2006 - 03 - corn is no place for a mighty warrior

“the Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”

--- judges 6:12 ---

READ JUDGES 6

so, i’m a strongbad fan. i don’t know if all of you know who strongbad is, but he’s a cartoon character on homestarrunner.com. and he also writes a very random cartoon called teen girl squad. in one of the last episodes of teen girl squad, he inserts a random character who is the mighty warrior. near the end of the episode, this character jumps up out of a bowl of corn chips, shouting, “corn is no place for a mighty warrior.” how true that is really. you don’t find a whole lot of mighty warriors sitting around in bowls of corn chips.

well, how about finding a mighty warrior in a winepress? threshing wheat? hiding? but, according to the text here in judges, that’s exactly what we find. see, in Israel at the time the midianites were in control. they were taking over everything including all the crops. so if you wanted to make some bread from the wheat you harvested you had to do it in secret. so gideon here has moved his bread making activities into a winepress in order to not be detected. just like a brave warrior would do, don’t you think?

obviously, God does some work with gideon. we see throughout the rest of chapter 6 that gideon is not exactly convinced that he is going to be the mighty warrior that God thinks he will be. God has to prove it to him several times, give him several signs. eventually gideon believed God and did what the Lord asked him to.

but there is something that is really interesting to me in this whole conversation with gideon. it is the way that the angel addresses gideon from the very beginning. The angel appears to gideon and says, “the Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” small distinction here, but notice, the angel addresses gideon as a mighty warrior. not as someone who is going to be a mighty warrior, not as someone who could be a mighty warrior, but as someone who is already mighty. the coolest thing is the source of that might is right there in the sentence. gideon is already mighty because the Lord is with him all these things are in the present tense. the Lord is with you, you are mighty.

if we know the Lord, the same thing is true of us. within us is already a mighty person, because the Lord is with us. let that sink in a little bit, you are mighty! realize, this means that in anything that the Lord calls you to do, you have the ability to be mighty. that may mean the tennis team and your play this year, that may mean overcoming your weaknesses, that may mean by giving and supporting a good friend, or helping someone get to know the Lord better. you already have the power, the strength, the might, because the Lord is with you.

but what is keeping you in hiding? gideon had to be brought out of hiding for his strength to help anyone, including himself. it’s the same with us. if we stay in hiding, no one will ever benefit from our strength, neither ourselves nor others. so are hiding because your worried about what the people around you will think? are you scared about the public opinion from being really committed to your relationship with Christ, and what people will say about you? gideon is. he’s so scared that he does his work at night so his family won’t kill him. but you know what? the Lord was with him. i think this is the most common fear of people when it comes to knowing Jesus Christ, is that others will think their devotion is weird. i understand

that. but we have to step out of hiding if we ever what to live in Christ’s strength.

so what’s keeping you in hiding? corn is no place for a mighty warrior, but neither are the things that keep you in hiding. let’s put it before the Lord to change it tonight. what’s keeping this team from living in God’s strength? let’s put that out before the Lord and change it as well.