Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Morning everybody. I'm Ben Fleming, one of the senior pastors here and excited to jump into what is actually part six of our sermon series called Sunday School, where we're taking different stories from the Old Testament that maybe are familiar to you because of your experience growing up as a kid in Sunday school, where they had those felt boards and all that.
[00:00:26] Or maybe you're completely unfamiliar and these are brand new. Either way, we're trying to use some of these stories that for many people feel like well worn territory, that we kind of know them backwards and forwards and expand on them and help us all understand exactly how Jesus fits into every single one of these. Because ultimately Jesus is at the center of our faith.
[00:00:47] Judges Chapter six is where we are going to start this story, which is about the person Gideon. About Gideon, it says this. The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and for seven years he gave them into the hands of the Midianites. Because the power of Midian was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves and mountain clefts and caves and strongholds. Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites, the Amalekites and other eastern peoples invaded the country.
[00:01:15] They camped out on the land and ruined the crops all the way to Gaza and did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep nor cattle nor donkeys, and they came up with their livestock in their tents like swarms of locusts. It was impossible to count them or their camels, and they invaded the land to ravage it. And Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried out to the Lord for help.
[00:01:37] And when the Israelites cried out to the Lord because of Midian, he sent them a prophet who said, this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says. I brought you up out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, and I rescued you from the hand of the Egyptians, and I delivered you from the hand of all your oppressors. I drove them out before you and gave you their land.
[00:01:53] I said to you, I'm the Lord your God. Do not worship the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live. But you have not listened to me. I love it when God just sounds like a parent sometimes, you know, really directly. I told you what to do and you didn't listen to me.
[00:02:10] And now there's consequences.
[00:02:13] The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak and Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abazirite where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress us to keep it from the Midianites. And when the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior. What a great declaration to make to someone who is currently hiding from the entire world.
[00:02:36] Gideon's reply is just as good.
[00:02:38] Pardon me, my Lord, don't mean to interrupt this divine appearance here in my home.
[00:02:46] But if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, did not the Lord bring us out of Egypt? But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us the hand of Midian. And the Lord turned to him and said, go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you?
[00:03:06] Pardon me, my Lord, again, real quick, but how can I save Israel?
[00:03:15] My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.
[00:03:22] Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for your word. We pray that we would have a greater understanding of who you are, your nature, how you see us and love us through these scriptures, Lord Jesus, that we would ultimately see Jesus and be encouraged and saved through him. In Jesus name we pray.
[00:03:40] Amen.
[00:03:41] So what we're going to talk about today is really, we're even going to expand on the story of Gideon, talk about a few other characters in scripture that I feel like can empathize with this position that Gideon has found himself in right here. And that is empathizing with the truth of an insecure leader, one that's not quite sure that God has come to the right door and knocked in the right way and requested the. The correct thing.
[00:04:08] But to understand this, we have to understand a bit the Book of Judges. So I grew up in the church. I'm a pastor's kid. And part of being a pastor's kid was memorizing all of the books of the Bible, right? Not all the texts, but, you know, just the names of the books in order.
[00:04:22] And I remember as a little kid some of these things, it was mostly just like, repeating songs and words. I didn't necessarily understand the context of each thing. And so as a kid, I would say Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth.
[00:04:36] And for a while when I was a kid, I thought Joshua Judges Ruth were like, together. Like it was a little mini story in the middle of all of them. You know, Joshua Judges Ruth. He's not very nice, that guy, that Joshua, very Judgmental him, you know, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Here's this guy, Joshua, not a nice dude, judgmental of a woman named Ruth.
[00:05:00] But Judges is actually.
[00:05:03] It's such an important part of the Old Testament narrative. To understand the Old Testament, really, you have to understand Judges, because what happens is this cycle of the people of Israel. In Judges, it happens over and over again. It looks like this. So the step one in the cycle is Israel turns away from God. Step two is God allows them to be oppressed by enemies. Step three is the people cry out for help. Step four is God raises up a deliverer or a judge to rescue them.
[00:05:31] And number five is then peace returns until they fall again. And then we go back around the cycle, and Judges six begins another turn in that cycle. And so Israel has again done evil in the eyes of the Lord. And as a result, God allows the Midianites, nomadic raiders from the desert, to dominate them for seven years. And these invaders destroyed crops, stole livestock, left Israel impoverished. Basically, they made life as miserable as possible for the Israelites.
[00:05:59] And the people hid in caves, often just to survive.
[00:06:03] This wasn't just political trouble, which of course it was. But in their view, in their experience, it was this spiritual consequence that Israel had abandoned, this covenant that they had made with God. And then God allowed them to feel the emptiness of life apart from him.
[00:06:19] And so, before raising up a rescuer, God first sends a prophet to remind them why they're suffering. And the prophet speaks for God. I brought you up out of Egypt and I said, don't worship.
[00:06:29] They're gods, but you haven't listened to me.
[00:06:32] And so the greater story, the beginning of this story, is about how deliverance happens, right? Deliverance. Often we think about how it happens when a hero arrives on the scene. When finally the hero arrives, then the process of deliverance can begin. But it begins even before this, right in this text, we learn that deliverance doesn't begin with a hero. Instead, deliverance begins with repentance.
[00:06:55] Deliverance begins by this message, encouraging this nation to turn from their ways and instead turn into another direction. So deliverance begins with repentance and then remembering who God is. I love stories. I love telling stories. I love hearing stories. I love stories that make me cry. Laugh.
[00:07:13] Books, television shows, movies, whatever it is. I love, love, love storytelling. It's fun, and it's often thought of as entertainment for all of us. But it was even more important for this nation of Israel back in these ancient times. They had to continue to tell stories in order to remind the next generations of what God has done and who he is so that then that could shape their experience with God and as a nation going forward. And so this repentance, a turning from the old ways and then remembering that God has brought us out of every difficult situation and lifestyle so far, and he is faithful to do so again.
[00:07:49] There's a perspective that comes along with that. Sometimes in my own life, I can feel really narcissistic, right, that I'm the only one that's ever experienced this. This is the only time our nation has ever been through this. It's the only time the world has found difficulty in this place or that place. And it can feel like, all right, this is it, this is the end. We finally ruined everything and there's no one that can save us. And yet God is faithful even in those moments. Repentance, it's helpful to remember that through the course of history.
[00:08:20] And so what happens in this process of repentance and then remembering who God is is that God also exposes our human inadequacy when God speaks or sends an angel, which happens many times over the course of Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament. What I've discovered is that the first thing people usually feel is not excitement, but it's exposure.
[00:08:41] Have you noticed this? An angel of the Lord appears and the glory of God shines around them. And what, they were terrified.
[00:08:51] There's never a situation where somebody's like, oh, finally.
[00:08:56] We were out here tending our flocks, hoping something would happen like this.
[00:09:02] I was threshing the wheat, I was in the winepress and I was waiting for you to show up. It is about time.
[00:09:11] Instead, the response is this exposure. They actually really, really quickly have this experience of feeling really small and inadequate and sinful and incapable of accomplishing whatever the messenger has to say.
[00:09:23] In the light of God's holiness and purpose, our self sufficiency so often gets stripped away. Moses stammers, Gideon hides. The prophet Isaiah trembles in the face in the voice of the Lord. And it's not false humility, it's this reality.
[00:09:38] They finally, in this moment, see the gap between divine purpose and their own human weakness. And it's a big gap.
[00:09:49] There's this undoing that God does in the process of speaking to his people.
[00:09:55] There's this undoing that has to happen in this moment of repentance. So often we want to kind of discard or walk quickly past this part of the Christian experience and journey.
[00:10:05] We want to pretend that we can kind of just walk through Every difficulty, and that no processing happens within us. There's no building or breaking down first before the building.
[00:10:14] There's a great piece of the story of this set of books that is really popular in Christianity, and that's the Chronicles of Narnia, written by C.S. lewis. And there's this point, I won't spoil the whole thing for you, where this boy Eustace, becomes a dragon.
[00:10:31] I know. Just give me a second.
[00:10:33] He becomes a dragon, and then he pretty quickly is like, I don't want to be a dragon anymore. And he runs into the lion, who is representative of God in the story.
[00:10:42] And he says, hey, God, I'd like to not be a dragon anymore. And Aslan looks back at him and he says, you got to take your skin off, then you got to get rid of the scales. You got to take your skin off. And so Eustace does this, you know, and stuff kind of comes off, and he goes, still a dragon.
[00:10:57] And he does this two or three more times at the direction of Aslan. And finally Aslan says, I think I'm going to have to do this.
[00:11:05] I think I'm going to have to take the skin off so that you might become human again. And so Eustace describes this as a deep and stretching and wounding process that often happens that is related to this exposure that we experience when we hear and experience the calling of God.
[00:11:24] When God calls us, he undoes this thing in us. He wants us to enter into the process of being undone so that we might be changed forever.
[00:11:33] Now, that's not to say that when we enter into the process of Christianity, God does this thing in us that creates this monoculture where we all look the same and sound the same and share exactly the same experiences. The worst thing that could happen in Christianity is that all of you begin to sound like Ben or Evan.
[00:11:50] That would be the worst.
[00:11:53] Nobody would hate it more than me.
[00:11:56] That's not the idea. It's not that we begin to lose our personalities and we become this cultish kind of community instead. It's that we become very much in our own lives and experiences exactly who God is shaping and molding us to be.
[00:12:10] And that is a difficult and painful and often frustrating process.
[00:12:17] But we must be willing to enter into it.
[00:12:20] That's the part that we can't miss. So often we are consumed with hearing and knowing this call of God. And then when the call of God comes, we're resistant to the actual process that God wants to bring us through.
[00:12:31] So when God calls us, he first undoes us so that he can then remake us.
[00:12:38] Now, what's interesting with all these stories is almost every divine calling in scripture makes no practical sense.
[00:12:44] If you are a very pragmatic person, I'm sure much of scripture is really difficult for you to take in. And I understand it.
[00:12:51] Moses is the one asked to confront Pharaoh, the one place that he's been running from. Moses is hiding out in the wilderness when the bush appears to be burning, and the voice of God comes through it.
[00:13:03] And then Moses. It's such a great story. It's very much like Gideon, who's like, excuse me. Pardon me, Lord. My family is terrible, and I'm the worst of my family.
[00:13:11] God speaks to Moses, and he has this great right. The pyrotechnics are there. The bush is appearing to be on fire, and yet it's not consumed.
[00:13:20] And Moses hears the voice of God, and he goes, this all sounds great.
[00:13:24] You got the wrong guy.
[00:13:26] As if God's like, oh, shoot, you're right.
[00:13:30] Somebody turn off that bush.
[00:13:33] Let's go this way, you know?
[00:13:36] And most like, whew. Thank God. I mean, not thank, thank me, you know?
[00:13:42] And he comes back to God and he says, look, this all sounds great. I'm not a real good public speaker, okay?
[00:13:51] He comes to Gideon. My family's not particularly wonderful and great. It's not a great idea to have somebody give birth to a child that is a virgin, and yet the angel comes to Mary.
[00:14:05] So much of this doesn't make practical sense from a human viewpoint, from all these people's viewpoint, they have a good right to say, you have the wrong person.
[00:14:14] But God's kingdom actually operates by faith and not feasibility.
[00:14:21] God doesn't look at the same bottom lines and have the same Excel spreadsheets that all of us do.
[00:14:26] Instead, he operates purely by faith and not feasibility. And so the wrong person is often exactly the right person, but because their weaknesses then highlight the power of God.
[00:14:41] Now I have this thing about me that I haven't been able to get over in all my years of existence, and hopefully someday I will. But it's that I love when people think that I can handle stuff all by myself.
[00:14:55] I love it.
[00:14:56] Is it a toxic trait? 100%.
[00:15:00] Will I probably do something this afternoon that plays further into this personality trait? Yes.
[00:15:06] I love it when people think I can do stuff all by myself. And so we, over the last. We actually moved back into our house three weeks ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:15:15] Pretty great. For those of you who've been keeping score, it was almost Exactly a year we lived in a trailer in our front yard.
[00:15:23] And I would not recommend to a single person.
[00:15:27] We made a tremendous mistake.
[00:15:31] No, it's all working out in the end. In Jesus name.
[00:15:36] But not every project is done. And so we. We were having some more carpet installed in our downstairs. And this particular part of downstairs, we were storing a lot of stuff, so I had to move it to an even smaller room and jam everything in there.
[00:15:48] And I clocked this conversation I had with my wife almost immediately, but not early enough to save myself. And when she said, we have to move all this stuff because the carpet people are coming tomorrow morning. And I said, okay, great, I'll take care of it. She said, I can help you. There's some big items down here, you know, a refrigerator and tables and dishwasher. You know, all these things. I said, no, I have it taken care of. And she said, I would love to help you. And I said, no, because I'm fine.
[00:16:18] You know, I love shimmying refrigerators for 25 minutes. It's a great move. And so she walked upstairs. And immediately I was like, I could use some help.
[00:16:29] I didn't ask for this.
[00:16:31] And so of course, I really practically. I'm left with a job that I'm actually unequipped to do all by myself. But because of my pride, I'm insisting on getting as much of it done as humanly possible before I grovel before someone in order to get some help.
[00:16:44] I don't know what that is, but I got to believe that it's not just me that we like this idea of. Of self sufficiency. I can get this done. I can do it on my own. And I wonder if God comes to somebody in this situation and says, you are God's mighty warrior. And they're the type of person that says, yes, I am.
[00:17:01] Been training for this my whole life.
[00:17:04] Now I'm going to take on that enemy army all alone, and it's going to be amazing.
[00:17:10] But instead, he finds somebody that actively pushes against this idea. And why is that? Well, my belief is that he knows that someone like Gideon will actually want to partner with someone like God.
[00:17:23] Now, this is where the power of God actually shows up in finding these weak people that know that they can't do it all on their own.
[00:17:31] That's not to say that there isn't some courage and some bravery that has to come somewhere along the line, but. But to find somebody who at a base level says, I know that I can't possibly do this myself.
[00:17:42] God says, that's my person right there.
[00:17:47] They're gonna want me involved in every single little bit. They're gonna want me to take the lead. They're gonna want to live after this way that I am setting up for them.
[00:17:56] That's the kind of person that I need to accomplish my will.
[00:18:02] I wonder if many of us in this room have fallen for the cultural addiction that we have, especially in the Western world that says the greatest form of human living is that of the independent person.
[00:18:18] We stop relying on the people that love us around us and nearby. And ultimately we stop relying on God, believing that the most noble way to live is alone.
[00:18:31] Now, notice that God's response to their protest right with Moses, he doesn't argue with them and say, no, you are strong.
[00:18:40] I believe in you, Gideon. You can do it. Come on, man, we're going to get out of this wine press.
[00:18:47] But what does he say? He says, I'll be with you.
[00:18:51] That's it.
[00:18:54] Yeah. You're inadequate. Yep. You're the worst of your family and your family is pretty bad.
[00:19:00] And yet I'll be with you.
[00:19:05] God's presence is actually the qualification for these leaders.
[00:19:12] The call is less about their ability and far more about their availability.
[00:19:19] Now again, I think we underestimate the power of this availability of this presence that we have in other people's lives, that other people have with us. And ultimately knowing that God is with us.
[00:19:34] I talked a few weeks ago about my dog that had cancer. We had to put her down about a week and a half ago.
[00:19:40] It kind of happened fast and I'm going to go fast. Otherwise that will be the end of this sermon.
[00:19:47] But I was thinking back, I was, you guys, I love dogs like any good self respecting bend person does.
[00:19:54] I was in Los Angeles this last week and not enough dogs.
[00:20:01] And I was thinking, like, why am I so torn up by this? Like, I was a mess. Still amazing at some moments. And I was thinking, and I was like, it was because, you know, she talked to me all the time and we had great conversations. That dog never said a word to me. 12 years, never spoke up once. You know, Ben, what I think, what did she do? Of course she did what any great dog does. She was with me. She was with me in the truck. She was with me in the room. She was with me in the living room. She went through all these different moves that we had and changing cities and homes. And she was through all of it. 12 years with this church dog. She was there.
[00:20:44] It's a dog.
[00:20:47] I look at myself and go. This relationship should be completely meaningless.
[00:20:51] We've never spoken together. How close can we possibly get? You are an animal and I'm a human and I am undone. Why? Because of the presence of this living being with me. How much more should we understand the impact that we have on the world when we find ourselves present and in the room and with people when they're with us, and ultimately when we understand that God is with us. Don't be so caught up and worried about hearing the voice of God that you forget that the entire point of this thing is to simply remember that he is with you.
[00:21:24] God, I need you to speak to me. I need you to speak to me. Speaking to Gideon did nothing. You got the wrong guy. You knocked on the wrong. You have the wrong number.
[00:21:32] I am Gideon loser who's hiding from the enemies.
[00:21:38] And God doesn't say, no, no, no, you're qualified and listen to my voice. And don't you feel inspired?
[00:21:44] None of that. He says, I will be with you.
[00:21:47] My presence is all you need. When he calls someone unqualified, it's an invitation to walk in this dependence and not self reliance.
[00:21:57] Don't fall for the trick of believing that the independent life is the best and greatest and most noble way to live.
[00:22:07] That pushback that you have the wrong person kind of moment often becomes the soil where this reality, deep faith, can finally take root.
[00:22:17] Because faith doesn't begin in confidence. Where does faith actually begin? It begins in honesty.
[00:22:22] A deep work happens in an honest place. I hope you have a place where you can be truly honest in your life, where you can really grieve, where you can really mourn, where you can really weep, where you can really rejoice and celebrate and be excited and be your truest self.
[00:22:39] Where you can be honest about all the difficulties and the beauties of life.
[00:22:43] You know, this whole Seattle Mariners winning thing and being one game away from the World Series has done a lot for me personally.
[00:22:50] It's created a lot of anxiety, first of all. Secondly, I haven't screamed and shouted and rejoiced and hugged and high fived this much in my entire life.
[00:23:01] It feels terrifying.
[00:23:05] There's something about the intimacy and the vulnerability of being with a group of people and being as excited and overt as you would like to be.
[00:23:13] All that feeling comes out and shouting and streaming and celebration and sometimes big tears, too. Well, Ben cries a lot. I do. I cry a lot.
[00:23:23] I'm sorry and I'm not sorry. I'm gonna be honest. I'm not sorry.
[00:23:29] But it's funny, these relationships with these people that are around me in these honest moments, these genuinely excited, earnest mom moments, There's a connection that happens in the greatest mourning and memorial services and weeping and lament in those honest places is where real faith and growth happens in our lives, where we connect with other people and we're reminded of the presence of God.
[00:23:53] We can say a lot about the different heroes in the stories in the Bible, but one thing that we can really, really, truly say is that many of these heroes were so honest about where they found themselves when God called them.
[00:24:06] You can't fill someone who's already completely full of themselves.
[00:24:11] But God empowers someone who says, I can't do this unless you go with me.
[00:24:18] And then finally we'll. We'll close with this.
[00:24:22] So where does Jesus fit into all of these things?
[00:24:26] There's this Christological layer or this Christ centered piece that all these hesitant deliverers point to. This one deliverer who didn't resist or push against God's call.
[00:24:40] Jesus faced this mission. And he didn't say, God, if you could simply just send someone else instead. In the garden of Gethsemane, Gethsemane. In his own desperate hour, Jesus looks to God and he says, not my will, but yours be done.
[00:24:55] Where Moses doubted and Gideon hesitated and Jonah ran away, Jesus obeyed perfectly, humbly and fully.
[00:25:04] That's why every reluctant leader in Scripture highlights not their failure, but ultimately the greater faithfulness of God.
[00:25:12] We need a better Jonah.
[00:25:15] We need a better David.
[00:25:17] We need a better Gideon.
[00:25:19] His name is Jesus.
