Before You Take It | Daily Breakthrough Bread | September 25, 2026

TEXT

Joshua 6:17-19; Joshua 7:1-26

KEY VERSE

“When I saw among the spoils a goodly Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I coveted them, and took them; and, behold, they be hid in the earth in the midst of my tent, and the silver under it.”

Joshua 7:21, KJV

CONTEXT

God had clearly commanded Israel to keep away from the devoted things of Jericho. The silver and gold were sacred to the Lord and were to be placed in His treasury.

But Achan saw what God had forbidden, coveted it, took it, and hid it in his tent. His hidden disobedience was eventually exposed, and Israel suffered defeat at Ai because of the violation of God’s command.

REFLECTION

Most of the time, it starts with something that doesn’t look very serious.

You see something you shouldn’t be looking at.

You know you should scroll past, but you don’t.

You look again.

Later, you remember it.

So you go back.

This time, you tell yourself, I’m only looking.

After a while, you stop feeling as uncomfortable about it. You know it is wrong, but you have become familiar with it. Then one day, you do the very thing you once told yourself you would never do.

That is what makes Achan’s story so revealing.

He saw the Babylonian garment, the silver, and the gold. Achan knew God’s command concerning them. Yet instead of walking away, he allowed himself to want what he had seen.

Then he took it.

Then he hid it.

Look at how ordinary the first step seems compared with the last one.

“I saw.”

Nothing had been taken yet.

But then:

“I coveted.”

The thing he saw had entered his desire.

Then:

“I took.”

The desire became an action.

Then:

“They be hid in the earth in the midst of my tent.”

The action became something he had to conceal.

James gives us the same pattern from the inside. Desire gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is allowed to grow, brings forth death.

This is why we cannot wait until we have committed the final act before taking temptation seriously.

The useful thing about a sequence is that it has joints, and every joint is a place where something can be stopped. Seeing was not sin; Achan was in a city full of plunder and had eyes.

Coveting was where it turned, and coveting could have been confessed as easily as anything else. Taking was still not burying. Even with the goods in his hands, he could have carried them to the treasury and told the truth.

Four exits. He walked past all four in one afternoon, and the last one closed when the earth went back over the hole.

If you keep returning to the conversation, keep checking the person’s page, keep replaying the insult, keep opening the website, keep imagining the money, keep preparing the lie, eventually you may not need much convincing to do what you have been rehearsing in your mind.

Achan’s first problem was not the hole he dug in the ground.

It was what happened before he ever picked up the shovel.

He wanted what God had said not to take.

So when you notice yourself returning to something God has already told you to leave alone, don’t negotiate with yourself. Stop there.

You do not have to find out where it leads.

PRAYER

Lord, help me turn away from temptation before desire becomes action.

TODAY’S CHALLENGE

Read Joshua 7:20-21 and James 1:13-15. Identify one thing you have been repeatedly returning to that you know you should leave alone, and prayerfully make a concrete decision today to turn away from it.

KEY TAKEAWAY

The sin we eventually commit may begin with the thing we repeatedly choose to look at, think about, or return to.