Joshua Part 4 - Jericho

Now we come to probably the most famous part of Joshua's life - Jericho.  This story has been talked about several times and I know that Veggie Tales made a skit about it but here is my rendition of the story.

Joshua finally got the people of Israel across the Jordan river.  Now they had entered the Promised Land.  God had been telling them for 40 years that they would get to this land and the time had finally arrived.  As I stated in the last post, they were facing a tremendous challenge when they got there.  There were seven nations occupying their land and each of these nations was more powerful than Israel.  But Joshua had God on his side so he was determined to conquer the land.

Throughout the first several books of the Bible, we see that while God is certainly a God that can do miracles, the Israelites learn much about tactics and how to do things militarily.  Fortunately for Joshua, this is not his first campaign as their military leader and he is at home fighting wars.  So Joshua sends out a couple of guys to do reconnaissance of the land.  He needed to know what he was up against and these guys were to go take a look and give him a report on the land.  While the two guys were spying out Jericho, they came across a woman named Rahab and they stayed with her.  It's interesting that Rahab was a prostitute.

Well the king of Jericho finds out that the Israelites stayed at Rahab's house and he isn't real happy about it so he sends some people to pick the two spies up.  Rahab hides them.  Somehow she knows that the Israelites will be victorious so she makes them promise to spare her family when they invade the city even though the city has real high walls that make it almost impossible to attack and win an easy victory.  The spies give her a scarlet string and tell her to tie it to her window when the attack happens.  Anyone in her house will be spared but everyone else is going down.  They leave and tell Joshua all the found.

So Joshua loads everyone up and they prepare to cross the Jordan river which is at it's flood level.  Joshua has the people carrying the Ark of the Covenant go first.  Now as soon as their feet touch the edge of the water, the Lord stops the water from flowing and everyone crosses.  The instant that the last of the people's feet touch the other side of the river, it starts flooding again.  So the children of Israel camped on the other side of the Jordan river.  The day the pitched camp was the last day that the Lord sent them manna from heaven for food. 

Now while Joshua was standing around, he looked up and there was a man standing there with his sword drawn.  Joshua fell down on his face before the man and asked if he was friend or enemy.  The man was the captain of the Lord's army.  He was an angel.  Now Israel had surrounded the city so that no one could get in or out and the angel said the Lord is giving you this city.  Then the angel gives him the strangest battle plan ever used on a battle field.  Here is what he tells Joshua to do.  I want you to get some priests and the whole army and I want you to walk around the city once.  Do this each day for the six days.  On the seventh day, I want you to walk around the city seven times.  On the seventh time, the priests will blow their horns and everyone give a loud shout.  When that happens, the wall of Jericho will fall down and you can rush in to capture the city.

I don't know about you but this doesn't make much sense to me.  If the angel had said, I'm going to call in the heavenly Navy Seals and they are going to blow the walls apart with explosives then I'm going to hit the whole city with a bunch of bombs from a bomber, that would make sense.  But we need to learn a lesson.  God's thoughts are higher than ours and many times what He tells us to do won't make sense to us.  But if we know it's Him, we need to follow His directions. 

Fortunately for them, the Israelites did exactly what God told them to do through Joshua and just like He said it would, on the seventh trip around of the seventh day, when the people shouted and the priest blew the horns, the wall fell down flat and Israel captured the city!

Joshua went on to help the children of Israel conquer the promised land and while I could say much more about it, I am going to stop right here.

That's another of the Minion's Bible Stories.

Joshua Part 3

Today I want to continue with the story of Joshua.  Now as we previously discussed, Joshua was a military leader as well as being one of Moses, the President's, right hand men.  Joshua had a heart for God and served him all the days of his life.  He was only one of two people who were adults that actually entered the promised land with the other children of Israel.  What about Moses you ask?  Well Moses saw the promised land but he didn't enter it with Israel.  I will get to that in a few minutes.

Now what I find interesting is that Joshua was destined to become the next President/Leader of Israel.  Israel wasn't a democracy so they really didn't have a president but I hope this helps you understand Moses and then Joshua's position in the government.  Now like we touched on in the last post, Joshua and Caleb were full of faith and when the Lord told them to go and take possession of the land, they were ready to do it but everyone else was to afraid to try.  So God sent them to wander around in the wilderness for 40 years until everyone from the generation of those that didn't believe was dead.  During that time, they took on two different nations and wiped them out.  The didn't start the fight, the other nations did.  But with God's help, they sure finished it.

So we see that Joshua did very well as the General of the Army.  As President, he would keep the same position as the top general of Israel's army.  He did all the right things.  He supported God's man in power, Moses, and he worked hard to do what Moses said.  But something was going to happen that he wouldn't like.  He was going to get promoted but it was going to come at a cost.  See one time when the Israelites needed water, God told Moses to talk to a rock and that it would produce water enough to take care of this whole nation.  Moses got mad at the people and he hit the rock instead of talking to it.  Now I haven't done the studying to determine why this made God so mad at Moses but it did.  Because of that Moses was not able to go into the promised land with Israel.

The Lord told Moses to appoint Joshua as the leader of Israel which he did.  Then Moses went up on this mountain to see all the land of Israel and while he was there, he died.  The bible says that the Lord buried him and is the only one who knows where Moses body is today. 

This caused Joshua some discomfort because he was about to lead his nation into battle again but he was facing an impossible situation.  First of all, they had to cross the Jordan river while it was at it's highest level of the year.  That was no easy task.  Then once he got to the other side of the river, there were seven nations in the land of Israel.  Each one of these nations on their own was larger than the whole nation of Israel and the Lord told Joshua that he was going to lead Israel into victory against each one.  On top of all this, Moses was dead.  Joshua couldn't go to Moses to find out what should be done.  He had to go to the Lord himself and seek God through the Levites who were the priests of Israel.

I want to end today with what the Lord told Joshua because it has blessed me personally over the years.  I will finish what I plan on writing about Joshua with the story of Jericho next week.

This is from Joshua chapter one.  This is my paraphrase.  The Lord says, "Moses is dead.  Get over it.  It's time for you to lead this people now.  You lead the people over the Jordan and into the land that I promised them.  Every place that you walk I have given to you just like I told Moses.  No man will be able to stand against you all the days of your life.  As I was with Moses, so I will be with you:  I will not fail you or leave you.  Only stand strong in your faith in Me because you will deliver this land to Israel.  Do what Moses said and I will cause everything you do to prosper."

That's another Minion's Bible story

Joshua Part 2

Let's continue with our story of Joshua.  This has been very interesting for me so far because I started out thinking we would talk about Joshua and the wall of Jericho.  We will get to that in time but I am really learning a lot about his character as we go.  Joshua was constantly around Moses.  He was learning everything he could about how the Lord, through Moses, led the children of Israel.  Joshua seemed to be the type of guy who would do anything that Moses told him to do.

Now we know that the children of Israel left Egypt and they were headed for what the Lord called the Promise land.  That land was a good land and it is actually where the children of Israel came from before they went to Egypt.  But it had been about 400 years since they had been to their homeland and they were on their way back to it.

Now when they got to the edge of the Promised land (also called Canaan) Moses sent people to go check out the land.  He sent one man from each of the twelve different tribes of Israel.  Guess who was one of the twelve?  Yup, it was Joshua.  So these twelve guys head out to check the place out.  Moses knows they will have to invade the place so he wants to know stuff like whether the people live in tents or in forts, if there is a lot of wood and if there is any food.  These guys come into the land and they find a ton of food.  As a matter of fact, they cut down this big cluster of grapes that is so big it takes two of them to carry it.  That's a lot of grapes.  They also brought back pomegranates and figs.  The guys came back to Moses after they searched the whole country for 40 days.

Everyone of the twelve said it was a really cool place with plenty of food and that it would be a great place to live.  But here is where things get a little interesting.  Ten of the twelve guys came back and said, "Dude, there are giants living in that place.  These are the biggest dudes we have ever seen.  Some of them are really famous and there is no way on earth we could ever beat them.  We can't make them leave our land.  We aren't good enough to do it.  We even saw these giants called the sons of Anak.  After seeing them we looked at ourselves and we thought we were just little grasshoppers.  Also, they thought we were grasshoppers too and they know that beat us up."  This is the Minion translation of what the bible says.

So everyone in the whole nation of Israel freaks out.  They get all worked up and then they get mad at God.  They say, "God should have just let us die in Egypt or in the wilderness.  The Lord just brought here so these people could kill us with a sword and take our kids captive.  Maybe we should get rid of Moses and Aaron and find someone who will lead us back to Egypt."  Now God told these people that they were supposed to go and take this land back for them to live in.  He even gave them several things that he wanted them to do when they lived there.  But they were so afraid because of what ten of the men said about the land that they trusted these men's words much more than they trusted God's word.  That doesn't make a lot of sense does it?  If God tells us to do something, even if it seems impossible, He will make it happen because He says he will.

Now Moses and Aaron are pretty upset so they fell down on their faces before the nation.  It would probably be a good thing if our top politicians and our top Christian leaders got on their face to pray to God about what to do with our nation.  Notice I said that only ten of the twelve had bad stuff to say about the Promised land.  By the way, the Promised land is the country that we call Israel today.  Anyway, there were two guys who had something different to say.  One was Caleb.  Guess who the other was?  Yup, it was Joshua.  They stood up before all the people and said, "This is a great place to live.  If God told us to go take this land then He will make sure we do it regardless of the giants that live there.  It's a good land.  But we need to be careful now.  We can't rebel against what God said to us.  Dudes, don't be afraid of these wimps.  It doesn't matter how big they are.  They can't defend themselves against us because God is going to kick them out.  God is with us."

But these folks wouldn't listen and they wanted to stone Joshua and Caleb to death.  The Israelites were kind of mean weren't they.  We will hear more about the children of Israel and Joshua next week but for now I want to leave you with a few things we have learned about Joshua in this post.

First of all, Joshua did what his leader Moses told him to do.  Think about it for a minute.  If the land was like they described it, there were only twelve scouts and if they got into a fight, they could have been whipped pretty bad.  Second, Joshua knew what the Lord said about the promised land.  He knew that God told them to go into that land and live there.  When he was faced with a situation that looked different that what God told them about it, he didn't get upset.  He just expected God to do something about the situation.  He knew that God would fix it.  Let me stop here for a minute and ask, what situations are you facing in your life right now?  Are there things in your life that seem like they don't line up with what God has to say?  Maybe you need healing in your body or your spirit.  Well Jesus said in 1 Peter 2:24 that his body was broken and because it was, we were healed.  Start setting your heart and mind on what God said and don't let what your situation looks like scare you.  It cannot stand up to the word of God.

Lastly, Joshua was so passionate about what he believed God said that he was willing to stand up for what he believed the Lord wanted.  Like the country music song says, you have to stand for something or you will fall for anything.

Well it's happened again.  I have blogged myself happy and that's another of the Minion's bible stories.

Joshua Part 1

Hello Everyone,

Today I want to start the story of Joshua.  He has an amazing story because he was actually the man who lead Israel into the promise land.  Now we know that Moses was the one who lead them out of Egypt and he was their leader for about 40 years while they wandered around in the desert.  

Now Joshua was a military man and Moses was sort of like the President.  I used to think that Moses was a priest because the bible talks a lot in the book of Exodus about all of Moses conversations with God.  After all, it was Moses who went up on the mountain to talk to God and get the ten commandments.  It was Moses and God who talked over what was going to happen in Egypt, etc., right?  Well in our society today, I used to equate this type of person to the Pope or to a preacher because we go to church to hear from God.  I wonder what our country would be like if it was our political leaders who were talking to and hearing from God instead of just our preachers.

How do we know that Moses was not the preacher of his day?  Well, the Bible says in Exodus 28, that Aaron, Moses’ brother was going to be the high priest.  Moses was the leader of the people, not the priest.  So anyway one of Moses’ right hand men was Joshua.  Joshua was the military leader of Israel.  He was like the commanding general of their whole Army.  In Exodus 17, we get our first look at this commanding general.  The Lord gave Moses, the President, the battle plan to fight against a group of people called the Amalekites.  Then Moses told Joshua how to fight against them.  Now you have to understand that the Israelites were just slaves a couple of months before this battle.  They really didn’t know how to fight.  That’s why God didn’t let them fight against the Egyptians when they came out.  Remember Moses parted the Red Sea and they walked through on dry land then the Red Sea swallowed up the Egyptian army?

Well now the army of Israel got it’s first test and their commanding general was Joshua.  This is pretty amazing because not only did Joshua have to learn to be a warrior, he had  to learn to control a whole army that was fighting against a whole nation.  So for this battle, Moses, the President not the priest, goes up on this hill to watch the battle.  The Lord tells him to hold up his hands.  As long as Moses is holding his hands up, Israel is winning the battle but if he puts them down, then the Amalekites start winning.  Now here we get a good picture of how things are supposed to work.  Moses has to sit down on a rock because he gets tired.  This battle takes all day.  First of all, notice what God tells Moses to do.  The key to the battle isn’t the brilliant tactics of Joshua, although those are important.  The key is Moses holding up his hands.  Here is what we need to learn from this.  Sometimes, the Lord will ask us to do strange things but if we know that it is the Lord, just follow his command and trust him.

There is something else here to notice.  When Moses gets really tired, Aaron (the priest) and another dude named Hur, stand on either side of Moses and hold his hands up.  Get a picture because it’s important, the priest is there to support the president.  Also notice that the president is leaning on the priest.  Both of these things give us a picture of the way God intended things to work.  

So anyway, Joshua is victorious in his first battle because he defeats the Amalekites and Israel wins a great victory.  Now I am going to stop right here for now.  Next week we will look at what happens when the children of Israel get to the promised land and get a real good glimpse into Joshua’s character.

That’s another of the Minion’s bible stories. 

Gideon Part 2

OK let's recap what we learned about Gideon from the last blog and then we will finish the story.  Last time, we learned that Gideon was the wimpiest guy.  The bible says he was from the smallest house of the smallest tribe of Israel.  If you think of US Navy Seals, he was the exact opposite, or at least he thought he was.  But God saw something different in him.  See Israel was being raided and beaten up a lot and God was going to use this sniveling, weak, wimpy guy to deliver the whole nation of Israel.  Gideon wasn't sure about this whole thing so he decided to test God.

Now let's pick up the story there.  Before he tested God with the fleece, something really cool happened.  He trusted God.  Now trust is a hard thing for most of us but he trusted God completely.  He decided that he would do whatever God told him to do.  So before God could use him to deliver Israel, He had to build Gideon's confidence.

Well they started with something right inside Gideon's own family that was really hacking God off.  It was a common practice to set up alters in those days.  Now unfortunately, Gideon's town worshipped the devil because they had an alter set up to Baal (or the Devil).  This kind of stuff makes God mad.  Just think about it for a minute, if your friend really needed lunch money and you constantly gave it to him and this same friend went around telling everyone that someone else was giving it to him, it would make you mad right?  God is the same way.  So God tells Gideon to go brake that alter to pieces.  There was also a grove of trees near the Devils alter that God tells Gideon to chop down and use to sacrifice offerings to God.

Now even though Gideon was gong to do what God told him to do, he was still a little scared of his family.   He knew they were going to be really mad when they found out so he did it at night.  Now when the folks that lived in the town got up the next morning and found their alter to the Devil cut down they were plenty mad and they found out Gideon had done it.  They went up to Gideon's dad and told him to hand over Gideon so they could kill him for breaking their alter.  I love what his dad said.  He said, "Well, if you think your god is such a big shot, let your god kill Gideon himself.  If he's such a big deal, he doesn't need you to kill Gideon."  This caused the folks from the town to leave Gideon alone and guess what, the devil couldn't kill Gideon.

So then all the bad guys gathered together and pitched their tents in this place called the valley of Jezreel.  When that happened, God's spirit came on Gideon and he was ready to take on a couple of whole countries not just a family.  This is where the whole fleece thing comes in.  This is where Gideon tests God like we talked about in the last blog.

Well, Gideon got a group of people together and they camped out too.  So the Lord said, Gideon has too many people with him.  I want to show everyone what I can do so I need to shrink the number of people in Gideon's army.  So God told Gideon to have all his men drink water from a stream or pond or something like that.  Some people got down on their knees and just used their tongue like a dog to lap up the water.  Some people scooped up the water in their hands and drank it.  Well it turns out that after using that test, God kept about 300 dudes to go after these other armies.

So God tells Gideon one night to sneak up to the camp of the bad guys to listen to what they are saying.  Gideon takes his servant Phurah to go check things out.  Now God has just told him not to fear and that God has given this army into Gideon's hands for him to destroy.  This army that these 300 people were about to attack was so high that the bible says that the whole valley looked like it was covered with grasshoppers and that they had so many camels that they couldn't count them all.  That doesn't look like good odds right?  I mean 300 dudes against this whole big army.  Have you ever seen the movie, 300.  It's a little like that but the results will be a lot different than the 300 men in that movie.

So after Gideon knew what God wanted him to do and he had reconned the other army, he split his group into three groups of 100 men.  They had trumpets and lamps inside these pitchers.  So these guys snuck up on the bad guys in the middle of the night.  Then Gideon blew his trumpet and everyone else did too.  The broke the pitchers and said, "The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon."  When the other army heard this, it scared them so bad that they took off running.  Gideon's army started killing the bad guys as they whole army ran off.  After that, some other families from Israel helped him wipe the bad guys out.

That's another of the Minion's Bible Stories.

Gideon

OK today I want to tell you the story of Gideon.

This story takes place after Israel has entered the land that God told them he would give them.  They acted badly and God allowed other countries to treat them pretty bad.  But after a while, the Israelites would say they were sorry and stop acting so bad.  When that happened, God would send someone to help them stop the other countries from being mean.  You have probably heard of Sampson.  He was one of those people. I will tell that story later.

Today let's talk about Gideon.  This dude was a just a simple farm hand.  He worked refining wheat and he helped make wine.  He wasn't a leader by any stretch of the imagination.  As a matter of fact, he was a wimp.  He was from the weakest tribe of Israel.  Not only that but his family was the weakest family in the tribe of Manasseh.  On top of that, he was the weakest dude in his whole family.  To put it in Texas terms, he was the runt of the litter.  He was the guy that always got beat up at school and the one that everyone picked on.  When a bully wanted to look good, they picked on him because he was an easy target.  I want you to picture a scrawny, wimpy, kid who is always whining.

One day, he is working doing the jobs that no one wants.  As he is working, an angel of the Lord, sat under this tree and said to Gideon, "The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior."  The angel was calling him  a man like the Rock or Brock Lesner.  Can you imagine that.  Surely the angel was mistaken.  This was just a wimped dude from a dirty poor family in a real small tribe and here this angel was calling him Arnold Schwartzenegger.  That sounds crazy.

But understand this, God uses his words to build things.  He called this man a mighty warrior because that is what he was going to become.  Also, God never looks at us where we are today.  He always sees where we could be with his help.  Maybe today you don't think you will ever amount to anything.  Well if you ask God about your situation, you will find that he always has a good plan for your life (Jeremiah 29:11).  So for us, we can't look at ourselves through our own eyes, we have to look at ourselves through God's eyes.  When we do that, we will see that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.

OK, let's get back to the story before I start preaching.  Now Gideon isn't convinced that he is a Navy Seal by any stretch and he points out to the angel that he is dirt poor.  He is the lowest person in the lowest family in the lowest tribe.  He tells the angel that he is the lowest on the totem pole.  Gideon starts telling God that he doesn't understand how this other country has been so successful at beating up on his country and God tells him to go and deliver his people from the bad country.  Gideon still doesn't believe God really wants to send him so he decides to test God.

He says to God, "Lord if you really like me, let me give you a test to make sure you are God and you want me to lead an army."  The first thing he does is make some food for the angel.  When he puts the food on a rock, the angel touched the food and fire came up from out of the rock and destroyed it.  This is when Gideon figures out he has really been talking to an angel and it scares him silly.  But God chose him and tells him it's OK.  So Gideon is still not sure that God wants him to go to war against that bad country and asks to test the lord again.  He says, "God, if this is really you, I'm going to put this jacket on the floor.  Please make the jacket wet in the morning and keep everything else around it dry."  That's exactly what happened.  Then he decides to test God one more time and says, "This time Lord, please make the ground around the jacket wet and keep the jacket dry."  That's exactly what the Lord did.  The next morning the jacket was dry and the ground was wet.

I will finish the story of Gideon in my next post.  What I want you to take from this is that sometimes it's OK to ask God to confirm himself.  You have to do it in the right heart.  If you really are seeking God and you feel like he is telling you to do something, it's OK to ask him to do something to confirm that he wants you to do something.  That's exactly what Gideon did.  But understand this.  If you just want to see some miracle for the sake of seeing one, it won't work.  God is not a circus act.  But if in your heart, you truly desire to follow God and are not sure that he is leading you in a certain direction, it's OK to ask him to confirm his plan for you.

That's another of the Minion's Bible Stories.

Israel

Hello everyone.  It's been a while since I posted a bible story and I apologize for that.  Today I want to tell you a little about how Israel was born.  Now Israel was born from the descendants of a man named Abraham.  He had eight kids that I have found in the Bible.  (Gen 25:1 for the others besides Isaac and Ishmael).  These kids went on to found many nations.  Now Isaac had two sons named Jacob and Esau through a lady named Rebekah (Gen 25: 24-26).

The Lord actually changed Jacob's name to Israel.  As many of you know, especially back then, Israel was the Lord's special chosen people.  Jesus would ultimately come from that people.  Israel is still special to God but when we accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, we get adopted into the family.  Here's another great thing about our God - He doesn't differentiate between someone who was born into the family and someone who was adopted.  He is Love and he loves all of his kids just the same.

But let me tell you a story about the founder of Israel that you might find very interesting.  He was a liar and a cheat  He even stole the right to be the founder of Israel from his brother Esau.  Does that shock you?  It did me when I first read it many years ago.  So here's what happened.

The first thing that Jacob stole from Esau was his birthright.  This birthright included inheritance rights from their dad (see Heb 12:16).  Here's how it happened.  Esau was a hunter.  He was Mufasa, the Lion King.  He went out to the fields and hunted wild game, etc. for the family to eat.  Now Jacob was the kid who always hid behind mama's coat tails.  He didn't go out much.  He kept to himself and just sort of hung out.  But he was always a schemer. 

So one day, Esau comes out of the fields from hunting and he is about to starve to death.  Esau was the first born and he was the one who would rightfully have the inheritance from his dad.  Jacob sees this as a golden opportunity to "steal" Esau's birthright.  He tells Esau that he can have some stew if Esau gives him his birthright.  Esau figures that his birthright doesn't matter much if he is dead so he agrees and gives it to Jacob.  (Gen 25)  One thing I never really understood was why Esau just didn't take the food from Jacob.

Anyway, you would think that was enough because he got the inheritance but it wasn't.  Jacob also wanted to get his father to bless him.  This was the other part of the inheritance not included in the birthright.  Now his dad tells Esau to go out to the field and hunt some game.  Esau is supposed to prepare the food and bring it to his dad who will bless him.

While Esau is gone, his brother Jacob goes into action again with the help of their mother.  This is sort of a messed up family.  Esau's mom was plotting against him.  I think she probably needed therapy but I'm not sure Dr. Phil could have fixed that mess.  Anyway, while Esau is out in the field, their mom, Rebekah, convinces Jacob to go get a couple of goats to prepare as food for their dad.  Then Jacob puts on a disguise and pretends to be Esau.  Now their dad, Isaac, is really old and his eyesight isn't very good.  So Jacob and his mom, get the food together and Jacob takes it to their dad.

Their dad realizes that something isn't quite right.  At first, Isaac asks Jacob how he got the food so quickly.  Jacob lies to him and says that God gave him the food (lie number one in this exchange).  Dad is still not convinced and he asks Jacob to come close so he can touch Jacob.  Well good ol' Jacob is wearing a disguise and it works.  Dad asks Jacob if he is really Esau and Jacob says yes (lie number two in this exchange).  So Jacob feeds his dad some food and after his dad smells the disguise (a total lie on Jacob's part), he gives Jacob his blessing (Gen 27).

Now let me ask a question.  Have you ever watched one of those old movies where some guy is selling people some magic potion that he claims will do all sorts of stuff but it won't?  Or have you watched one of those movies where someone is trying to cheat someone out of something?  Those types of people are normally bad people because what they do hurts others.  I don't normally like those kinds of people.  The come across as bad people and those are not the kind of people I like to hang out with.

Well, that is exactly the type of person that Jacob was at this point in his life.  Can you imagine God choosing this loser to be the founder of His chosen people, Israel?  Well that's exactly what God did.  However, by the time Jacob's name was changed to Israel, he had changed a lot.  When he became Israel, he was following God and guess what?  He worked for a guy who ran a con game on him a couple of times.

The point I want to leave you with is this.  You don't have to be perfect for God to use you.  As a matter of fact, He already knows all of your imperfections before He chooses you and He still loves you completely.  So if you aren't perfect, don't worry about it.  Just give your self over to him and watch what a miraculous person he turns you into.

That's another of the Minion's Bible Stories