Read Judges 6:11-16

¹¹ The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. ¹² When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”

¹³ “Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.”

¹⁴ 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?”

¹⁵ “Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.”

¹⁶ The Lord answered, “I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites, leaving none alive.”

Let’s Pray.

Through the ebb and flow of my life I have done a lot of moving. I moved around a lot when I was a little kid following my dad’s job around until I hit 2nd grade at about this time of year when we settled down in Marshalltown, IA. We moved one more time right before I started high school to another house across town, but the most moving I’ve ever done was between the ages of 18 and 23. I lived in a new place every single year I was in college, and college moving is different than any other type of moving. It’s different because you have more help than you’ll ever have again in your lifetime, but it also means that you are also going to have to do a lot of moving for other people.

And the funniest thing about moving – to me anyways – is moving big, bulky, heavy pieces of furniture. You know how it goes: you get a bunch of people around and coordinate who is going to do what and how you’re going to pick it up and orient the furniture to get it in or out of the room/place you’re moving it to or from and all of you hoist this thing up in a semi-coordinated effort and carry it together. And, without fail, there are 3 different types of people that appear in this arrangement: there is the person who is doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. They’re carrying their weight, they’re steering with the team, and they’re in line with the plan as it has been laid out. The second person is the do-it-all guy. The one who knows the plan and sees the team, but it going to do it all by themselves anyway either because they think its easier, they want to show off for a girl, or they just don’t know how to work in a team. I will admit, this is me most of the time. I’m not proud of it, it just is what it is… And then there is the third type of person. That person that realizes about 5 steps in that they’re really not doing anything. You kind of drop your hands for a second to see if anybody really even notices and then either decide to place your hands back under the furniture so you get to be part of the team or walk alongside them and say – without fail – “I guess you guys don’t even need me, I wasn’t doing anything!”

Now, we’ve all been each one of these people in the carrying line at one point in time or another, or at least I know I have. But what struck me was how this is a perfect metaphor or simile or allegory for our walk with God, and we all go through this same thing.

We have those times in our walk with Him where we feel like everything is going right. Everything is in line, we feel close to him, we feel embedded in scripture and prayer, and our faith life is really just hitting on all cylinders. We are engaging in the church, we are living a Christian witness in our life, and we know that God is really using us exactly how He intends to use us. Those moments are wonderful! Those moments are absolutely summit or mountaintop moments. We live for these moments.

The next one is the over-worker, and we talk about this one a lot in church and in small groups. Those times where you feel exposed before God and completely unworthy of this gift of grace that you’re given and so you try and earn your salvation. You do it through constant penitence, through devoted – if not excited about it – scripture reading, through church attendance, and by doing all of the things we think we need to do in order to earn God’s love. That show-off mode. And not everybody finds themselves here to the fullest extent, but I think we’ve all been there before where we think, “OK, this year, I’m going to read the Bible everyday and I’m not going to miss a single Sunday of church, and I’m going to pray as soon as I wake up and as soon as I go to bed and at every meal, and so on and so forth…” It’s not that we’re necessarily doing these things out of a desire to love God or know God and be close to God. It comes from a place of misplaced obligation – if that makes sense. We feel like these are the things that we’ve been told we’re supposed to do if we’re “good Christians”. And, so, we try to earn that title of “good Christian”.

Now, that’s one end of the spectrum that we’re talking about today. And it is the end of the spectrum that, I think, we spend most of our time talking about. But there is another end of the spectrum that is much more prevalent and much more overlooked in the ebb and flow of our Christian life.

It’s that feeling that “this is all that God has intended for me”. That end of the spectrum where you are walking alongside everybody, and you know that your hands are underneath the furniture but you’re not really doing anything to help carry the weight. It’s that space that our scripture takes place for today.

If y’all don’t remember this story or aren’t familiar with this story, this is the beginning of the call of the Judge known as Gideon. This comes to us in the book of Judges in the Old Testament, and if you’ll remember, Judges is kind of a wild west sort of moment in the history of the nation of Israel. This is after Moses has died and the Israelites entered the promised land under the leadership of Joshua. This is also after God has led them into battle against all of those people that were occupying the promised land at the time and handed the Israelites incredible, violent, and decimating victories. And now that the people of Israel have established their dominance and occupation of the promised land, they’ve forgotten about who got them there in the first place. Joshua is long gone, and the Bible tells us multiple times throughout that book of Judges that “everybody did as they saw fit”. If you read those words in the Bible, you can be assured that it means that the people of Israel are NOT living they way that they are supposed to live. And as they neglect their covenant with God, God allows their enemies to attack them and defeat them. Since they aren’t holding up their end of the deal, neither is God, essentially. But each time they cry out and each time God raises up a mighty Judge to bring the people of Israel together, lead them, and defeat the invading nation that has been threatening them.

In chapter 6 we are in another one of those moments where the people of Israel are doing as they see fit and the Midianites are now the ones that are attacking them. The people of Israel cry out to God and God tells them – I’m the one that delivered you from Egypt, I’m the one that travelled with you across the wilderness, I’m the one who delivered you the promised land, and I am the Lord your God and you shall not worship the God’s of the Amorites but you did not listen.

Fortunately for the Israelites and for us, God is a faithful God who is much better than we could ever imagine or deserve, so in spite of their insubordination, God selects a man to raise up and be the next Judge and leader of the Israelites and that’s where we meet Gideon.

When we meet Gideon, he is a Jew but he isn’t a mighty warrior or a leader in the making. He’s certainly no Samson or Deborah. No, he is working in a winepress and doing it in such a way that he is hiding what he is doing from the Midianites so that they won’t see it and take it from him. He’s what most of us might call a meek person or, in less politically correct terms, he is a bit of a coward.

But God seeks out Gideon and the Angel of the Lord tells him “The Lord is with you oh man of might and valor.” Now, most of us, if we heard those words from God, might do a bit of a double take like, “Me? Might and valor? You must have the wrong guy?” Which is almost what Gideon does, but he takes it a step further. He hears the Angel tell him that the Lord is with him, and he responds with, “No he isn’t. He used to be, but clearly now he’s forsaken us.” That’s a bold statement to make when the Angel of the Lord is addressing you, isn’t it? But God isn’t one to be punked, so he punks Gideon himself here. He says to Gideon, “Find, if you’re so strong, go do it on your own with your own might! Do not I send you?”

So, there’s this kind of – hey, if you think you can do it then go do it! But God immediately follows up this little dig with – I am the one that is sending you. Don’t you understand that I am with you???

But this next statement from Gideon is what I want us to remember for today. Gideon says that he is weak, he is from the weakest clan, and surely this is as much as any of them are really able to do.

That feeling of uselessness. That feeling that – hey, everybody else carrying the furniture is clearly strong enough to do this without me, I must not be needed, or I must be so weak that I’ll just walk and go along, but I don’t think I’m really needed in this.

That feeling of uselessness makes up a lot of Christians around the world. We think that ministry – that being called to do the Lord’s work – only happens to those that are called to preach, to sing, to lead, or to care for others. We think, “You know what, I think this is as much as God has really called me to do and I don’t have much else I’m supposed to do other than love him, go to church, pray a little bit, and tell people I’m a Christian if they ask or the topic comes up.” The reality is the exact opposite. That may be how you see yourself, but God sees you differently. God saw Gideon differently. God goes on in this conversation to call Gideon a Mighty Warrior. To tell him that he and his clan are going to be the people that defeat the Midianites and save Israel because God is going to go with them. And he emphasizes this throughout the story as Gideon pulls together 32,000 men to battle 135,000 Midianites and God tells him its too many. 10,000 leave and God says that’s still not enough, and the army continues to reduce until it is 300 against 135,000. God does this to show Gideon that it’s not about him and his might. It is about God and his.

See, God doesn’t just see you as a follower of Christ. He doesn’t just see you as one of his children. He sees you as a part of the body of Christ – as the church. And that part of the body that you play is much more than you could ever imagine. If you lean into his calling of you, if you lean into His definition of you, you’ll see that whatever you think He had in store for you, God’s not done with you yet. He has even more for you.

And, again, I’m not talking about those called into pastoral ministry. In fact, Paul tells us in Ephesians that those of us called into Pastoral Ministry are really not doing a lot of the ministry as a whole. He says that the role of the pastor or deacon or bishop or clergy is merely to equip the body for ministry. It is the body that is making up the majority of the ministry. It is the body that has been called, like Gideon, to be the mighty warriors for the body of Christ.

And there are going to be times where we feel all three of the things we’ve talked about today – times of walking in step with the plan God has for us, times when we try to overcompensate because we’ve been feeling particularly lost, broken, or unworthy, and times where we think, “This must be all that God has called me to be”. Those times of comfort can also be the most dangerous. Those are the times where we become lukewarm in waking out our faith, but I’m telling you right now that God has seen each and every person sitting in this church, and he has called all of you to be mighty warriors. Whether it is praying, singing, and reading scripture over a fellow Christian in a time of pain or need, if it is feeling a call to lead a small group so that you have the opportunity to invite somebody you love who is feeling lost, or if it simply feeling called to lean into the ministry of your family and your coworkers, you have been called to ministry.

You have been called up in this battle against the enemy that we wage every single day. Because the enemy was clear for Gideon – it was the Midianites, but we are engaged in a battle today and, unfortunately, the lines of battle are much less delineated than they were for Gideon. Instead of having a clear boundary, we have been put behind enemy lines and we are fighting as a rebellion in this world that is owned by the enemy. So, hear that call today. You are not useless. God is not finished with you yet. You are a Mighty Warrior and God is calling you into ministry and into this spiritual battle, so take up the sword of the spirit and put on the armor of God because we have all been called into a battle and the beauty is we know that, in the end, it is already won.

Let’s pray.