Gideon: waiting on signs
June 16, 2024
Wait: Waiting on signs
Lighting the Christ Candle
KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAWelcome and Announcements
Call to Worship
To you, O GOD, we lift up the spirit of our whole selves.
O God, we trust unashamedly in you; seeking your word, waiting on your voice
Teach us. Show us. Guide us in your paths. Grow us to know your ways more clearly.
We wait on your revelation, show us the answers we need, give us the grace to trust your voice
For you we wait.
We wait for the signs that reveal your voice as we seek to follow your way
Hymn: 290 Immortal Invisible, God only wise
Prayer of Adoration
Lord, the eyes of all look to You in hope; and You give them what they need. You open Your hand and satisfy the hunger and thirst of every living thing. You see all of our needs, and you bring us to wholeness in you.
May the time we spend together in Your presence nourish our hearts and minds; may it strengthen our relationship with You, and renew our commitment to live in this world as Your faithful disciples.
For You alone are God, the Source and Sustainer of life. You know everything about us, including our doubts and fears and the temptations we have to seek other voices… Hear us now as we confess together, saying….
Prayer of Confession:
We shudder at signs we see. Anxieties bombard us. How can we know which signs are from you? Our hearts are afraid. Help us Lord, let us be vigilant, hold our heads high. We ask for a sign that you are our hope and stronghold. We ask again that you heal our doubt by showing us once more the sign that our hope is our stronghold. Thank you for your compassion, seeking to assure us, even as we fail to understand your voice speaking to us. Keep us awake and alert to your presence in the midst of our struggles now. Tell us again that your love will triumph. In Jesus name, Amen
Assurance of Pardon
Hear the good news: We are forgiven. Despite our doubts we are energized by God’s love and directed by his grace. God equips us and energizes us to fulfill our calling. In Jesus Christ we are forgiven, loved and healed. In Jesus Christ we are called forth in the strength of God. Glory be to God.
Passing the Peace
May the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you….
Hymn: 414 God reveal your presence
Scripture:
Judges 6: 6-23 p 381
Judges 6: 33-40 p 382
Judges 7: 1-9 p 383
Sermon: Gideon: waiting on signs
From the writing of Soren Kirkegaard we learn that we can forget that God is good. But we also forget that God is wild and uncontrollable.
Yet he also assures us that God can be known, only because God chooses to make himself known to us. We need to be ready to read those signs.
When God chooses to make himself known, we see the extent of his love for all humankind, and his depth of concern for all those whom he calls.
When we look at the accounts of God calling his people, we see their reluctance. With a few odd exceptions of those who express faith and trust immediately, what we mostly encounter are those who doubt their own abilities. Or even those who run away from God’s calling. Or those people who test God every step of the way.
In this sermon series we are looking at the ways in which God calls people as they
wait before him,
learn from him,
and learn to hear his voice.
Joseph waited in prison and in service to Pharoah for decades to discover the moment of his calling. Moses waited 40 years in service to his father-in-law as a shepherd.
So, where does this account from Gideon’s life fit into the call to wait upon the Lord?
There is something of a rush going this account. The Midianites are causing a huge problem for the people of Israel. For seven years they have been destroying the villages, and the crops. Everything is ruined. Finally, the people cry out to God for help.
To answer the cries of the people, God has a plan.
He is going to send Gideon, the son of a farmer, with no military experience to lead an army of 300 people against the mighty Midianite army, that scholars report as being roughly 132 thousand people.
So, the angel of the Lord goes to Gideon declaring that the Lord God is with him. The first thing Gideon does is question that God is with them, considering the carnage and destruction that is occurring.
Then the angel of the Lord, calls Gideon, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?”
Gideon questions what the angel says, asking, “How can a farmer from the weakest family, in the weakest clan of Israel be the one who will save the country?” Judges 6: 15 NIV
The angel says, “The Lord will be with you, and you will win.”
Gideon is not willing to take the angel’s word for this. He asks for a sign and demands that the angel wait while he gathers together what he needs to make a burnt offering.
And the Lord said, “I will wait until you return.” 6:17 NIV
Gideon prepares some goat, some bread and some broth and brings it out for a burnt offering.
The angel of God said to him, “Take the meat and the unleavened bread, place them on this rock, and pour out the broth.” And Gideon did so. 21 Then the angel of the Lord touched the meat and the unleavened bread with the tip of the staff that was in his hand. Fire flared from the rock, consuming the meat and the bread. And the angel of the Lord disappeared. 22 When Gideon realized that it was the angel of the Lord, he exclaimed, “Alas, Sovereign Lord! I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face!” 6: 20-22 NIV
So, Gideon is now aware that this is indeed a message from God. And he goes and does everything that God asks, right?
Wouldn’t our journeys of faith be so much simpler if we could just trust what we see God doing to bring faith without doubt or questions.
The problem with humans is that we don’t know if we can recognize God when he does reveal himself to us.
We doubt our memories.
We have questions: Was that really God?
Was that really God speaking to us?
Joseph trusted that the dreams were a gift from God. Moses trusted that it was God speaking from the burning bush. Gideon, is not so sure.
Is this really God revealing himself?
Root and Bertrand tell us that the revelation of God comes to us in backward ways. Sometimes we don’t believe our own eyes or ears. Especially when what happens is so improbable.
I can barely light a candle with a match. Yet Gideon doused meat and bread in broth and when the angel touched it with his staff it burst into flame. No matches required. No dousing it in lighter fluid.
When I was working with Youth Groups in Nova Scotia, we watched a video from Mike Warnke, a comedian, about hearing God’s voice. The joke he told about trusting dreams and visions is something I often think about.
He said, “I don’t think I can trust dreams and visions because I am prone to eating pizza late at night.”
So what can we trust. Is it God? Is it the pizza talking? Or something worse?
In the first letter from John, we read this advice. I am reading it from the Message… “My dear friends, don’t believe everything you hear. Carefully weigh and examine what people tell you. Not everyone who talks about God comes from God. There are a lot of lying preachers loose in the world.
2-3 Here’s how you test for the genuine Spirit of God. Everyone who confesses openly his faith in Jesus Christ—the Son of God, who came as an actual flesh-and-blood person—comes from God and belongs to God. And everyone who refuses to confess faith in Jesus has nothing in common with God. This is the spirit of antichrist that you heard was coming. Well, here it is, sooner than we thought!” 1 John 4: 1-3 MSG
Clearly the expectation is that there are many voices out there. We need to be sure that the voices, dreams, visions, and messages we are receiving truly come from God.
There are voices from the forces that want to mislead us. We must be sure about whose voice we are listening to.
To illustrate that point, I once used multiple voices in a chidren’s story. I blindfolded poor, trusting Tyler, and asked him to walk down the aisle to me, trusting just in my voice to know where to go and how to stay on the path. To make it complicated, I had enlisted members of the congregation to shout out directions contrary to what I was saying.
Tyler had to listen to pick up my voice from all the other voices. Since he was related to ¾ of the congregation, he knew the other voices very well, and he did a great job ignoring them all.
The calling we have in real life is a crucial part of the unfolding of God’s will for mission and ministry. If we listen to the wrong voice that would be a disaster.
So, we look at Gideon today as a waiting story, even though it unfolds in a few jam-packed days. Knowing and obeying God’s voice would be a matter of life and death for Gideon and the army he led into battle. More so than Gideon could even know.
For that reason, Gideon tests God again and again, and rightly so.
When we are waiting for God to speak, how can we know that it is God speaking to us? Waiting on God means that we must be learning to discern God’s voice from all the other voices that clamour around us.
How are we going to know if the voice we are hearing is God’s voice?
Root and Bertrand point out that the Church has no life other than waiting for God. Yet because God often speaks in backward ways, and strange signs and wonders we need to learn how God speaks to us, and we need to recognize God’s voice above all others. In the waiting we learn to listen for God speaking, and we learn to recognize God’s voice.
The Church waits and watches for God’s action.
We ask questions such as:
Is this God centred? Is God the agent of this revelation? Is this something that God has initiated?
And the biggest question: How can I corroborate that this is a message from God?
The learning curve that we encounter when we make the choice to wait on God, helps us to develop the lens through which we look into the world for signs of the living God.
Waiting requires attentiveness that shapes the understanding of what we see and hear. We question. We read Scripture. We pray. When it comes to God’s mission, we must be sure that this is God’s voice.
Along the way we ask those questions:
Where do I see God active in my life?
Where do I see God in the people around me?
Where do I see God working for the salvation of the world?
When we pay attention as we wait for God; we will encounter God. Martin Luther King, in the struggle for equal rights, said from jail, “wait, God will provide.”
Karl Barth writes that we can encounter God in many different places, because it is God who does the revealing.
God will reveal himself through various people, and visible signs. Sometimes people will come to us with a word of what God is speaking to them.
And we can ask for signs for corroboration because we want and need to be sure that we listen to God, not another spirit. This is especially true when God is asking the impossible from us. God’s calling will take us out of our comfort zone, thrust us into situations when he will be all that we can rely on, and ask us to do what we really do not want to do.
When Gideon stops to ask for signs of confirmation from God, what he is doing, is stopping to wait for God to reveal himself more fully. He slows things down so that he can wait to be sure that he is hearing God clearly. And God, is so gracious that he says to Gideon, “I will wait.”
After the sign of the burnt offering Gideon did what God asked.
As people heard, they came out from all around, Gideon blew on his horn, and more came. They gathered as a large army.
Yet Gideon still had his doubts. He needed more assurance that he was listening to God. Again, he asks God to reveal himself more fully…
If the dew is on the fleece only and the floor is dry, I will know that you are calling me and that you will use me to save Israel…
And it was as he asked. The fleece was so wet that he could wring it out into a bowl.
But Gideon was still not sure.
39 Then Gideon said to God, “Don’t be impatient with me, but let me say one more thing. I want to try another time with the fleece. But this time let the fleece stay dry, while the dew drenches the ground.”
40 God made it happen that very night. Only the fleece was dry while the ground was wet with dew. Judges 6: 39-40 NIV
This time of waiting worked on both sides. Gideon waited to test that he was hearing God correctly. God waited for Gideon to be sure and become ready to place all of his trust in God.
Hearing God aright, and trusting God implicitly is a knowledge worth waiting for. And certainly so, given what God is about to ask from Gideon.
Remember that huge army Gideon brought with him. God was about to pare that down.
First God asks Gideon to send home anyone who is afraid. 22 companies left the army that day. 10 companies remained.
Then God says to Gideon, you still have too many soldiers. Take the soldiers down to the stream and watch how they drink from the water. Put those who lap with their tongues like a dog on one side and everyone who kneels to drink on the other side.
Of those 10 companies, only 300 men lapped to drink like a dog. These were the 300 people whom God commanded Gideon to take with him into war.
Do you remember the numbers I quoted earlier, 300 against an estimated 132,000.
This is madness.
If you are going to do this, you had better be 100 % sure that you have heard God and not another spirit. If you have heard God, you need to be 100 % sure that this is exactly what God said. Everything, absolutely everything, depends on Gideon having gotten it right. Everything.
This puts the reason why we wait into very bold relief. We wait to learn God’s ways, God’s voice, and God’s direction. We wait to be sure that we are certain that we know the revelation of God when we see it. It’s important because God does not show himself on a jumbotron at the football game.
God shows himself in barren women who become pregnant. God shows himself in a stuttering prophet with a tale of a speaking bush. God shows himself through a pregnant teenage girl. God shows himself through a criminal on the cross. God shows himself in soldiers lapping water like a dog.
We wait to be 100 % sure that we have heard God correctly; and God waits for us to be sure because his plan depends on us getting it right.
Amen.
Affirmation of Faith:
Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40: 31 NRSV
Hymn: 442 Speak Lord in the stillness
Offering and Doxology 830
Offertory Prayer
Holy God, you have called us to share in your sacred work here on earth. You have given us everything that we need to live as your grateful people. In joy we bring you now, our gifts and tithes, ourselves and our service. May we share our gifts, our transformed selves, and your grace with others in our local and global communities. Amen.
Gathering Prayer Requests
Prayer of Thanksgiving and Intercession
O God of love, we thank you that you have called us to be the church. We praise you for the opportunities to grow in understanding of your way, of your voice and of your calling.
Make us aware of the pain of the world. Help us to hear the cry of the oppressed, the poor, the prisoners. Help us to listen as you speak to us through their cries. And show us how to speak your love and respond with our love.
We bring you:
JOY
CONCERN FOR OUR COMMUNITY
CONCERN FOR OUR WORLD
O God, you have led your people in the past; lead us now. Grant us the courage to leave behind the old and familiar. Give us the confidence to risk against all odds. Give us the confidence of Joseph to invest in the future for and with those whom we love.
O God of Moses you delivered your people and led them through the wilderness. We praise you for your triumph for their sake and for our sake.
O God of Gideon you have given us the audacity to ask more from you, fill us with the trust to test you, to learn your voice as you build our confidence that you will be with us in the work that seems impossible. Teach us how to work together in mutual responsibility in the building up of your church and it’s ministry in the whole world. We ask in the name of Jesus who taught us to pray, saying:
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen
Hymn: 445 Open our eyes Lord
Benediction
God sends us into the world, to accept the cost and to discover the joy of discipleship. Go forth, trusting that God gives you everything you need for every encounter you will have.
Carry with you the peace of Christ, the love of God and the encouragement of the Holy Spirit.
Blessing Song: 500 Open my eyes v.1 & chorus
Open my eyes that I may see glimpses of truth thou hast for me place in my hands the wonderful key
that shall unclasp and set me free Silently now, I wait for thee ready my Lord, thy will to see open my eyes, illumine me Spirit Divine
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