Mighty While Hiding: What This Changes Between Us

The hallway still has two versions of the same name. Last month this church spoke a calling sentence out loud over a chair that still treats hiding as the safer public line. One household received it and still keeps the wheat in a quieter place. The chairs around them received that delay as if it were the only memory the rest of you are allowed to live under.

A teenager two seats down is deciding whether this church hears a name together, or a set of private wine presses that write the public sentence for everybody else.

This is a sermon about what Judges 6 changes between you. If you preach it as a map of anyone's private insecurity program, you will lie. If you preach it as Gideon in Ophrah, wheat in a wine press, Yahweh's angel speaking mighty before the man felt capable, you give this church a God who names people by his purpose, and a people who cannot keep a brother's hidden wheat as the last word a watching room is allowed to keep.

Text

Hear the calling as Holy Scripture tells it, from the World English Bible: "Yahweh’s angel came and sat under the oak which was in Ophrah, that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite.

His son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press, to hide it from the Midianites. Yahweh’s angel appeared to him, and said to him, “Yahweh is with you, you mighty man of valor!” Gideon said to him, “Oh, my lord, if Yahweh is with us, why then has all this happened to us? Where are all his wondrous works which our fathers told us of, saying, ‘Didn’t Yahweh bring us up from Egypt?’ But now Yahweh has cast us off, and delivered us into the hand of Midian.” Yahweh looked at him, and said, “Go in this your might, and save Israel from the hand of Midian. Haven’t I sent you?” He said to him, “O Lord, how shall I save Israel? Behold, my family is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.”