By Ryan Shaw
These bi-weekly memos are to provide encouragement, exhortation, and spiritual nourishment in the lives of those who have signed the Message Bearer Creed as you prepare to serve the Lord globally, and are influencing your peers with this vision.
Gideon's Story – Part # 1
Aahhhh…..the beginning of another academic year! What a special time of year. It is a time for new beginnings and for changes. Both externally, as we engage with school, work, and a host of other activities, and internally, as we seek to go deeper with God in cultivating our hearts and spirits. I want to thank you for your patience with these writings as I took the month of August off from writing them.
I am excited about the days to come this Fall and what the Spirit of God wants to do in each of our lives and in our churches and campuses. There is a sense of expectation brewing within me. The Bible tells us about a man named Issachar who was the leader of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. He knew the times and seasons of God and how the people should respond and what they should do. God divides all of time into seasons and the Scriptures help us to navigate (if we give ourselves to hearing and seeing) how to proceed, according to His plans and purposes. We must never let common sense lead us, but only the Spirit of God breathing upon us day by day. I am prayerful that in your life mighty breakthroughs over bad habits and negative ways of thinking will come. I also believe that this will be a season of uncommon favor for many.
Over the next several weeks I want us to focus on the account of Gideon in the book of Judges. This man's experience between Judges 6 and the end of Judges 8 speaks to us today. There are multitudes of principles to apply in our own lives and ministry journeys. I believe that Gideon could be symbolized as a type of the emerging generation today. There are many similarities that we will consider together. The inner issues he and the Israelites faced, as well as the outer obstacles, will need to be overcome in the lives of those in the emerging generation who are serious about following hard after God and serving Him among the nations.
The book of Judges is somewhat of a depressing book. It tells the story of the Israelites and their rising and falling concerning a thorough commitment to worship and serve God. We watch a cycle take place throughout the book. The Israelites rebel against God, and so He sends judgment upon them because He cannot tolerate sin. Then they cry out to God in the midst of their hardship and He hears them and sends a deliverer (or judge) to give them victory. They worship God for a time, but slowly fade away in their hearts and start the cycle over again. God is sovereign over history and uses people and armies to work His will, even in bringing a wake-up call to His people.
The narrative of Gideon starts in Judges chapter 6. The context at the end of chapter 5 is peace in the land. The people have just concluded a cycle where God sent a deliverer and there was wholeness and commitment to God in the land. But the cycle was moving and they were slipping from their consecrated worship and turning their hearts to do evil. Then in chapter 6 verse 1 we see the Israelites doing evil and turning fully from God to indulge in idolatry. It is a strange phenomenon, this cycle. They seek other gods no matter how much God historically exerted Himself on their behalf . The people had been prospering in the Jezreel Valley and cultivating it for harvest when God sent His judgment upon them in the form of the Midianite armies, who destroyed their crops, killed their livestock, and forced the people to live in caves. We see them next crying out to God in their misery and He responded.
There are several spiritual themes and principles here to observe and consider in our own lives. The first is how truly easy it is to find ourselves going with the flow of life and eventually, as time goes by, having our spirits dulled and our hearts toward God lulled to sleep. In fact, there are countless Scriptural admonitions calling us to be careful of this and to beware of its ability to get us totally off track with God (Deuteronomy 11:16; Joshua 22:5; Joshua 23:11; Matthew 25:13; Acts 20: 28-31; Romans 13:11; 1 Cor. 9:27; Ephesians 5:15 and many more…) We see also that the power exerted by God in bringing about their deliverance caused awe and adoration of God to commence for a season, but was not enough to keep them focused in the long run. What they failed to do was continually cultivate a heart of tenderness toward God and through this allow Him to reveal Himself to them. Instead they relied on one experience with God and similar to us, this cannot sustain in an ongoing manner.
It is our responsibility to keep watch over our hearts and spirits daily and take stock of whatever tends to get in the way of giving ourselves fully to Him. It is scary how easy it is to not do this and find ourselves living for 5, 10 even 15 years in a fog-like state devoid of real and intimate spirituality with Jesus. Instead our hearts easily become stained with bitterness, spiritual lethargy, hardness of heart, and a pseudo-spirituality we claim to be real. We come against this by not simply having our obligatory "quiet time" every day, but deliberately choosing daily to abide in Jesus, rest in Him, wait upon Him, worship Him, listen to Him, and receive from Him the depths of love and the revelation of spiritual treasures that He wants to give each one of us. This practice demands time from us and usually cannot be done in a 15-minute timeframe.
Another theme we see here is that of the character of God. Imagine yourself being God for a moment and this cycle repeating itself generation after generation. Eventually you would probably get fed up and say something like, "these people will never get it. I'm not going to listen to them next time they cry out to me because I know they'll eventually go back to their old ways." God doesn't respond like this at all! I am so grateful that God is not anything like us, but totally different in almost every way. Instead, out of His covenant relationship with the people of God, He extends His mercy and comes to their rescue. No matter how many times we fall and mess things up, His grace and mercy will prevail upon us as acknowledge our waywardness and turn from it. In fact, the judgment He sent in the first place had as its motivation to squeeze the people in such a way as to make them aware of their dire need for God's intervention and to produce deep love for God in their hearts. God is extremely good at this, but often times we simply aren't listening to Him and so don't respond to Him when crisis events emerge in our midst. This comes back to the prior principle of keeping watch over our hearts and keeping spiritual sensitivities heightened so that when things happen we can discern the purposes and ways of God in them.
In verse 6 we find the purpose of God in sending the attacking army working in the lives of the Israelites. They commenced in crying out to God to intervene and remember His covenant, even though they had been faithless to keep their side of the partnership. We find God's heart being moved and responding as He had every other time. Friends, God hears your cries! If you are seeking out of a pure heart, He will show Himself strong on your behalf in time. He knows the best time for all things and Psalms 31:15 says that He "hold your times in His hands." He knows the deliverance you need and as you wait on Him for it, let your heart be renewed with faith in His unchanging nature, in His awesome love for you, in embracing Him in the midst of crisis and pain, and allowing your faith to be matured and tested in the process.
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