“For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt… And as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted… for the LORD your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.”
Joshua 2:10–11

Would you believe me if I told you these words were spoken by a prostitute?

Her name was Rahab, and if I am quite honest with you, I see a little bit of myself in her. Rahab was not an Israelite. She didn’t grow up among the people of God or experience the miracles Israel had experienced. She was a woman living in Jericho who had simply heard about what the God of Israel had done—and she believed.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons I love her story so much. I didn’t grow up in church either. There wasn’t a long history of Christianity passed down to me. Somewhere along the way, I heard about Jesus, I believed that what I was hearing was true, and that belief changed the direction of my life. And in some ways, isn’t there a little Rahab in all of us? We heard the good news about a God we could not see, we believed, and our lives changed because of it.

Hebrews 11:31 remembers Rahab as a woman of faith, and James 2:25 points to her as an example of faith that produced action. She heard, she believed, and then she acted according to what she believed. But there is another part of her story that has been sitting with me lately.

When the spies arrived in Jericho, Rahab told them that her people had already heard about their God. She even mentioned the Red Sea, an event that had happened decades before. Israel had spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before Joshua finally led the next generation toward the land God had promised them. We don’t know when Rahab first heard these stories or how long she had personally been thinking about the God of Israel, but we know this: God’s reputation had arrived in Jericho before His people did.

And it makes me wonder about all the people who can be sitting on the other side of our obedience that we know absolutely nothing about.

When Rahab hid the spies, she asked them not only to save her, but to save her family. Eventually, a scarlet cord hung from her window, and when Israel entered Jericho, Joshua 6 tells us that Rahab and her family were spared. This woman who had only heard about God became part of His people. Even more beautifully, Matthew 1:5 later gives us her name in the genealogy of Jesus Christ.

Her obedience was not only for her.

And this is where her story becomes very personal for me.

My father-in-law has spent years faithfully walking with God. He is a man of prayer, the kind of man who would wake up early in the morning to pray for his family and pray over his children at night. One of the things he emphasized strongly while raising his children was sexual purity and devotion to the Lord. At the time, that obedience probably looked like something he was simply responsible for teaching his own children.

But one of those children eventually became my husband.

Ira carried those convictions into our marriage, and I came from a very different family story. Divorce and sexual sin had affected generations of my family, and I had not inherited the same example he had. Yet something God had taught my father-in-law, and something he faithfully passed down to his son, eventually became a gift to me too. It entered our marriage, it entered the home we built together, and now it is entering the lives of our daughters.

And somehow, it traveled even further. My younger brother lived with us for five years, and in many ways we helped raise him. He watched those same values lived out in our home, and today it is beautiful to me to see how strongly he carries some of those convictions himself. My father-in-law’s obedience reached a young man from an entirely different family who wasn’t even born when some of those seeds were first being planted.

That is what I want you to remember today.

If God is asking you to obey Him in an area of your life, you may only be able to see what that obedience means for you right now. You see what you need to surrender, the boundary you need to establish, the habit you need to change, or the step of faith you need to take. But you cannot see all the people who may one day live in the blessing of the obedience you are choosing today.

There may be a Rahab somewhere on the other side of your yes.

We talk often about how our disobedience can affect other people, and that is true. But sometimes we forget the beautiful opposite truth: our obedience affects people too. Someone may learn to pray because you prayed. Your children may inherit a conviction you fought hard to establish. Someone who joins your family years from now may receive the fruit of a decision you are making with God today.

You may never know how far your obedience will travel. So obey Him anyway—not because you can see everyone who will benefit from it, but because you trust the God who can.

Your obedience may begin with you, but by the grace of God, it does not have to end with you.