We’re in the third week of our
sermon series “Dream On”, looking at dreams and dreamers in the Bible. Our goal in doing this is to see how that can
help us pursue dreams for ourselves and for the church. Today, we take a look at the story of Gideon.
At this time, Israel was under the control of a nation
called Midian. God chose Gideon to be
the one who’d lead Israel to fight the people of Midian, who were known as the
Midianites, and drive them out of Israel.
Now, Gideon was kind of skeptical about this, as a lot of
people God calls are. He put God to a
couple of tests to make sure he had the story right. Then he’s finally convinced, and he gets an
army together to fight the Midianites. That’s
where our reading for today picked up the story.
Gideon and his army are ready to go and fight, but God
says, wait a minute. This is not going
to work. I don’t want you to do it this
way. You’ve got too many people. If you win this way, you’ll think you did it
yourselves instead of realizing that I did it.
And God tells Gideon to send some of them home. Specifically, God says that Gideon should
tell his army that anyone who’s scared should leave.
And they do. Over
two-thirds of them leave. Gideon’s army,
which started with thirty-two thousand men, is down to ten thousand.
So once again, Gideon and what’s left of his army are
ready to go. And God again says, wait a
minute. This is still not going to
work. You’ve still got too many people. You’ll still think you won this battle
yourselves if I let you keep this big an army.
And God tells Gideon to take the army down to the water to drink. Anyone who scooped up the water in their
hands would stay back, and only those who lapped the water with their tongues
would go to fight.
Now, I don’t know, but as I think about that, I think
that if I was to try to get a drink of water from a river or a creek or a lake
or something, I don’t think it would even occur to me to lap the water up with
my tongue. And it did not occur to very
many of Gideon’s army, either. Out of
the ten thousand men in Gideon’s army, only about three hundred, about three
percent, lapped up the water with their tongues. And God told Gideon to take those three
hundred and go beat the Midianites with them.
Imagine how Gideon felt here. He’d started out with this huge army, and now
he was down to this little band of warriors.
He was scared. So God sent Gideon
and his servant down to the Midianite camp.
And just as Gideon gets there, he overhears one Midianite telling
another a dream he’s had. And the dream
is one that says God is going to give Gideon victory over the Midianites. And of course, that’s exactly what happens.
So what do we learn from this dream? For that matter, what do we learn from this
whole scenario?
We’ve talked in previous weeks about how what we’re
looking for here is not our own personal dream for ourselves or for our
church. What we’re looking for is God’s
dream for ourselves and for our church. But
when we find God’s dream, we need to let that dream be fulfilled in God’s
way. We’ll have a role to play,
certainly. But we need to play that role
in God’s way and at God’s time. And a
lot of times, God’s way and God’s time are quite a bit different from what we
think the way and the time should be.
Gideon thought the way to do follow God’s dream, the way
to defeat the Midianites, was to build the biggest army he could get. And to you and me, that would make perfect
sense, right? I mean, I’m not promoting
going to war, but if we decide to do it, I think we’d all want to have the
biggest and best military force we could get.
We’d want to go in with overwhelming force if we could. We’d want to go in with shock and awe.
That’s what Gideon wanted. But that’s not what God wanted. Because God wanted Gideon and all the people
to know who was going to be responsible for this dream coming true. It was not Gideon. It was not the people of Israel. It was God.
They would defeat the Midianites because of what God did, not because of
what they, themselves, did.
That’s an important lesson for us. Have you ever noticed how quick we are to
blame God when things go wrong and how quick we are to either take it for
granted or credit ourselves when things go right? When there’s a tragedy, when there’s a
disaster, when things go wrong that don’t seem to be our fault, what do we
always hear? “Why would God let
something like that happen?” But when
things go well, when we get a good break that we did not deserve, how often do
we say, “Why would God do that for me?”
Not very often.
I’m guessing that for every person here, God has given us
all kinds of good breaks that we did not deserve. For one thing, I was born in the United
States of America. You probably were,
too. That’s a huge break right
there. I was born in rural South
Dakota. A lot of you probably were, too. I think that’s a huge break. I was born into a family that was not rich,
but was certainly not impoverished, either.
I’ve never had a day where I worried about having enough to eat that day
or having a warm place to sleep that night.
I suspect that’s true of most of us.
I was born into a loving family.
Some of you may not have been, but I suspect many of you were. I was not born with any physical or mental
impairment. Again, that may not be true
of all of us, but it’s true for the majority of us.
That’s just the very beginning of the list of good breaks
God has given me. I had nothing to do
with any of them. I did not cause
them. I did nothing to deserve
them. Most of us here probably had most
of those same good breaks from God, things we did nothing to earn or
deserve. And of course, we’ve had a lot
more throughout or lives.
Everything positive we’ve ever accomplished, really, is the
result of good breaks we’ve gotten from God.
And yet, most of the time, we don’t even think about that. We may pay lip service to it, once in a
while, but most of the time, we give ourselves credit, right? I do, a lot of times. When someone gives me a compliment, I don’t
usually respond by giving God the credit.
I don’t know a lot of people who do.
We’ll give God the blame when things go wrong, but we want the credit
when things go right.
It’s a rare thing, and in fact it’s probably an
impossible thing, for us to make God’s dreams come true by our own
efforts. Now again, we have a role to
play. Gideon did, eventually, go attack
the Midianite camp at the time God told him to and with his three hundred men
that God left for him. But everyone knew
there was no way those three hundred guys, on their own, could’ve defeated the
entire Midianite army. They knew Gideon
had won because God was with him.
And that’s how we’ll achieve God’s dreams for ourselves
and for our church. We’ll achieve them
because God is with us. Or we won’t
achieve them, because we’ll try to do it all ourselves. Again, we have a role to play. But we’re not going to accomplish God’s
dreams for ourselves or for our church by our own greatness, any more than
Gideon could’ve overwhelmed the Midianite army with three hundred men. We’ll only accomplish them at God’s time and
in God’s way.
There’s one other thing to note about this story. We talked last week, in the story of Joseph,
about not being afraid of a big dream if it comes from God. The thing is, though, that a certain amount
of fear in a situation like this is normal.
It’s how we respond to that fear that makes the difference.
Who were the
first people who left Gideon’s army? The
ones who were scared. The ones who were
afraid. They were afraid that things
would go wrong, that they could not do it.
And notice, God does not criticize those people. Neither does Gideon. Nobody says that they’ve disobeyed God or
that they lacked faith or anything. What
they felt seems to be accepted as a normal and natural thing to feel in that
situation.
But while Gideon did not criticize those people, he did
go ahead without them. See, Gideon was
scared, too. He was especially scared
when God cut the army down to three hundred.
That’s why God sent him to the Midianite camp and gave the Midianite the
dream that Gideon was going to win.
Gideon was
afraid, but he still trusted God. Gideon
did not let his fear keep him from following God and doing what he was supposed
to do to make God’s dream come true. And
he did not let the other people who were afraid prevent him from following God
and doing what he was supposed to do to make God’s dream come true. And neither should we.
God has a dream for you.
God has a dream for me. God has a
dream for this church. It will come true
in God’s way and at God’s time. It will
come true because God made it come true.
We’ll have a role to play, but if we try to force it, if we try to do it
in our way and at our time, it won’t work.
If we simply trust God, do our best, and let God handle the rest of it,
we’ll see incredible things happen. And
when they do, we and everyone else will know that all the credit goes to God.
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