Series - Maximum Impact, Life with a difference # 1
“Do you have a dream for your life? Is it a dream worthy of your identity as God’s child?”
A better word might be, vision, but I hesitate to use it since it is over-used so often. God, the Holy Spirit, wants to invade your imagination and create a picture in your mind about what He is doing, what you can do, and how your life can have maximum impact!
Some of you just groaned inside, didn’t you? “Pastor, I don’t need another guilt trip. I’m already buried up to my eyeballs in work.” I assure you that I have no interest, nor does the Lord, in laying a heavy burden on you. But, He is deeply concerned that each of us is living in a way that pours our energy into the right efforts!
And then too, I know that there are millions of Americans who sit and stare at a glowing TV for hours every evening, escaping the boredom of their lives, stepping vicariously into a world of fantasy relationships and accomplishments. Just for a few moments, the movie or program allows them to be rich, or famous, or thin, or beautiful, or powerful... And then they hit the off button on the remote and return to real life! Nothing is more tragic that wasted potential, a life frittered away in fantasy and foolishness.
Over the next few weeks, God-willing, I will be preaching a series of challenging sermons that will urge you to get up from the couch, to get off the couch, to commit yourself to living for maximum impact to make a difference in the world. Not only will you be a happier person, but God will be honored by your life, and you will build a rich reward in Heaven!
Jesus, was walking through Samaria, a spiritually barren region. His disciples were with him. Listen to His challenge:
As you look around right now, wouldn’t you say that in about four months it will be time to harvest? Well, I’m telling you to open your eyes and take a good look at what’s right in front of you. These Samaritan fields are ripe. It’s harvest time! “The Harvester isn’t waiting. He’s taking his pay, gathering in this grain that’s ripe for eternal life. Now the Sower is arm in arm with the Harvester, triumphant. John 4:35-36 Message
He’s saying that to you, to me.. “OPEN YOUR EYES and take a good look at what’s in front of you!”
Today we’ll be taking a look at a story from the life of Gideon. The Bible text is found in the book of Judges, chapter 6. In your Pew Bible, you can find the story on page 381.
As you’re turning there, I want to remind you that
the Bible absolutely declares that God makes everyone of us with a purpose. Furthermore, He gives gifts to us through His Spirit, resources to us so that we can serve His plans and purposes effectively.
Several hundred years before the time of Christ, the people of God had failed Him in major ways. He removed His protection, allowing an invading army to carry the best and brightest among them away to Babylonian captivity in Assyria. Years later, when they were repentant, He sent this word through the prophet, Jeremiah!
29:11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD,
“plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Did you know that those are still promise words for you and for me? God has a destiny for you!
Some of you no longer believe that! You had dreams once, but ...
they died when someone disappointed you or broke your heart.
Or perhaps your dreams died when a trusted spiritual leader failed.
Or maybe it was when you fell flat on your face trying and swore you would never put yourself in a risky place again.
Or perhaps your dreams just faded over time as they were put on the shelf and left untouched for too long.
Some of you excuse the death of your dreams as the result of maturity. “I just grew up and realized the futility of trying to make a difference. Life is what it is.” Yes, some of our youthful dreams (the sanctified ones!) weren’t really grounded in reality and were more fantasy than vision. But.... some of them might well have reflected our God-planned destiny. But just maybe we were too ready to believe the nay-sayers who beat the drums of “couldn’t, shouldn’t, never gonna’ happen, can’t afford it, get real, don’t lose your head in the clouds” until we settled for something much less than God planned for us.
Just maybe you’re here today and you don’t recall having a dream for your life. Maybe you were one of those people who were taught to reject dreams or whose life was so desperate you couldn’t afford the luxury of dreaming as you scrambled to survive poverty, abuse, or tragedy.
I repeat - God has a destiny for you!
Washington Assembly is guided by three words.
We are committed to being Authentic in our pursuit of God and His will.
We are committed to being Accepting, letting God love others through us.
AND, We are committed to being Accelerating, encouraging people start to do what God created them to do!
Gideon, whose story provides our Scripture lesson today, lived in a difficult time of Israel’s history. After settling into the Promised Land, the Israelites descended into a kind of political and religious chaos. The Bible says it was a time when (Judges 21:25) Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit. A pattern characterizes their lives which we observe and, hopefully, from which we learn!
∙ The people began to SIN, forgetting God and following their own agenda.
∙ The consequence was that God withdrew His blessing and they fell into SERVITUDE, oppressed by their neighbors.
∙ This suffering caused them to turn to God with SUPPLICATION, seeking God’s help.
∙ In response, God sent SALVATION, bringing leaders called judges who helped them win freedom from their enemies and get back to serving Him.
Let’s go to our text – Judges 6:1-10
READ, noting the cycle of sin, servitude, supplication.
Gideon was one of those leaders, but when we meet him he is clueless about his God-planned destiny.
The text goes on to tell us – READ Judges 6:11-24.
What does Gideon’s story teach us?
A. Life’s difficulties often obscure God’s plans for us!
I love Gideon’s honesty with God’s messenger.
“God is with you, mighty warrior!” says the angel. Truth was, Gideon was hiding out from Israel’s enemies at that very moment. The text tells us he was threshing wheat, that is, separating the kernel of grain from the useless outer hull. What he’s doing is common, but where he is doing it is strange!
In normal times the wheat harvest was carried to a threshing floor, a large open space. There several people or even a large domestic animal would walk over the stalks and heads of grain to make those kernels drop away. But what is Gideon doing? He’s working in a small winepress, a small round stone item. He is afraid of the Midianite raiders that frequently stole Israelite grain. “Mighty warrior?”
Besides fear, Gideon was full of doubt. “If God is with us, why are we having such a terrible time in life? God has abandoned us.”
You know how this feels, don’t you? I, too, know what’s it like to be full of fear and doubt when the ashes of defeat and disappointment are scattered around..
Past failures, sometimes our own and sometimes those of another, can hinder the fulfillment of God’s plan! Those images of failure can stand like walls that block the horizon, that keep us from seeing any hope for future. The enemy of God and all that is good likes nothing more than to keep our focus on yesterday, especially the failures, for as long as we’re looking back, we can’t catch the vision that needs to shape tomorrow.
Gideon’s experience is a lesson for us all.
B. God’s estimate our potential is much different than our own self-estimate!
“Gideon, mighty warrior, go save Israel,” says the Lord.
“But, God, how can I do this? I am from an obscure tribe, an even more obscure family, and I am the person from who the least is expected,” says Gideon.
Gideon was hiding. He thought he was in great danger. Gideon was fearful because he thought he was weak. Gideon saw only defeat and destruction and himself as a victim of circumstances beyond his understanding believing God had abandoned His people.
God saw a mighty warrior, a man who could rally the people of Israel and break about the defeat of their Midianite enemies! God saw a people who were ready to serve Him once again and a man who was called and equipped for leadership.
Is there a gap between points of view? Sure is!
∙ Might that same gap exist between who you think you are and what you think you can do and who God is calling you to be?
∙ What identity is shaping your life; your perceptions of yourself or the vision of the God who created you?
Again, I so appreciate the honesty of the story.
Gideon very humanly cannot quite bring himself to believe what he’s being told so he asked the angel if he could go prepare an offering, which he did. From the text, we can infer that this took some time, perhaps even hours! When he returned the angel told him to set the offering of goat meat, broth, and unleavened bread on a rock. Then the angel touched the offering with his staff and, in an instant, a fire consumed the offering right before Gideon’s eyes! He was convinced and went from that moment of encounter, a changed man, with a brand new identity.
When the Spirit came, Gideon found himself beginning to see a new vision, and he moved towards being a man living for maximum impact, making a difference!
So, how can you have maximum impact?
How can you move from sitting around on the sidelines, letting yourself escape into fantasy, to embrace God’s call to make a difference?
The very first choice is one Gideon made - accept a new identity from God!
In this time, we don’t need an angel to come to us with a message. Christ Jesus, came to change our destiny and offers each of us a new life!
As human beings we have a big problem which we do not like to face; we’re sinners. We have missed God’s plan and offended Him deeply by ignoring Him and doing our own thing. Israel came under the judgment of God when they took up the worship of the gods of the nations around them, and so do we. No, our sin isn’t displayed by bowing down to little carved idols. But we do serve many false gods. We serve gods that go by the names: Success, Retirement Savings, Reputation, Sensuality, and/or Pleasure. We serve these gods no less religiously than the ancient people worshiped the fertility gods of the Canaanites! Somewhere deep inside we know our wrong. We may deny it. We may cover it up. We may excuse it way, but the guilt remains.
But, He reaches out because He not only sees who we are, but who we can be!
He offers us, at His expense, a brand new identity . Sinners, the worst and the least alike, find a brand new life in Christ. The Scripture says, 2 Corinthians 5:17
. . . if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
That’s not just a spiritual transaction, hidden away in our hearts. It’s about a whole new life!
1 Corinthians 6:9-11 Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
And that is what some of you were. {Note the PAST tense!}
But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
In my pastoral counseling, I find that many people find it hard to accept the new identity. They keep wanting to look back. When, however, they focus on who they are in Christ today, they begin to break the patterns of who they were before. I use a great one page tool, called Who Am I? that was created by Dr. Neil Anderson as part of his ministry to people who feel trapped by addictions and habits. Dr. Anderson believes that when you change a person’s thought patterns, you change the person.
What negative experiences have brought you pain or shame and prompted you to shelve the spiritual desires you once had?
Whether the problem was of your own making or the fault of others, it’s time to let God heal those wounds.
The following steps give you a good start.
1. Put a name to the way you have been living.
Is it Fearful Gideon, Resentful Mary, Wounded Curtis, Angry Sally,
Disillusioned Dave, Negative Ned, or ____________?
Don’t move on to step 2 until you have identified the false name under which you have been living.
2. Now ask the Holy Spirit to show you the new name he wants you to embrace.
“Mighty hero, the Lord is with you!” is the healthy new identity the angel asked Gideon to accept.
What new identity might God want you to receive?
If you haven’t embraced Christ as the One who forgives your sin, do that FIRST.
Face the fact that no matter how good you’ve tried to be, you haven’t met the standard of a holy God! Thank Him for settling the issues of your guilt and making it possible for you to ‘come home again.’
THEN, ask the Spirit of God to help you to begin to dream again, inspired dreams of the person He’s planned for you to become!
No matter how much success or failure you have known, God can give you a new tomorrow.
Your win/loss record doesn’t matter to Him.
Who loved you, who hated you becomes irrelevant when you know HE loves you.
Look up and adopt the attitude expressed by Paul, who found His true identity after many years of trying to live life on his own terms. He was a religious man, a man of incredible self-discipline. We would have admired him on the outside, but he didn’t know God. His life was an empty thing, without meaning until Christ met Him on a highway between Jerusalem and Damascus. Heaven issued a new identity to the Pharisee named Saul and he became Paul, the saint!
Many years later he acknowledged the up’s and down’s of life, and the faithfulness of God. He wrote,
Philippians 3:12-14
I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached
perfection! But I keep working toward that day when I will finally be all that Christ Jesus saved
me for and wants me to be. No, dear brothers and sisters, I am still not all I should be, but I am
focusing all my energies on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies
ahead, I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God, through Christ
Jesus, is calling us up to heaven.
That is the first and most important step - becoming a new person, with a new perspective, and the life of the Spirit in you that allows you to hear the Spirit’s guidance. Respond to Him today!
In weeks to come - I hope to speak to you about...
• Learning to Walk WITH God.
• Planning to Succeed.
• Wiring Into Wisdom.
• Breaking out of the Boxes others build around you.
• Seeing past the edge of your yard!
• Taking a Leap of Faith!
Amen
________________
Jerry D. Scott, 2008