Mighty While Hiding: The Practice That Makes It Visible

The formation folder still has called written under last month's heading. The class closed it after the verse and named that a practice. This month the same class can quote mighty man of valor and still leave the named next act on the packet. The young adult in the second row was named into a ministry last fall and still treats the printed line as the work. The teacher by the aisle has a visit this church already named and still files as extra credit.

A kid in the hallway is deciding whether this church practices the name, or harvests the whole hour and then reprints calling on a card.

This is a sermon for a church that already owns you are called and still treats the practice that would make it visible as homework after the hour. If you preach Judges 6 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 a name before the man felt capable, you give this church a God who names people by his purpose, and you take away the cheap discipleship that hides behind a finished calling sentence.

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.”