Sermon on Gideon- Courage to take the step of faith

We get pretty used to seeing the symbol of the cross. Many people wear a cross necklace round their neck and we see it hanging on the wall of our church. And it’s got so much into the culture that we forget it’s a symbol of torture and death. It’s like having a little golden electric chair hanging round the neck, wearing a cross.

Isn’t it strange that we Christians worship a man who dies in suffering on such an instrument of torture?

Many would call it foolish. And it’s certainly a picture of weakness, Christ on his cross.

And yet God planned it as his method to save the world. 

Many people can’t understand how that works. And yet it does, as every saved person in this room has experienced. We know there is power in the cross. There is power in the foolishness and weakness of the cross. 

Paul says in the Bible, ‘For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
    the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

God has chosen an apparently foolish method, a method no human would have figured out to save the world. 

Not only is God’s method of salvation foolish and apparently weak- but the people that come to faith in Christ and become Christian, lets face it, are also not normally impressive. 

Paul writing to a church in the city of Corinth, a trading city, a place where were lots of money, he said  ^‘Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.’ 

Probably as we look around we can probably nod our heads and say, yes your right Paul! Not many intellectuals in our church, not many powerful, not many rich, not many of the great and the good! But God has chosen us. 

One visiting speaker came here and said something like, there are many rich people in Hong Kong, but it doesn’t look like they have come to this church! Which makes me chuckle. Because God doesn’t tend to choose the rich, sometimes He does, but not normally. 

God chooses those who the world overlooks, the weak things of the world.

In the story of Gideon, we see God’s choice of a person to fulfil a big job. And it’s a foolish, choice. God chooses an apparently weak man with low self-esteem. Gideon. But God works with him and shows him there is more inside Gideon than Gideon had realised and God shares his Spirit with Gideon and he builds Gideon up. And the story of Gideon is full of God encouraging the dear man and helping him overcome his fear. And God takes Gideon on a process that he takes many of us on, a journey of changing our self image and helping us face our fears and helping us rely on the Holy Spirit and releasing his power through us. God loves to take the weak and make them something.  

Well Gideon gathers a big army to fight God’s battle. But Gideon’s army is not foolish enough, its not weak enough and the Lord tells Gideon to reduce the size to 1percent of its original strength. And Gideon ends up with a tiny little army of 300 men. 

What a foolish thing and how weak looking. But God is setting things up for a demonstration of his wisdom and his strength. Is God setting things up in your life, in the life of this church for a demonstration of his wisdom and strength? Maybe we are feeling weak and not very impressive. Good! God can use that.  

When Nick and I stand out on Holyrood Road doing the Street Café, I don’t know about Nick, but I sometimes feel a bit foolish and weak. Especially at the times no one is stopping and the cars are driving past and I think, ‘this is silly’. But then there are moments where God just shows up and that moment a couple of months ago when the lady came along and said she had become a Christian through receiving a Bible from us, just demonstrated again to me- God uses weakness. 

And sometimes he needs to make us Christians weak before his power will be demonstrated in our lives. And it can be a painful lesson, but we are called to share in Christ’s weakness, so that Christ’s power is shown through us, its part of taking up our cross and following Christ. 

Paul probably is talking about himself when he says he knew a man who had been into heaven. Paul had seen into heaven- in fact he didn’t know if it was a vision or if he was physically there in the third Heaven in his physical body. It could have been either. He heard things in Heaven that he couldn’t tell anyone about. Amazing. But God knew that all these surpassing experience could cause Paul to get arrogant and prideful. So the Lord humbled him and to do that, He gave him something he called a thorn in the flesh, a ‘messenger of Satan’. Which I suspect was either a person who persecuted him or maybe this messenger of Satan was a demonic being that afflicted him. It wasn’t nice for Paul, but God wouldn’t remove it. Why? 

So that Paul would be kept humble and weak, - so God’s power could flow through him. Because Paul says God’s power is perfected, ie made most clearly visible in weakness. Do you want God’s power? Then you must allow God to weaken you. Paul ended up being glad of his weakness. He says ‘I boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.  That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.’

God uses the weak and he causes us to be weak, so he can use us.

And this is what the Lord does with Gideon. He weakens him. He reduces his army down to only 300. 

And in the middle of the night, the Lord arouses Gideon and he tells Gideon to attack the huge army facing him with a tiny little force of 300. It must have been a terrifying command. And Gideon was scared again. But God knows that he would be, so he finds a way to reassure him. 

And the Lord says; ‘if you are scared, go down with Purah your servant to the camp and listen to what they are saying and you will be encouraged.’ So off course Gideon does, Gideon needs all the encouragement he can get!

And Gideon and his servant go down to the edge of that huge encampment. It is massive, the enemy is spread out far and wide, thick like locusts. There are so many camels, they are beyond numbering, like the sand on the seashore. So the two of them edge down to the outskirts of this horde, and they listen in to two sentries talking to each other. And one sentry is telling the other about a dream he has had. He saw in his dream a round barley loaf rolling down a hill and squashing the tent below. And the other said to him- ‘that means the sword of Gideon is coming and the Lord is going to give the whole camp into his hand.’ 

And so you can imagine that Gideon and his servant were pretty encouraged when they heard that. God was speaking through the mouths of the enemy! 

God can speak through surprising ways, don’t limit him in the ways he will speak to you. God can even speak to you through the mouth of your enemy.

The Midianite had a dream and dreams were considered of great importance in ancient times, even in pagan societies, especially if the dreamer was an important person, for people thought that the gods made known their will or desires through dreams. They believed every dream could be interpreted. 

Well in the Bible, dreams are a common way of God speaking to people- both in the Old Testament and the New. 

When you study the dreams in the Bible, you will see that they are full of symbolism. Dreams are symbolic and the key to understanding their meaning is through deciphering the symbols. 

Sometimes the symbols are easy to understand and sometimes they are hard. But when they are hard, God will help us. As Joseph in the Old Testament says- don’t interpretations of dreams belong to God?  

In Gideon’s case- the cake of barley bread represented the poor farmers of Israel, who grew barley. It was a natural symbol for the nation. While the tent was a natural symbol for a nomadic community like the Midianites, because the Midianites lived in tents as they moved around. You know if God was going to symbolise the Gypsy or Traveller people, who recently passed through Corstorphine, He might have used a caravan. 

If God was going to symbolise the Scottish people he might use bagpipes or a thistle. 

Whats a symbol for Hong Kong? The Lion Rock maybe or one of your iconic high rise buildings there.  

So the barley loaf squashing the tent was a symbol of the Israelites defeating the Midianites. Simple when its explained!

Some of you will be dreamers. God will really speak to you through your dreams. You get dreams a lot and many of them are from the Lord. As I said before, write them down as soon as you wake up, it takes a bit of effort, because it’s easier just to say ‘it’s not important, it’s just a dream’. But if you remember it, it might well not have been just a dream, it might be from the Lord. 

God promised to pour out his spirit on all people and your young men will see visions and your old men will dream dreams- according the book of Joel. Actually both young and old can get dreams and visions. Doreen here, has recorded 1400 of her dreams over the years. 

Some dreams are just from your subconscious. Your fears, or frustrations coming up. Some are attacks from the devil. They come across as negative and dark, nightmares. But some dreams and maybe many dreams come from God and God is trying to get a message through to you. 

The Bible tells us this. Job 33 – God speaks now this way now another, in a dream, in a vision of the night, although people may not perceive it. 

The early church fathers really believed in dreams from God. Like Augustine who said dreams were an important way God spoke to people, Jerome who translated the Bible into Latin was converted partly through a dream. Polycarp, dreamed he would be martyred in Rome and he was. 

Sometime inventions and discoveries are made because of a dream. I’ve talked before about how the sewing machine was invented after Elias Howe received a dream with the key piece of information he needed to adapt his design and make it work.

Let me tell you the story of Otto Loewi - a 47 year old German Jewish scientist.

It was the night of Easter Saturday, 1921, and Otto Loewi fell asleep with a book on his chest.

Loewi was trying to find the answer to a question which scientists had been struggling to find for a generation. It was about how nerves operate in a body.

When a nerve fires a signal to a muscle — when your brain tells your hand to pick up a coffee cup — how does the message actually get across? Is it electrical? Is it chemical? Half the world’s top scientists insisted one answer. The other half insisted the other. Nobody could prove either.

Loewi had been chasing the question for seventeen years without an answer.

Then he had a dream.

In the dream, he saw the entire experiment laid out, step by step. Two frog hearts. Two salt water baths. A nerve. Move the fluid from one bath to the other and see what happens. He woke up in the middle of the night, scribbled the instructions on a piece of paper on his nightstand, and went back to sleep.

In the morning, he could not read his own handwriting.

He tried for the whole day. He could not reconstruct it. He could remember that he had dreamt something very important, but the actual experiment had slipped away from him like a name on the tip of his tongue. He went to bed that night devastated.

And then, the dream came back.

The exact same dream. Same frog hearts. Same saline baths. Same procedure. This time Loewi did not write it down. He got up, got dressed, and walked to his laboratory in the middle of the night.

He ran the experiment.

It worked.

He had just proven that nerves communicate chemically — that the brain releases tiny invisible substances that carry information from one cell to another. He had discovered the first neurotransmitter. He gave it the name vagusstoff. We call it acetylcholine today.

Fifteen years later, in 1936, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for that experiment. He is now called the father of modern neuroscience. Literally thousands of medications that work on the nervous system trace their lineage back to what Otto Loewi saw in his sleep on Easter weekend, 1921.

Years later, he was asked the obvious question. Where did the experiment come from? He had been stuck for seventeen years on a solution to what appeared to be a dead end. What changed?

Loewi was completely honest. He said the answer was simply given to him. He didn’t think it. He received it.

There are a few things that interest me about Loewi’s story. One is that he was a Jew. God, (and I believe it was God), gave a Jew, the long awaited solution. Remember what God said to Abraham- you will be a blessing to all nations. Well one of Abraham’s descendants Loewi has been.  

The second thing that interests me is that it happened at Easter time. The breakthrough happened on the day of ultimate breakthrough- Christ’s resurrection. It’s like the Lord had his time stamp on it.

And the third thing that interests me is that Loewi when he woke upon on Easter Saturday, could not remember his dream properly. His hand writing was not great by the sound of it, and when you wake, your handwriting isn’t always brilliant! But God gave him the dream a second time, the following night. That was good of the Lord. It was like God giving Moses the 10 Commandments a second time after he broke them the first time. 

Well Gideon gets the revelation from a dream and it encourages him. But now is the time to move. Even with the dream, it still takes a step of faith to do what Gideon did next. Basically attack an army multiple times bigger than his. Gideon is at the point of decision. Will he move forward and obey God’s command or will his shrink back? 

And there are times in our lives as Christians when we have a choice to make. We know what God is telling us to do, but in our minds it sounds foolish or difficult or scary. And we have a choice, will we jump or not? 

I read of a man who when his three children were young, they invented a game on the staircase inside their house. They would climb up four or five steps, line up in a row, and look down at him. With his hands held firmly behind his back, his children would call out: “Daddy, if we jump, will you catch us?

And dad would intentionally reply: “I might and I might not. The only way you'll find out is if you jump.”

The children loved this game, and despite his teasing answer, they would leap off the staircase anyway. Dad of course, would always bring his hands around and catch them safely. He later joked that they had to stop playing the game when they got older for "health and safety reasons"—specifically for his health and safety!

But you know the Lord will take us to that place, where we need to decide whether we will jump or not? Can we trust our Father enough to jump? If you know your Heavenly Father well enough, then you will not be scared to jump, for you know He is not going to let you down. Faith comes from knowing him. 

Faith is an action, it’s not just an intellectual belief. Do you believe in Jesus? Your actions will show your faith.

Well Gideon trusted God and he jumped! And because he jumped, he has gone down in the annuals of history as a man of faith. 

Hebrews 11:32-34: “I do not have time to tell [fully] about Gideon … who through faith conquered kingdoms … whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies.”

Faith will result in us conquering in the challenges we our families face, faith will turn our weakness into strength, faith will make us powerful in the Lord.  

Gideon used his brain as well as getting divine revelation. There is nothing in the text that tells us God told Gideon how to attack. It seems that Gideon himself came up with a very cunning way to attack. God gives us intelligence and problem solving ability. God is very creative, but he gives space for us to be creative also. And Gideon was very creative in the way he did things here. 

 He gave his men clay jars with torches inside and a trumpet each. Then he spread his men around the edge of the Midianite camp and probably at 10pm, when it was pitch dark and the Midianites had just changed the guard. The men all blew their trumpets, then they broke their clay jars which were screening the torches and help up torches. So suddenly the Midianites heard the trumpets all around, they heard the crash of the clay jars breaking and then they saw all these lights surrounding them, like the lights of a big army advancing to attack. And then Gideon’s little group of 300 shouted at the top of their voices. The shock to the Midianites must have been profound. They panicked.

The text tells us that the Lord caused the Midianites throughout the camp to turn on each other with their swords. 

It was the Lord who did that. God was moving. Gideon had come up with a cunning strategy, a wise way of doing things, but God’s power was the thing that made it all work. 

The Midianites turned fled west, over across the Jordan river into what we now call the nation of Jordan. The men of Ephraim, also Israelites, joined in the pursuit and many of the enemy were killed.

It was total victory. 

Gideon could look back and think: This victory was God’s, not mine. My only part was to trust and obey him. The glory is his, and the privilege is mine. And the 300 men should likewise say after the battle: It was impossible for us to win, few as we were—this victory must have been given by God. The glory is his, and the privilege is ours, for being allowed to be part of what he was doing. And the rest of Israel should think: I wasn’t even there! God rescued me without me doing anything. The glory is his, and the privilege is ours! Again we see the principle of salvation that comes in the Bible. God does not save through expected means, or through strength. But in the foolish and the weak. 

So let’s be open to God’s foolish and weak ways. Let’s not avoid doing God’s apparently foolish thing. Let’s trust him to move through our weakness with great power. Amen