Joshua 24:14-24

Joshua 24 Sermon: Choosing the Lord Without Skipping the Warning

Joshua 24 gets preached at building dedications, new members' classes, and any Sunday that calls for decision, because verse 15 hands you a ready-made altar call. What the text quietly asks of the preacher is harder: to let verses 19 and 20, where Joshua tells the people they cannot do what he just told them to do, stay in the sermon instead of being edited out for the sake of a clean ending.

The text at a glance

Joshua opens by walking the people through their own family history — Abraham called from beyond the river, Egypt, the wilderness, the conquest — before he asks them to do anything (24:1-13).
Only then does he issue the command: fear the Lord, serve him in sincerity and truth, and put away the gods your ancestors served, whether beyond the Euphrates or in Egypt (24:14).
Verse 15 frames the choice as public and immediate — today, not eventually — and Joshua states his own household's answer before asking for theirs.
The people answer quickly and confidently, and Joshua's response is not relief but resistance: he tells them plainly that serving this holy, jealous God is not something they are able to do on their own terms (24:19-20).
The people insist a second time, Joshua declares them witnesses against their own statement, and the passage closes with a renewed covenant, not a completed one (24:21-24).

Three ways a sermon can go

The whole household's declaration

Joshua's own answer in verse 15 — as for me and my house — makes the choice both personal and communal, a pattern for how a leader's household models allegiance. Preaching this angle well means keeping Joshua's statement as his own resolve rather than turning it into a claim that a head of household can decide the faith of the people under that roof.

The hard verse: you are not able

Verses 19-20 puncture the enthusiasm the people just offered, and how that warning relates to a believer's assurance afterward is read differently across traditions — some hold it describes a real possibility of falling away, others read it as a picture of covenant seriousness within a security God ultimately preserves. A sermon on this angle does not need to settle that question, but it does cost the preacher a clean ending, since the text itself does not resolve the tension here.

Naming and removing the rival gods

Verse 14's command to put away the gods beyond the river and in Egypt, echoed in verse 23, gives a sermon room to name what competes for allegiance now rather than staying at the level of ancient idols. It requires the preacher to do the harder work of naming something specific and current instead of a safe, generic idols of the heart.

Where sermons on this text commonly slip

Choosing without the history

Verse 15 makes a strong stand-alone quote, and it is tempting to preach the choice as pure willpower detached from the recital of God's acts in verses 1-13. Without that history behind it, choose this day starts to sound like self-determination rather than a response to what God has already done.

Skipping verses 19-20

Joshua's statement that the people are not able to serve the Lord is easy to leave out, since it complicates the forward momentum toward verse 24's happy agreement. A sermon that never mentions it lets the text's real difficulty go unaddressed and turns the covenant renewal into a formality.

Generic idols instead of named ones

It is easy to gesture at idols of the heart as a category without naming anything a listener would recognize in their own week. The text itself is specific — the gods of a particular place and a particular family history — and the sermon loses that specificity when it stays abstract.

Five questions to ask afterwards

Did the sermon walk through verses 1-13's recital of Israel's history before arriving at the command in verse 14, or did choose this day in verse 15 appear as a stand-alone call detached from that history?
Did the sermon read or explain verses 19-20, where Joshua tells the people they are not able to serve the Lord, or did it move from verse 15's choice straight to verse 24's agreement?
If the sermon addressed the warning in verse 20 about turning away, did it note that traditions read that warning differently regarding a believer's security, or did it press the warning as settled doctrine for every listener?
Did the sermon name a specific, current rival allegiance that a listener could identify in their own week, or did it use only the general word idols without naming one?
Did the application ask for one identifiable action a listener could take before next Sunday, or did it end at a restated version of choose to serve the Lord?

Keeping the application on the ground

A landed application from this text names one specific rival allegiance and asks the listener to do something concrete about it this week, the way Joshua named actual gods and asked for an actual choice on an actual day. A floating application repeats choose the Lord as a restated exhortation without ever specifying what choosing looks like before Sunday.

Write down one thing currently competing for first loyalty — a habit, a purchase, a use of time — and tell one other person what it is before next Sunday.
Have one honest conversation with someone in your household this week about what they actually believe, rather than what the family has always said.
Identify one practice or subscription that functions like a small altar in daily life, stop it for a week, and notice what that was like.

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