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Sermon Series on "Hearing from God"
St. Stephen's Anglican Church
The Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar, October 5, 2014


The Lord Says, "Trust Me."


Text: Judges 7:1-8

Together, we are working our way through a study entitled, “Hearing from God.” Each day for these four weeks, we have a reading from scripture. We are looking at the way the God who created us communicates with us. And we are looking at how God says, “Follow me, trust me and listen to me.”

Two Sundays ago I talked about following God. Today we will look at trusting God. I want to focus our attention on the amazing story of God recruiting Gideon to lead his people against the Midianites. The Hebrew people were settled in Canaan at this point. God had given them that land as their own as He had promised. But they had strayed from His command to worship and serve only Him. Judges chapter 6 tells us:

Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and for seven years he gave them into the hands of the Midianites. (Judges 6:1)

The Midianites were a nomadic tribe of herdsmen who came to Canaan every year with their flocks and herds. There were many thousands of them, and they not only overstressed the resources. They oppressed the Israelites. They forced them off the land and destroyed their crops. They took away all their swords so that they could not fight back. And the Israelites, in fear, hid in caves. One such man, cowering in fear, was Gideon. God chose him to lead a rebellion and chase the Midianites away. When God came and called him to this leadership role, Gideon protested. He wasn’t anybody. His family wasn’t prominent among the Hebrew people. And he was as fearful as anyone. But God persuaded him.

So Gideon recruited an army to go up against the enormous enemy hoard, which the Bible reports were like locusts too numerous to count (Judges 6:5-6). Joshua recruited 32,000 men to fight them. But God had a plan. He told Joshua this was way too many men. Too many men? Why wouldn’t you always want as many as you could muster to fight a battle? Overwhelming force helps win battles. But here, in Chapter 7 verse 2, God explained Himself.

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...”

God was demanding that Gideon and his people trust not in themselves, but in God. When Gideon announced that anyone who was afraid could leave, two-thirds of the men left. He was down to 10,000. But God said that was still too many. So he instructed Gideon on how to pare it down still further. Take the men to the stream and have them drink water. Most of them will put their faces in the water, and a few will scoop it up with their hands. And God said, those few will be your army. That left Gideon with only 300 men. Now, there was no way they would claim credit for routing the tens of thousands of Midianites. It would have to be God’s victory.

Of course, the fear must have been intensified. We find it hard to trust in God. Why is it so hard for us? Well the answer is the same as it is to so many questions about why people do the things we do: SIN. There was a time, before sin entered the equation, when there was nothing else to trust but God. We see that in the first chapters of the Bible. God created everything. He gave the first human beings everything they needed or wanted. They enjoyed His company every day. They knew what the rules were, and they wouldn’t violate them. Why would they?

And then along came sin. Satan planted the seed in their mind: “Did God really say that? Surely you won’t die if you eat the fruit He told you not to eat.” (Genesis 3:1-4) In other words, “God cannot be trusted.” That seed of doubt has borne the destructive fruit of every generation since. We hear the message constantly in myriad different ways: God cannot be trusted. So instead, we put our trust in all kinds of other things, rather than in God:

It is long list. But the bottom line is that we find it hard to trust God. Why? Because, as the Bible tells us so plainly, His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways. (Isaiah 55:8-9) We know that when we put ourselves in His hands, He’s going to do it His way.

God could have washed His hands of us long ago. But that wasn’t what He wanted. He didn’t create us to wipe us out. He created us so that He could lavish His love on us. He created us so that we could love Him, and be close to Him, and walk with Him day by day, hour by hour. That is why He has a plan to make everything right. And that is why He says, “Follow me, trust me and listen to me.”

So here was Gideon, with an army of 300 men to go up against the enemy thick as locusts on the valley floor. At this point, he had no choice but to trust God. It couldn’t have been easy for him or those 300 souls. But the rest of the story testifies marvelously to what God did through their willingness to trust Him. I hope you will read on in Chapter 7. Remember, I said the Midianites had taken away all their weapons. God sent Gideon and his men off to battle with trumpets and torches in jars! And God prepared the way by putting dread and confusion in the hearts of the Midianites. In the predawn darkness, the 300 blew their shofars that made it sound as if there were thousands of them. And they broke the earthenware jars, in which they had hidden the light of their torches. And as the Midianites were startled from their sleep, they went into a panic. They started flailing with their swords, killing each other! And they fled.

God can be trusted. Do you believe that? Do you trust God? In order to trust God, we have to trust in God’s Word.

Do we believe His promises? Do we live as if we believe His promises? One of my dear Christian friends is Edwina Thomas, who worked for many years as the national director of SOMA USA. SOMA stands for Sharing of Ministries Abroad. It is a short-term mission organization that sends teams to places around the world where an Anglican Bishop has invited them to introduce people to the powerful work of the Holy Spirit. In its early years, SOMA USA was housed at All Saints’ Church in Dale City, Virginia. Edwina was a member of that congregation, and she volunteered to run SOMA’s office, because she thought she would be good at administration and clerical things. When the national director resigned, the Board of Directors met to select his replacement, and they discerned that they should ask Edwina. She was dumbfounded. She had spent most of her adult life as a stay-at-home mom. She was comfortable running the office of SOMA, but being the national director required a lot of skills she wasn’t sure she had. And she would have to travel abroad, which was something of which she had done very little.

She agreed to pray about it. And after a time of discernment, she concluded that she was going to trust God to give her everything she needed. She would take the job. She went on to become known all over the world as a missionary who carried the power of the Holy Spirit with her. And God was glorified. And never did she forget that it was God who made it all possible, and God who provided for all her needs. Working through her, God has done miraculous things. He gave her the ability to speak in a language she didn’t know. He healed a retarded child in India. He reconciled a village in war-torn Rwanda. He brought renewal in Kenya. He healed a man’s blindness.

Ephesians 3:20 tells us that the power of God, working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. That is His invitation. The reward is the miracles we will see when we trust in God and surrender ourselves to His plan and purposes.

As I said earlier, trusting God is hard for us. It requires that we let go of a lot of things in which we put our trust. This coming week, you will be reading scriptures in which God urges us to let go of those things—like the Hebrew people who struggled to let go of their delusion that things were easier for them back in the slave days of Egypt. You will read familiar Gospel passages, where Jesus tells people to let go of their wealth, or their social obligations, or their need to be esteemed, or their concern for daily needs. The message of God telling us to trust Him is everywhere in the Bible. It is said that His most frequent command is, “Don’t be afraid.” How often God tells us to let go of our fears and trust Him.

When we don’t trust God, we miss out on the wonders He will do. When God first led the people out of Egypt toward Canaan, they moved fairly quickly through the desert. When they got to the Jordan River, where they could cross over into Canaan, they sent out spies to check out what was there. The spies came back, and all but two of them painted a fearsome picture of giants living in fortified cities. Caleb and Joshua saw it differently and told the people, “We can do this.” But the people chose fear. They chose not to take the risk. And God judged them not ready, because they couldn’t put their trust in Him. Consequently, they spent 40 years in the desert while God proved to them He could be trusted.

The Bible tells us in the Book of Romans that “in all things God works for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28) Do you believe this? Some Christians don’t. It sounds too good to be true. It strikes some people as being contrary to their experience. “All things?” What about that job I lost? What about my congenital heart disease?

My friends, if there is any invitation in the Bible to trust God, this is it. When you believe that God works in all things for the good of His plans, in which He has involved His people, you can look back and see through eyes of faith what God has done. You can look at your present situation and be confident that He is going to bring good from it. You can look at the future with joyful expectation that things are going to work out in a way that glorifies God, and you can be satisfied that that will be good enough.

T.D. Jakes has said that God takes our setbacks and makes them into setups for a comeback. He must have been preaching on Romans 8:28 when he said that. It is so true, and you can see how true it is when you look at your life through trusting eyes. In 2007, a terrible thing happened to our congregation. We had undergone a split the month before when we voted to depart from the Episcopal Church. One evening through a phone call from one of our former members, we found out that almost every penny we had in the bank had been taken away. Our friends who had separated from us had changed the signature cards, and we no longer had access to $360,000. We paid the bank an emergency visit. They would not reverse their decision. Instead they froze the funds indefinitely. By objective human standards, it was a disaster.

Now, how would one look at that through Christian eyes? Should it have made us wonder if we had done the wrong thing? Should it have made us doubt that God was there for us? Or should it have caused us to lean into the Lord and trust Him to make it all work out according to His purposes?

As it turned out, we didn’t miss paying a bill. We made it from there on current giving each week. It took five years to resolve the question of who would get the money. We lost. The Episcopal Church litigation went against us. The judge ruled we would have to leave the property, and pay the Episcopal Diocese the amount of money we had on deposit at the end of 2006. That was $360,000. So the amazing thing God did was that we didn’t have to write a check. The money had already been set aside, untouched for five years.

We are Christians. If that name means anything, it means that we trust God. We are supposed to put all our trust in Him.

The reason we’re supposed to believe all that is that it is true. And those who believe it are the ones who are going to see God do miracles.

There was a time in this country when being a Christian simply became a way of supporting our lifestyle. Those days are gone. The world is much too dangerous. The devil has enlisted far too many allies. Our culture is far too confused. More and more each day, being a Christian means commitment and risk and courage. We aren’t going to get those things from ourselves. They are God’s gift to those who trust Him.

And there was a time in the life of this congregation when we could enjoy each other’s fellowship and do a few good works in the community and be satisfied. No longer. We are very much visible. The eyes of the community are upon us. God is doing a new thing with us. And what He is asking of us is that we trust Him. If we do, He is going to do miraculous things.

Through the power of His Holy Spirit, God will bring miraculous, wonderful fruit out of our obedience—our commitment, our risk and our courage. Are you ready? Do you trust Him?

© Jeffrey O. Cerar, 2014

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