Joshua wrongly assessed the problem. He failed to identify the true cause of it and he responded in three stages. I want you to see these three stages. He began to blame God for it first.

He said, "Lord, why did you allow this? Lord you knew this was going to happen. Why did you permit it to take place? You are God; you are sovereign. You knew what was going on.

"Why me, Lord? Why did you allow this to happen? Lord, it's all your fault. Why did you bring us over here just so that the enemy could kill us? Why Lord?"

You start shouting at Him. Then after a while you start to calm down and you have to admit that God doesn't make mistakes. You begin to realize that you shouldn't be shouting at God anyway. You start to become introverted, and you analyze yourself and start looking inside. You start saying,

Why is God punishing me? What did I do wrong? It must have been something I did wrong. What was it? Where did I fail? Oh, where did I go wrong?"

After you have entertained that thought for about 30 seconds you start to find some way of justifying yourself. You have to give God some reasons why you did this. You have to find a scapegoat to put the blame on, and you have a million people out there to blame. It is wonderful.

You say, "It's their fault Lord. It's the people; that's who it is. Lord, it wasn't me. You know I was sincere in this whole thing. But Lord, these miserable people that you have given me, they fled in the sight of the enemy.

"Lord, how can you give me people like this to fight and take the land with? They're useless; they're pathetic. Why do I put up with them? Lord, you could have given me somebody better than this."

Joshua was failing because he hadn't approached it the correct way. And he found out where the people had failed because God told him both.

You see it was a two-fold failure. Joshua wasn't that far off when he blamed the people. Yes the people were to blame, but not the way he thought. He was to blame also, and he had to take responsibility, but not him alone. It was a failure all round.

Find and Remove the Curse

So the first thing he had to do was to get rid of the curse in the camp. He had to find out who brought the curse in. Well how are you going to find that out amongst thousands of people?

I think there were like over a million people by that time. It could take you a while to check everybody and look in their eyes to see if they are lying. He had to get revelation and the kind of revelation they got in those days wasn't,

"Thus says the Lord, it is Achan the son of so-and-so. Go and get him."

They used a device known as the Urim and Thummim which gave you yes and no answers. God said to Joshua,

"Get all the people together and take a representative from each tribe. As you go before each one of them you will test the Urim and Thummim until you find which tribe it is.

"Then once you have the tribe, take the leaders of the main families in that tribe and test which main family it is. And so you can trace it down through the family trees until you find out exactly who it is."

It was pretty good programming algorithm there don't you think? If you know a little bit about computer programming it was a good search method. It didn't take them very long to find out who did it. It was a guy called Achan.

God said, "You go and find out who caused the curse. There is a curse there all right. Somebody brought some stuff in. Now you find out and you do it this way. This is how you go about it."

Now if there is a curse in your ministry; if things have started to go wrong and if everything is falling apart, you need to find out where it comes from. You must not just ignore it and hope it will go away. You must also not stand there and bind the demons and the person. There is a curse in the camp and that curse must be removed.

You had better find out who it is and you had better let God lead you in exposing who it is. And when you find out who it is get rid of that person. It may be someone right there in the leadership ranks of your ministry. He or she is bringing a curse into the camp and it is affecting the whole ministry.

Watch out; be careful. Look out for curses, because Satan will always try and find somebody to creep in and bring a curse into the camp. And suddenly your whole ministry will go sour.

They had to destroy Achan and his family and everything that they owned. And when they broke the curse then only were they ready to go and have victory.

Exact Instructions

Then finally Joshua received the correct military strategy from God. This one was even more humiliating than Jericho. This was because at least at Jericho, God told Joshua what to do and Joshua added a bit of his own military strategy. This time however, it was as though God was saying,

"Joshua, you are too stupid to even be a general. Now I'm demoting you to private and I'm going to be the general here and I'm going to tell you exactly how to do this thing."

That is pretty humiliating. So God gave him exact instructions and said,

"Firstly, you lead the attack yourself. Secondly, you take all the people with you this time. And thirdly this is how you will do it. You will set up an ambush behind the city. And when you attack, that ambush will come out and attack the city and take it."

This time Joshua did it the right way. He went in there, made as though they were attacking and turned as though they were going to run. And as the people saw them running they came running out of Ai and there was the ambush sitting behind the city.

As soon as the people ran out of the city to chase after Joshua, the guys in the ambush came from the back, entered the city, plundered it and took it. They destroyed it.

The people looked back at their city and saw that it was on fire. The enemy was in front of them, and now Joshua turned around and attacked them.

They tried to run back to their city, but when they tried to do it they found the city was already full of Joshua's soldiers. They were coming out of the city to attack and they were caught in the middle.

That was the end of Ai. It was quick, decisive and simple; so simple that a child could have understood it. Joshua should have known how to handle this one from the beginning. He found if he had just asked God he could have been saved a lot of trouble.

But you see it was necessary for Joshua to experience this so that God could deal once again with his need for recognition and his natural strengths. It was necessary for this to happen to Joshua so that I could share this here and you could learn from it.

Poor old Joshua, the things that he had to suffer just so that we could learn from them. The Scripture says that all of these things were given as examples for us upon whom the ends of the age have come.

Identify any Curse

So what have we learned from this? All of us as leaders face discouragement and failure at times. Now when this begins to happen, before you go spouting off your big mouth, getting deeper in the mire and making a fool of yourself, stop and ask yourself,

"Do I see the symptoms here of a curse?"

What are the symptoms of a curse? They were so clear in Joshua's case. It is just a pity that Joshua didn't have the New Way of Blessing, because he would have known how to identify curses and it could have solved him a lot of problems.

The number one symptom was he lost control. Loss of control is one of the biggest effects of a curse, but what are the other signs? The biggest sign is fear.

What happened? The people came to attack, and suddenly as the enemy came they were gripped with fear. It was an unexplainable fear that took hold of these big, strong men who were mighty warriors. They would gladly give their life in battle, but now suddenly they became afraid and turned and ran.

Now if you start seeing fear coming upon the people, don't stand up and berate them and say,

"You bunch of cowards. You useless people, you've got no courage whatsoever. Why can't you be bold and strong like me?"

I dare say if Joshua had gone out while the curse was still in the camp he would have become full of fear himself. Is there strife and conflict? Is there theft or destruction taking place?

They lost and people's lives were destroyed. There was destruction. All of the signs of the curse were there. Why? It was because a curse was brought into the camp.

Get Revelation

So when you go through your Ai, you must start first by looking for the curse. Look at yourself and look at the people, and identify where the failure is. But above all, before you move, you get before the Lord and you say,

"Father I need revelation. Something is wrong here."

Don't pull out your membership list, go through all the names and say,

"I know that guy. He doesn't like me. I'm sure he's cursed me,"

Then you get all bitter and twisted against the wrong person. Don't do it.

Are you laughing? If you have been in leadership you have been there. The temptation is so strong at times to try and find out who did it without trying to first get revelation. Then you go chopping the wrong head off.

Imagine if Joshua had killed the wrong guy? He would have had innocent blood on his hands. Don't go chopping heads off until you have revelation, and until God has revealed to you where the curse is coming from. He will reveal it to you. He will do it very clearly and distinctly and He will expose it.

You know the Lord has a wonderful way of exposing these things. We have seen this even in our own ministry at times, when it seemed there was a curse in the camp and we couldn't figure out who it was.

Somebody would send an email to the wrong person by mistake and there it would be. Something would come to light unexpectedly.

Why? Because we asked God to reveal the curse. God will reveal the curse. And if He doesn't reveal to you directly where it is coming from, He will bring it to light and expose it so that you can deal with it. But don't act until God has given you the revelation.

If you approach it that way, you can stand tall as the leader that God has called you to be. You can lead the Body of Christ in victory.

You can lead the church into this new move to accomplish what God is causing it to accomplish. You can stand tall, giving the people the covering, remaining at the helm and leading them into battle.

You will do it not in your own strength and not with the wrong motive of recognition. But you will do it by fully obeying the call of God and accomplishing what He called you to do.

If you can do that and accomplish that now ahead of time; if you can put yourself in a place where you catch it before it takes place, you will face your Ai. But you might be blessed to find that you will avoid the anguish of Ai.