Hey, I'm coming to you now from the basin. This is a special bonus teaching that I recorded just for you to break it down a little more, to take it a little deeper.
I hope you enjoy this overflow message. Let me know. Let's go.
So if we bring these two verses together, right, get in a mighty warrior hiding in a wine press. You an incredible creative human being, kind of living in a state of constant chronic distraction, and you know, giving into the culture around you that wants you to compare and feel terrible about yourself, or compare and feel like you're you're better than other people, whatever extreme you fall in.
This culture of comparison, this culture of cynicism, this culture of reliance on everything else that isn't God on the scene rather than the unseen, This culture that we seem to live in where we divide so quickly with people, we can't learn anything from anybody, so we stay in ignorance. The Lord says, go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. And then after Gideon sees the fire of the Lord and is afraid, and God says it's friendly fire. He says peace, you're not
going to die. And they built an altar and called it the Lord is Peace. I want to bring those two verses together for just a minute and tell you what the Lord spoke to me. He said, make peace with your strength. Make peace with your strength. Don't you mean with your weakness. Don't you mean with your past?
Yeah? Yeah, those two, but make peace with your strength. That is so.
Contradictory to a lot of what I was taught, especially in a religious sense, but even growing up in the South, you know, we had this phrase that we say, he's getting too big for his breeches, and I thought that was just monk's corner until I went to Australia. They call it tall poppy. You know, somebody gets too high, they cut him down. And in all fairness, you know, after God gives Gideon two signs with the fleece, the fleece is first drenched and the ground is wet.
So that's like the thing the thing.
That God touched was wet and everything around it was dry, and then the second time everything around it was wet, but it was dry. And I take that to mean that God's spirit will be your supply in any situation. Sometimes you'll be dry inside. But God will bring do from somebody else or somewhere else to refresh you for what He has called you to do. And how sometimes everything around you will be dry. The situation will be like valley of dry Ohs. Try, but man, God's going
to drench you with his spirit. Because Gideon picked up the fleece and squeezed it and all that happened a little bit later, after Israel had come out, the people of Israel heard that Gideon went after he built an altar to the Lord and said, the Lord is peace. He then went and smashed the altars that his father had made to Bail, which is crazy, right, like to break his father's altar in order to make peace with God. He went and smashed the altar that they would use to call on Bail and Astra.
He used even the wood from the.
Altar to asher, which was kind of like a sensual sex god in the surrounding area, and he broke it, and all the people came out and they were like Gil Gideon, and his dad was like, now you know, if Bail, who the altar was to, was wrong, let Bail deal with him. And they actually nicknamed Gideon and they gave him a name that meant may bail contend with him. So you know, after that happens, and you've got God coming to Gideon calling him out of the
wine press. God calling you out of this kind of weak place where you locate yourself, and he was there because of fear. The Midianites would come and take their crops. And it said they were like swarms of locusts that would come. And I thought that was interesting because locusts are little, and Gideon has the strength of a lion, but he's he's hiding from locusts.
That's what God said.
Their enemies were like like swarms of locusts to take the crop. And Gideon's first strategy, because he's so scared, is to try.
To make himself smaller.
Oh man, I'm the weakest I'm from the weakest tribe.
Now, all of this.
Is Gideon trying to size up his own strength. And God has called him a mighty warrior, and so he goes immediately to his own strength because he's scared. When we get scared, we tend to shrink ourselves, we tend to shrink others. We even get into the part of our brain that they call the lizard brain, which is the survival part of our brain, which is like running from tigers and bingles and bears.
And stuff like that.
And we start running from stuff and hiding from stuff even though nothing's really chasing us and nothing's really wrong.
And I know you've done that before.
You just feel like, why am I down here in this winepress thrush of my week? What's because you've been attacked before. It's because you've been rejected before. It's because you tried to step into something before. And you know, you look at what's ahead of you in the season of your life and you're like, I'm not smart as them,
I'm not as good as them. And a lot of times the first step to making peace with God and making peace with yourself and making peace with who He made you to be and who he didn't make you to be. Sometimes the first step to all of that is smashing your father's altars. That doesn't mean to me that you, you know, go outside if you're a teenager and just start going through your dad's garage and throwing his power tools around because he spent too much time out there and not enough with you.
That's not what I mean I.
Don't mean if your if your parents' drink, you go through smashing their their liquor bottles.
That'd be kind of that'd be kind of bad if if you hurt me say that.
But realistically, though, I think a lot of us never make peace with the strength that we have, the capacity, we have, the potential that we have, because we are limited by what we've seen before us. I thought it was crazy how Gideon's dad came out and he's like, hey, let Bail deal with him if he's really God. And of course Bail didn't and Bill couldn't because God was
with Gideon and God is with you. And there may be some altars that you need to smash, beliefs that you need to smash, agreements that you came into, Like everybody in our family does this.
Nobody in our family did that.
I actually remember this cool moment where somebody was saying to my dad that I would never be able to afford to go to college. Talk about me, and my dad never graduated high school, so that triggered at me.
He's like, don't you ever tell my boy.
You shut up, You don't ever tell my boy he can't go to college. He's like I'll rob a bank, I'll kill somebody and take their money so he can go to college if he wants to go to college.
I'm not saying that's like christ.
Like, Like I often joke, that's not going to land him on focus on the family with that kind of parenting, but kind of meant a lot to me. He's like, don't let my limitations become your insecurities. That's what I think he was trying to make sure of there. And this isn't a video devotion about my dad. It just
got me thinking about him. I was sharing with a friend of mine a little bit about his story yesterday and how his life was so hard and my dad was a barber and he never made more than twelve dollars a haircut before he died, and how in many ways, I think the fears that he experienced now he grew up in a real rough household. His dad was an alcoholic, a really mean drunk and would beat them and stuff,
and eventually his dad committed suicide. And he actually committed suicide on my dad's birthday when he was a little boy, like seven or eight years old. I think it was kind of important to him and I know it was to my mom too that they gave me opportunities, even based on their own sacrifices, to enable me to go forward, and so that I could have the strengths, so that I could have the skills that I was supposed to have. Every parent wants that for their child. I want that
for my children too. And yet at the same time that they gave me opportunities, there are ways in which God will call me to grow into my own man, my own family traditions, and sometimes moving forward and what God has given me is going to feel like I'm being disloyal to somebody that I love, or something that
I always thought, or something I believe. To me, this image of Gideon making an alter to God that says the Lord is peace and going forward in the strength that he has means in many ways, leaving behind a lot of the life that he was loyal to, all the people around him, the clan that he was a part of, how they saw themselves, and breaking out of that is not easy. Making peace with your strength isn't easy.
So you try to shrink yourself. You try to shrink what God is doing and fit it into your previous experience. If you've never seen it before. You think God can't do it, You feel God calling you up higher. It kind of scares you. You're like, well, I can't do that.
That's not me. But what if it is? What if it is me? What if the other stuff?
The fear, the holding back, the not being encouraging, the going through life guarded, the hiding in a wine press, not coming out and really being creative, not engage in my day, not wanting to lead, not wanting to set an example, not wanting to do the things that I know we're going to make me feel better, Just trying to get relief through the day so I don't have to feel bad right there? What if that is? What if that is false? And what if Mighty Warrior is true?
What if wimp and a wine press is just where fear has put you? What if wimp and wine press? I'm not calling Gideon a whimp, Like between me and you, I think he's pretty crazy. How much faith he did have, He just needed a few signs. He blows a trumpet, boom, he goes out. The first thing God does, though, he starts taking people away and gets Gideon's army down to three hundred and he shrinks the army, doesn't shrink Gideon.
He calls Gideon a mighty warrior, but yet he shrinks the things that Gideon would depend on that would make Gideon think that it was his.
Own strength that saved Israel.
He didn't want Gideon to rely on his own strength, but that doesn't mean he didn't want him to own his strength because he called him a mighty warrior. So you got to get this. This is crazy. He says, You're a mighty warrior. That's who you are. You got a lion within you, and the Midianites are swarms of locusts compared to the lion of the spirit of God that's in you. And Gideon did go and do amazing things,
and powerful, powerful things are ahead for Gideon. But the first thing that's got to happen is he's got to break his father's altars, which doesn't mean that he hates where he came from. It just means that he's moving forward and he's got to go say this out aloud, go in the strength you have. And then the next thing that he has to do is make peace with God at the altar so he can know that that is God calling you Gideon.
That is God using you.
And then when God starts removing people who aren't going to be ready for the battle, people who God doesn't to move into the next season, it's getting Gideon ready to experience a strength that doesn't come from him. And if you have felt in this season like you've been, you've been shrunken. Maybe your options, maybe your friendships, maybe your your possibilities, maybe your energy, maybe your time has been shrunken. That could be God's setting you up to
rely on his strength like never before. I want you to go in the strength that you have. What does that mean? It ties into the teaching I've been doing. Do the thing that you would do. Mighty warrior, you capable, you annointed you, the you that has made peace with your strength.
When you make peace with your strength, that's because.
You know it comes from God, doesn't come from you.
You make peace with that.
Like God, these are the gifts you've given me, these are the abilities you've given me.
I'm good with being Gideon. I'm good with being Stephen.
They had a prompt one time when I was a little boy in class that we thought was funny. It was a vocabulary prompt and it said even Stephen knows this word. I don't remember what the context was. I just remember that was funny to me and we left at it. Even Stephen knows this word. I was reading this morning. The Lord brought that up as funny, even Stephen.
It's like a little saying. And the Lord was saying, you know, I'm the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Gideon and even Stephen, because I'm like, man, Lord, I'm from Monk's Corner. I'm from Manassa and I wasn't a star athlete at Berkeley High School. I was like a water boy. And God, you want to use me to speak to people, influence people.
That's crazy. I'm not a trained or crazy talented musician. Like I talk. That's what I do for a living. That's my strength.
And what do we say about people who talk, They're all talk.
Talk is cheap.
So I come to God sometimes like all I know how to do is talk, and I don't even know if I'm very good at that. Sometimes, you know, and the Lord is bringing me into a season that he's the God of Abraham, Isaac Jacob, get in and the God of me, Like I'm here where I'm supposed to be doing what I'm supposed to do. Make peace with that, make peace under the oak of your urba that I'm
making peace with my strength. I think a lot of times we talk about accepting your limitations, and that's great, but that should lead to making peace with your strength and action. When you accept your limitations, it shouldn't paralyze you and make you go.
I can't do that.
Let me just sit back and watch YouTube for four hours because I can't do that.
I can't.
I don't have any opportunities over here. Nobody's calling me, nobody wants me, nobody No. Go in the strength you have. Do the thing that you would do if you believed you were a mighty warrior.
What would you do? So do that? Do that? And I thought about how.
When you hear about a when you hear about a target, they always say it's harder to hit a moving target. How God's telling getting get going be a moving target. If the enemy's gonna hit you, don't let him find you in the wine press. If you're gonna fail. I wrote this down the other day. I may end in failure, but I will not live in fear. And boy, that thing got in me when I said it. I don't mean that I am a failure. But shoot, man, I
don't know my story is gonna end. I don't know if I'm gonna win great victories in every season or climb up or fall down.
I don't know any of that, all right, But if God is with me, then I gotta go.
And if I'm an to get hit by the enemy, I'm gonna do it while I'm moving towards something that's worth moving toward, and enjoy my life and make peace with my strength. I hear God saying to somebody, that's me that you're running from. That's me calling you. That is the real you that I'm trying to show you. Don't reject it when you feel yourself going like man, maybe I could be more of a patient person. Maybe I could be more kind, Maybe I could be more encouraging.
Maybe I could do these things. Maybe you could go into strength you have and find out what it can be. But the first step to going in the strength that you have, you got to be grateful to God for it. It insults God when we diminish that it does. So make peace with your strength so that you can be at peace with the God who gave them to you. Don't fight the fire God has given you, don't fight the flow He's given you. Don't downplay yourself to fit in with people.
That, honestly a lot of times are weaker than you are.
And don't worship at the altar of everything that your family knew. God might have brought you into the season to even set some of them free.
There are so many.
Applications of this, I know we could take it to crazy places. Here the Lord saying, make peace with your strength.
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