Viola Solid Rock Assembly
From Fear to Faith
All right, so we're gonna get into God's word tonight. We're gonna look at Judges chapter six and I dropped a guitar pick. It's not part of the sermon. All right, Judges chapter six, and we're gonna be looking at Gideon tonight. All right, so Judges chapter six, and a lot of you know the story of Gideon will, and Gideon, I'll give the background before we really get through what we're talking about, but Judges chapter six, and Gideon and God's people had, God's brought people, God had brought his people through a whole lot from Egypt. He had rescued them, he had delivered them. Y'all know the story, and they get to this place where God had told them to separate themselves from other idols, separate themselves from the countries around them, the people around them, and what they worshiped. And they didn't, they failed to drive the people out that they should have driven out. They failed in keeping God as their only God. They had all these other little g-gods all around them, and so what happened is God would hand them over to people that would torture them, to torment them, to all these enemies that come up around them, and so in Judges, what we see is that enemy at that time is the Midianites. So the Midianites were the people who, they were like these bullies, and they would come in the land, they were barbaric bullies, they would come in, they would camp out for days on end, weeks on end, you name it, they would wait for all the crops to come up, and then boom, they would come in and just take all the crops. They would take everything that Israelites had grown, they would take their sheep, their cattle, they would take their, you name it, all the livestock, and leave them with nothing and starve them out. And during all this, the Israelites, they just fled the caves. They got scared, and they just bailed, and they said we're going to the caves, we're going to hide out, it was that bad. It was really, really, really bad. And I was trying to think through like what's an analogy we could come up with, what that would be like, and this is silly, but I thought if the Canadians got really powerful, and we somehow got scared of the Canadians, they grew strong, and they would come down, and they would raid all the Dollar Generals, they would get all the Walmart's, they would take everything we grow, it would be like that, but way worse, you know, because they were fearing for their lives, they were hiding out in caves, so try to imagine that, that fear that would come on the land, that would drive you to go hide out in a cave, because there's no other place to go. That's what they were going through, and that's the backdrop in the whole setting for Judges chapter six, it would not have been fun. And so this has been going on for seven years, this has been going on, and then we get to verse chapter six, or yeah, verse six. So Israel was reduced to starvation by the Midianites, then the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help. Have you guys ever been in a spot where you had to cry out to God? You ever been desperate for God? You had to have God's help. Some of young people, maybe you haven't been there yet, at some point in life you will be at that point. And what we learned all throughout the Bible, here and throughout the Bible, is that when God's people cry out for help, God listens, God hears. God's desperation gets the attention of God. And in our story right here, we see that God's people were in a spot, they were desperate. They had no other, they said, "God, we need you." And what we see is that God heard and God answered. And he answered first by sending a prophet, so he sent this prophet, we're not gonna read through that, but he sent a prophet, and he shows up and he says, "Hey, God told you what was gonna happen, right?" God said, "Hey, if you disobey me, "if you don't listen to me, "if you go your own way, this is what's gonna happen." It's not gonna be fun for you in the land that you're in. If you give yourself over to the idols that are there and worship them, this is what's gonna happen. And so the prophet comes and he says, "This is what God said would happen." All right, but God wasn't done there, God had heard their cry, wanted to answer, and also deliver them. Let them know why they're in their mess, and then deliver them. And so to do that, God literally shows up in verse 11, this is what we're gonna look at. Then the angel of the Lord came and sappeneth the great tree at Ophra, which belonged to Joash, the clan of A.B. Azer, Gideon. Gideon's son of Joash was threshing wheat at the bottom of a wine press to hide the grain from the Midianites. So anytime we see the angel of the Lord, a lot of Bible scholars believe that actually refers to the pre-incarnate Jesus. So picture Jesus showing up to Gideon. And he's there, and what's interesting to me, first of all, is that God can show up in everyday moments. So what Gideon is doing here is he's just getting his food ready. It says that he's threshing his wheat. So he's just putting some food together, right? He's just trying to do his everyday thing he probably did. And to me, what is awesome about that is that God can show up to you anywhere you are. You can be cutting grass. You can have an encounter with God. You can be putting a project together or baking something, and God can show up in this moment. So any moment can be a divine moment if we will allow ourselves to hear the voice of God and just encounter him too. So anytime that can happen, right? And so what's also interesting about this is what he was doing and how he was doing this. So this is interesting. He was threshing wheat at the bottom of a wine press to hide the grain from the Midianites. So Cody, we got a couple pictures back there. And first we're going to look at it as a wine press. So it's wine press. It's like this pit, and it had kind of a thing running through it. You see it on the screen. That's the threshing floor. I got him in the wrong order. That's my bad, sorry. That's a wine press. And so this is where Gideon was. And you can see that it's got this drainage. And so the intention there was you get all the grapes in there and they stomp them, they smush them whatever. And all the grape juice runs down into it. So it's kind of down in the ground a little bit. And then you're going to see go back to the threshing floor, and that's usually up on a hill. So to thresh the wheat, what they would do is they would separate the wheat and the chaff, and you need wind to help you do that. So the wind takes away the chaff. You're left over with the actual wheat you want to keep. And so that's done out in the open, out on a hill. So you can go back to the other one, the wine press again. He is trying to do that process down here where nobody can see him. And it's a process that would not be easy to do because you have no wind down there. And so here you have Gideon. He's hiding out. He's afraid for his life. Why is he doing this? It doesn't make any sense to do this, but the verse tells us that he was doing that to hide from the Midianites. Hide the grain from the Midianites. He was afraid to make his food. He was afraid to do his job because he knew if they saw him, they might kill him. They would take his food, his family would starve. And so he did a process that made absolutely no sense. And I've never been in a spot like that, but I can look back at my life. And I see some similarities here where we can start filling. Life is just coming at us. The enemies coming at us. Things are difficult and we freeze in fear. Gideon was frozen in fear. And sometimes if we let our problems do this to us and we don't have the Lord's help, we can end up freezing in fear. And for us, that might look different. For some of you, I'm gonna talk to young people with school coming up Wednesday. Young people, are you excited for school? No, mixed reaction. Yes, as a nose. Hey, for young people, you might have that one friend at school who you know is not a good influence, right? And you need to stay away from that friend. And you've been trying to work up that courage and say, "Hey, we need time apart. "No, I don't want that influence in my life." But it can be hard to have that conversation, right? And so you freeze in fear. For us grownups, hey, we got people at work, we got that person that, boy, they need Jesus. And we wanna share our faith, but it gets difficult sometimes. We don't, I don't have the words to say. I don't know how to approach them. They're always snarly with me. They ain't kind. I don't know how to get this across. And we kind of freeze in fear, right? If we all kinds of situations in our life, God's working on you to get, maybe give more, to maybe serve an area in church. And you think, I don't have what it takes to serve. I don't know if I have the patience for kids. I don't know if I have the words to say, well, whatever it might be, right? It could be different things. God, I don't know if I have that money I can free up or whatever it might be. And so when God speaks to us, and then we kind of dig our hills in the ground, we're doing what Gideon did here, and we're kind of freezing in fear. And hey, I've had plenty of moments in my life where I look back and I know I should have moved forward and I kind of stayed where I was. And I don't know if you've ever done that, but it's not a good feeling. You don't feel very brave in those moments. And this is where Gideon was in our story. He was frozen in fear, and he wasn't moving forward. And he was doing something that made no sense. Threshing weed in the wine press made no sense, but he created this system to try to get around the problem that he had in front of him. And so that's where Gideon was. But here's the cool news, here's something cool about that, is that God met him in the middle of that. Even when he was in a spot that he was afraid, even when he was in a spot where, you know, he didn't have that strength, that courage. God still met with him there. And so for me, that tells me, for all of us here, you can be in a spot where maybe you are frozen. God still wants to meet with you. God still wants to meet with you where you are. You don't have to have it all together. You don't have to have it all figured out. God can encounter you in your everyday job, and he can encounter you in a place of fear, in a place of where you're frozen. So be encouraged by that today. All right, we're gonna move on in a story. So then we see, this is what God says to him when he encounters him. The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, "My dear hero, the Lord is with you." All right, here's the guy who's afraid, right? Here's the guy, we just saw he's scared to death. He won't even go do the very basic thing out there in the open, and yet, God says to him here, "Mighty hero." He calls him, "Mighty hero." And we're gonna look at verse 14 next. Then the Lord turned to him and said, "Go with the strength you have." Again, Gideon didn't feel strong right now. He's probably like, "Well, what are you talking about?" All right? "Go with the strength you have and rescue the Midianites. "I am sending you." Verse 15, "But Lord Gideon said, "How can I rescue Israel? "My clan is the weakest in the whole tribe of Manasseh, "and I'm the least in my entire family." And then verse 16, "The Lord said to him, "I will be with you and you will destroy the Midianites "as if you were fighting against one man." All right, so in this conversation, Gideon speaking words, God is speaking words into Gideon, that Gideon didn't even believe about himself, right? So Gideon is in this place. If you kind of read through what he's saying here, he's saying, "I'm the least, my tribe's the least in Israel, "and I'm the weakest in my family." And he had really came to believe this about himself, that he was too inferior to other people, and he was comparing himself to other people. And so comparison is a trap that is easy to fall into, but you never win when you compare. Because either you're gonna feel puffed up, you're gonna feel, "Hey, look how great I am." Or you're gonna feel like, "Wow, everybody's so much better than me." Comparison is always a trap. It's an easy trap to fall into. Gideon was in this trap of comparison. But here, I like what God says to him. He says to him and calls out to him, "Hey, mighty hero, the Lord is with you." And one truth I want us to come away with today is the fact that when God sees you, he doesn't necessarily see the you that you feel like you are. He can see what you can become if you'll trust him. He can see where you're gonna be 10, 15 years down the road when you've had a life of obedience and a life of trusting him and a life of growing. He can see that in you and call that out in you if you're willing to listen, right? And this is where Gideon was. He didn't feel that, but God saw it anyway. And for each of you, God might see something in you. You don't see it about yourself. He may see you as a mighty hero, a mighty warrior, where you see yourself as somebody who just isn't there yet and he sees it and he wants to turn you into that. But it takes your obedience and we're gonna look at that here in a minute. And so we're gonna fast forward in the story some. We're gonna zip through a little bit and I'm gonna paraphrase verses 17 to 32. And basically God asked Gideon to tear down this idol. So there's an idol in his dad's house actually. His dad seems like he's prominent in town and Baal had this giant thing there's idol. People come to worship it and everybody liked it because we can see that Gideon was afraid to do this in the daytime. God says tear it down, Gideon waits till nighttime. So it's funny, he's Gideon, I get his character. He's like, I'm brave enough to take a little step, but I'm still scared. You ever been there? All right, so this is where Gideon was. He goes and he tears down. He gets 10 guys. He go tear it down and sure enough the next day, the people of the town, they come and they say like, who did this? And they figure out it was Gideon who did it and they tried to kill Gideon. But Gideon's dad said, this is a great quote. He said, if Baal is real, let Baal defend himself. If he's really a God, let him come down and take care of himself and so the man backed off. And so that's where we are in the story now. Kind of paraphrasing some of that. And it's really cool to see this character of Gideon shifting. 'Cause you see a transformation happening in him and listen, this dude wasn't perfect. And you all probably know the rest of the story. Even after this whole entire story in Judges chapter six and seven, he still had some issues. But what we see here is he was at a place where he was afraid and he was in a place now where he's just brave enough to have some obedience. Just have some obedience. And sometimes that's what God is asking of us. He's not asking you to figure the whole thing out. He's not asking you to sit there and overcome every single problem in your life. He's asking you for one step. Just do one step, right? Just one step. Gideon took the one step. And he had some backlash, but God was with him. He was afraid to move, but he did it, right? And he moved from hiding out. He was in that wine press, you remember that? He did something heroic after that. From hiding out to heroic action. All right, so listen. So let's backtrack a little bit. So think about God, he was afraid. God shows up. He spends time with God. He has an encounter with God. He hears these words from God, money hero. Go in the strength you have, and then he takes that little step. And so for us in our lives, it is so important and counter God and hear what he says about you, right? And so what does God say about us? He says that we're His treasure possession. He says that we're more than conquerors. We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. We're fearfully and wonderfully made. So all these things about, all these truths about us that sometimes we forget about ourselves. But when we sit in the presence of God, we get in the Word of God, and we soak in what He's, the words He says about us, like Gideon heard the words about him. It can move us from fear to a little bit of obedience, right? And it's all God needs. It's just a step in faith a little bit. But you have to be listening to the words that God says about you. All right, the story keeps getting even better here and winding down somewhere with our story of Gideon. Verse 33 shows us, soon after the armies of Midian, Amalek, and the people of the east formed an alliance against Israel and crossed the Jordan camping in the Valley of Jezreel. So this is just like the movie, the nightmare playing over, this horror movie playing over again, just like the last seven years, the people of Israel had to be feeling the same way, right? Oh, here they are all coming again, just like they've always done. This time's gonna be different though. Verse 34, then the spirit of the Lord clothed Gideon with power, the spirit of the Lord clothed Gideon with power. So two things were a game changer for Gideon. He heard the words of God to obedience, he then he was able to obey, right? And then the spirit of God came on to Gideon, right? So this is what happened after that. He blew a ram's horn as a call to arms and the man of the clan of Abbeyser came to him. He also sent messengers throughout Manasseh, Asher, Zebulun, and Naftali summoning their warriors and all of them responded. So think about that, let's go back, he was a guy again, he was hiding out, he was scared to death by himself just to do the basic job of making his food. And now, basically 32,000 men is what followed him, 32,000 men followed him into battle. And the story goes on from there, I'll kind of sum it up a little bit, is that God wanted them not to go into battle with all 32,000 men. God said, listen, if you go with all these people, Israel's gonna say, hey, we were tough enough to do this on our own. So God says, hey, I want you to take a few people away. He said, okay, God, you're just like 10,000, all right? Listen, all right, now we're ready. No, God's like, no, you're not ready yet. Whittle it down more, and then whittle it down more. He was left with 300 people against countless. It says that the people, when they came from all these countries, it was like locusts that you could just not even count the number of people. And with just 300 people, they took down these nations that have terrorized them for seven years, right? And here's why that happened, it was one person's obedience. One person who, when they encountered God, doing an everyday job, they encountered God, they listened to what God said about them. And then they just believed enough to take that step of obedience, and then the Holy Spirit's power. Listen, when you walk into obedience in your life, and you couple that with a power of the Holy Spirit, watch out, watch out. Because what happens is one small step of faith, and then the Spirit of God on you too, God's just gonna make faith in your life snowball. And one thing becomes another thing. Next thing you know, you're walking in and anointing that God has for you. All right, so that's all stand to our feet if we would. That's a story of Gideon. And God, listen, God has some mighty heroes in this place. Young people to the oldest person here. You're not too old to be used by God, you're not too young to be used by God. Everybody in between. Heavenly Father, we just come to you tonight, and we thank you that your word is full of examples of people, normal everyday people who you empower to do incredible things. And you're looking for surrender. That's all you're looking for, God is surrender. And so tonight, God, that first place we surrender is by deciding to surrender our heart to you, to have a relationship with you. And so people as you're praying, Christians be praying, if there's anybody here tonight, maybe you've not made that decision. Maybe that first decision to say, Jesus, I know you've got great things for my life. I know you've got a plan for me, but I'm not even walking with you right now. I'm living for myself, and you want to surrender your life and say, Jesus, right from this day forward, it's no more me. I've decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, but you've not made that decision yet. Just raise your hand real quick if you want to make that decision to follow Him. All right, for everybody else. I'm just going to pray over you. I know we're going to the school to pray here in a few minutes. I just want to pray over you, and before I hand it back over to Pastor Joe, and God, we just thank you so much that you want to clothe us with power, a power that's not our own. And God, listen, there are callings and plans you have for the people in this room, or they cannot do it on their own strength. It's going to have to be a God thing. And so I ask that God, just fill this place with your power right now, that God, you would rest down on us, that you would rest on every single individual in this room where they see themselves one way, there might be fear, there may be inferiority, there might be all kinds of things making them frozen where they're at. I ask that you would move them from fear to power in you. Help them to hear what you say about them. Help them to know who you've created them to be, what you've called them to do, and then move them to a place where they're operating in your power. In the name of Jesus, do that in this place. And we trust you, we give our whole selves to you. We offer up what we have, we hold nothing back for ourselves. And Jesus, just like Gideon, he went from one place to another place. There'd be transformations from the people in this room. There'd be a place they moved to that they didn't know they could get to, because you see it in them. I ask that you would draw it out of us as you move in our lives. And God, we're commit to you right now, God, that just like Gideon had to tear down Beow, that idolatry worship, he had to tear that down. There was a step of faith for somebody in this room. There might be just one step of faith you've been asking them to do. One person you've asked them to witness to. One relationship or friendship you've asked them to cut away. Maybe social media, you're asking them to step back, consuming too much time. Maybe God is the step of faith in serving or giving God. A lot of people here might have a step of faith they're calling them to. I ask for you to fill them with courage to believe that you are calling them to do it, and therefore they can do it. You and your strength are gonna be with them. And then as they do that, God, I just believe you're gonna open the windows of heaven. Now you're gonna open up an anointing in their life. You're gonna open up resources in their life. And we thank you, God, that you are the God of all resources and you love us. And so we commit ourselves to you tonight. We love you in Jesus name. Amen.