress, no sign that the walls were weakening. It would have been easy to question the process or adjust the plan, but they continued in obedience. Then on the seventh day, at the appointed moment, they shouted — and the walls collapsed.
Jericho did not fall because Israel was strong; it fell because God was faithful.
This is the nature of spiritual victory. The greatest strongholds are not broken by force, but by alignment with God’s instruction. What seems foolish in the natural often carries power in the Spirit. Obedience becomes the weapon, and faith releases what God has already determined to do.
Revival follows this same pattern. God often leads His people in ways that do not appeal to human reasoning. He may call for worship when pressure is rising, prayer when action feels urgent, or persistence when nothing appears to be changing. But spiritual battles require spiritual weapons, and victory comes when we trust His method above our own understanding.
Jericho was more than a city — it was a declaration. No barrier can stand before a people who are aligned with the voice of God. The walls that appeared permanent collapsed in a moment because obedience positioned the people for a breakthrough.
Beloved, do not measure your breakthrough by what you see — measure it by your obedience. The walls before you may look immovable, but they are not stronger than the God who has spoken. This is the hour to trust His strategy, even when it stretches your understanding. If we walk when He says walk, worship when He says worship, and respond when He says speak, the walls will not stand. Revival will not be released through human effort, but through a people fully aligned with heaven — and when that alignment is complete, every stronghold will fall.
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]As we discussed last week, the word for “sign” in ancient Hebrew is “oht”. It was used in Genesis to designate God’s covenant sign with Noah, (the rainbow). And we see now the same word again, in Exodus, identified with the deliverance of the Jewish people from the tenth plague, when the angel of death passed through all Egypt to strike the firstborn. Anyone under the “sign” of the blood was spared.
Yesterday we wrote about one of the greatest moves of God … the Moravian Revival. When the community was in complete disarray, Count Zinzendorf focused on how they could live together in love despite their differences. He called all the men together for an intense study of the Scriptures to focus on how Christian life in community was portrayed. These studies combined with intense prayer convinced many of the believers that they were called to live together in love and that their disunity and conflict were contrary to the clear calling of Scripture.
In the late 1800s, an awakening in South Africa led by Andrew Murray was a powerful move of God. Studying that revival yields essential insights concerning the events occurring now throughout the United States. As the spirit of God began to move in Cape Town, Murray compared the SA revival with past experiences of revivals in Europe. He decided that the intense “emotionalism” was a false experience of God and charged in to break up the meeting. Stepping out of the church, he encountered his father standing and weeping. His father rebuked Andrew, “How dare you stop something that I have prayed to happen for 30 years!”
Revivals, that is, genuine Divinely ordained seasons of the activity of God among men, have a universally unusual character. Normal activities and behaviors give way to the tangible influence of God’s Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brings a freedom of expression, emotion, conviction, worship, and other variations from normal experience.
During the Catholic inquisitions, as millions of Christians were being killed by the Jesuit Priests for apostasy, throughout Europe, Christians were fleeing. In Bohemia alone, there were an estimated 4,000,000 Christians before the Jesuit inquisition, and ten years later, only 800,000 people remained in Bohemia – all of whom were Catholic. These terrible events prepared the ground for one of the greatest moves of God that have ever been recorded, the Moravian Revival, which lasted for over 100 years. Gustav Warneck, the German Historian of Protestant Missions, testified, “This small church in twenty years called into being more missions than the whole Evangelical Church has done in two centuries.”
I love to study past revivals and in studying them, there are two recurring themes that stand out:
First, that He has often used obscure and unknown individuals to lead revivals, and that even these men whom He used so powerfully never considered themselves to be “special”, but often wanted to stay out of the limelight.
During the Great Depression, poverty swept across America like a whirling tornado, ripping up dreams and scattering hopes to the wind. One such poverty twister hit a small part of Texas where a man named Yates ran a sheep ranch. Struggling even to keep food on the table, Yates and his wife did all they could to survive. Finally, they had to accept a government subsidy or lose their home and land to the creditors.