The Lord said to Gideon, “You have too many men for me to deliver Midian into their hands. In order that Israel may not boast against me that her own strength has saved her, announce now to the people, ‘Anyone who trembles with fear may turn back and leave Mount Gilead.’ So twenty-two thousand men left. Judges 7:2-3
Gideon was collecting all the logical resources he needed to get the job done. This looks like an act of daring faith to me. After all, we employ money, manpower, information, innovation, and strategies to accomplish what we are called to accomplish. That is generally true in the church world as well as the marketplace. It’s intriguing that, in this case, God does not applaud Gideon’s obedience, and that should cause us to ask why.
In Gideon’s story The Israelite community had slipped into some bad habits of leaning on alternative solutions: trusting in idols, and lauding themselves. So God called an audible and spiced things up with elevated drama. After all, God does not like to compete for our allegiance. He doesn’t just want obedience, he wants you to trust him! And sometimes he’ll turn up the temperature just to train us to lean on him. He wants us to run to him, lean on him, trust in him, pray to him, cry out to him, get our strength from him, find our joy in him, build success in him, and give all credit to him.
Coming to the end of the year I have a few simple questions for us.
- Are there areas of life you are obeying God, but not fully trusting God? Are you trying to do the right thing on your own power—meeting demands through self-sufficiency; or generally working for God’s approval, but not specifically asking him for his input?
- Is there anything God is asking you to give up? Maybe you’ve started to trust in something else instead of trust in the Lord? Maybe you need to step down from a committee but you find it difficult because you find identity in being useful or influential. Or maybe God is asking you to give up pride in your marriage or parenting by asking for help from others.
- Is there a specific area of life God is asking you to trust him in? Your children’s schooling? The health of a parent? Departmental goals at work? The direction of your career? Are you asking God to be intimately involved in the process?
- How does God want you to trust him right now? Does he want you to be consulting him, inviting him, listening to him, or praying to him? What does a radical trusting relationship with God look like?
God has a scorecard tallied with successes. He has provided for our needs: both through our industrious labors of obedience, and through his supernatural means. Sometimes he expects us to put in the sweat equity by plowing the field, planting the seed, pulling the weeds, irrigating the soil, and harvesting the crops. And sometimes he miraculously provides 5,000 brown-bag lunches using only bagels and lox for two. It’s not just obedience he’s after, he wants a relationship built on trust. The end of the year is the perfect time to pause, look backwards, and listen to God as we make adjustments and continue to live life in trusting relationship with him.
