Looking Forward

Amen.

Well, before we jump into the message this morning, a couple quick things.

Number one, I just want to say that if you were here last Sunday, what an incredible time.

Together last week.

We uh we got to celebrate our 10-year anniversary last Sunday.

If you if you weren't here, um it was incredible.

Such a reminder of how special what we have here really is.

This is so special.

The vision that God's given us, the love that's in this place, the fact that God just moves, that we want him to move, that we allow him to move.

It's it's really incredible.

We started 10 years ago in Woodstock with just over 200 people who believe that God could do anything.

And last Sunday we had just over 2,000 people here celebrating all that God has done.

It's just awesome.

It's awesome.

So I want to thank everyone who was here last week to celebrate with us, and and even more than that, I want to thank everyone who who's just part of this place, which is like all of you, all of you who serve and give and do whatever God asks you to do to make this place the special place that it is.

You guys are amazing, and I'm so excited about the next decade.

I really am.

Um, number two, I want us to pray for our nation this morning.

You know, this uh, yeah.

This this election, this this year has taught me a lot of things, and it's definitely taught me that I need to be praying for our country a lot more, and not just not just in election times at all times.

One of the amazing things about Jesus is that he came into a world that was incredibly divided, and he was a unifier.

Jesus unified people.

And we live in a divided world.

I think what's been really, really sobering for the last few years is for some of us to realize that maybe our our country might be a little bit more divided than we we thought or maybe than we were taught.

And we have this tendency to look to people and put our hope in a in a person not named Jesus to unify and to bring to bring love where there's fear.

But only Jesus can do that.

Only he can do that.

And and that's that's the beauty, is that we're the church.

We have the answer that our world needs.

We have Jesus.

And it's beautiful because here at his hands, we're not unified by our political party, we're not unified by who we voted for.

Some of us are excited, some of us are not.

We're not unified by our race, we're not unified by how much money we make, we're not unified by anything other than the fact that we believe that Jesus Christ loves all, died for all, and is with us and is for us.

That's what unifies us.

But the the rest of the world doesn't necessarily have that.

So we have to make sure, no matter what is happening in our country, that we are Jesus to our communities, that we're Jesus to our nation, that we bring that love that casts out fear, because there's a lot of fear out there.

We need to make sure that we're praying for our president.

Not just individually, but as a church.

Because there's never been a leader ever of any nation, of any community that doesn't need the wisdom of God and the guidance of God.

And it doesn't need to be surrounded with people who hear from God and who can advise he or she about whatever it is they're deciding on.

And we need to make sure as a church that we step up and we pray for our leaders, those that we vote for, those that we don't.

We need to pray for for all the people underneath them, around them.

And we need to pray that we would just be the church, that we would be those agents of love and hope, no matter the circumstances around us, all right?

So let's pray for that this morning as we start.

Jesus, we love you and we're grateful to live in America.

And Lord, we are grateful that here in this family that we have, we can we can disagree and still love each other.

But we we have a world that struggles very much with loving people that they disagree with.

And Lord, you you know exactly what that feels like, but you are love.

You are love.

It's not that you're just loving, you are love.

And Lord, our our our world needs your love, our world needs your wisdom, our world needs your power, our world needs you to heal what only you can heal, Lord.

And so we want to we want to be the church.

We want to ask that you would fill us with hope, because we're supposed to be the most hopeful people in the world.

That you would fill us with a desire to support and pray and serve our leaders.

And God, we want to pray for our president.

We pray that you give him uncommon wisdom.

We pray that you would speak to his heart, Lord.

We pray that you would surround him with men and women who hear from you, who will advise him wisely.

We pray for guidance for our nation, Lord.

And we believe, we believe that you care about this country.

And we ask that your will be done, and we pray this all in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Amen.

All right.

So today we begin a brand new series on the story of Gideon in the Old Testament of the Bible.

We're gonna call this series Gideon.

We thought really hard about that.

That's the most creative thing we could come up with.

Gideon.

I've been really excited about this series for a while, for a variety of reasons.

Number one, it's a very interesting story.

If you've heard the story of Gideon, uh, it's interesting, it's simple.

It's a story I heard as a young child, thought it was really cool, still think it's interesting today.

Gideon is a very relatable person, which is very strange because he lived a long time ago in a culture that none of us would fit into at all.

But you can relate to Gideon.

You will see so much of yourself in Gideon if you'll if you'll try to just a little bit.

If you've ever been thrust into a position that you did not ask to be in, you can relate to Gideon.

If you've ever felt completely unqualified for something that you've been asked to do, you can relate to Gideon.

If you've ever felt like you do not have the resources at your disposal to do what needs to be done, you can relate to Gideon.

If you've ever questioned why God does things, the way that he does things, and why he doesn't do things that you think he should do, you can relate to Gideon.

He's an incredibly relatable person.

And on top of all of that, his story is one that God has used in my life and many other people's lives to teach incredible practical lessons.

I mean, there are takeaways in this story that every single one of us can walk out of here with, apply to our lives, and see results.

So I'm excited to learn.

And I'm excited to grow.

And most of all, I'm excited to move forward in life because that's really, in a lot of ways, what the story of Gideon is about.

It's about moving forward.

That's a very, very short story.

It's found in the book of Judges.

Chapter six is where it starts.

If you have a Bible, you can turn to Judges 6, electronic paper.

We'll put it on the screens for you for your viewing pleasure, if not.

But let's just go ahead and jump into Judges chapter 6, story of Gideon.

Judges 6 · chapter mention

Here we go.

Judges 6, 1, the Israelites did evil in the Lord's sight.

So the Lord handed them over to the Midianites for seven years.

The Midianites were so cruel that the Israelites made hiding places for themselves in the mountains, caves, and strongholds.

Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, marauders from Midian, Amalek, and the people of the East would attack Israel, camping in the land and destroying crops as far away as Gaza.

They left the Israelites with nothing to eat, taking all of the sheep, goats, cattle, and donkeys.

These enemy hordes, coming with their livestock and tents, were as thick as locusts.

They arrived on droves of camels too numerous to count, and they stayed there until the land was stripped bare.

So Israel was reduced to starvation by the Midianites, and then the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help.

When they cried out to the Lord because of Midian, the Lord sent a prophet to the Israelites, and he said, This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says.

I brought you up out of slavery in Egypt.

I rescued you from the Egyptians, from all who oppressed you.

I drove out your enemies, and I gave you their land.

I told you, I am the Lord your God.

You must not worship the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you now live, but you have not listened to me.

Okay, so to sum things up, to give some context, this takes place about 1100 years before Jesus.

So we're talking over 3,000 years ago.

And at this point in time, Israel is God's chosen people.

He has decided that he will reveal himself to the world through the nation of Israel.

He's going to reveal his power, he's going to reveal his wisdom, he's going to reveal his might, he's going to reveal his nature.

Eventually, he's going to reveal his love through Jesus, who comes from the nation of Israel.

God chose Israel to be his vehicle of revelation to the world.

And at this point in time, Israel has entered what they called the promised land.

They were slaves in Egypt for over 400 years.

And then God delivered them from slavery and he took them to their promised land.

And there were all these people living in the promised land, these mighty nations, but God conquered those nations.

He was with Israel, he favored Israel, and he gives them this amazing land, and now they're not slaves.

Now they have everything they've ever wanted, and now they don't think they need God anymore.

And that's kind of human nature.

In fact, they've gone so far that they've abandoned God and they have decided instead to worship false gods.

The false gods of the nations that they conquered, the false gods that apparently couldn't help those nations stand up to the real God.

They're just really off in their thinking.

And they believe because of that that God has abandoned them, but he has not.

God loves them.

He loves them enough to even discipline them.

He loves them so much that at this very moment, as he sends this prophet to say, hey, look, you guys have abandoned me.

You haven't done what I've asked you to do, he's already working out a plan to save them.

He's already working out a plan to help them.

It's important for us to remember that so often when we're at our low point, God already has a plan in motion to help us and to rescue us.

And it just so happens that God's plan is named Gideon.

As we go to verse 11 and continue, then the angel of the Lord came and sat beneath the great tree at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash of the clan of Abezer.

Now Gideon, son of Joash, was threshing wheat at the bottom of a wine press to hide the grain from the Midianites.

The angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, Mighty hero, the Lord is with you.

Sir, Gideon replied, If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?

And where are all the miracles our ancestors told us about?

Didn't they say the Lord brought us up out of Egypt?

But now the Lord has abandoned us and handed us over to the Midianites.

And then the Lord turned to him and said, Go with the strength you have and rescue Israel from the Midianites.

I am sending you.

Okay, so there's a lot going on there.

Let's try to unpack it the best we can.

It tells us that Gideon is threshing wheat in a winepress.

And you don't have to be someone that lived 3,000 years ago to understand that you're probably not supposed to thresh wheat in a wine press.

You're supposed to press wine in a winepress.

This is what a wine press would have looked like around the time of Gideon.

There was this large indentation in the ground where they would put grapes, they would crush the grapes, and then that juice would run down a little canal along with the slope of the land and collect in this deep, square-shaped hole.

That's where Gideon is.

And the Bible tells us that he's threshing wheat in that hole.

Now, threshing floors were where you would thresh wheat.

What a threshing floor was was a big wide open space where you would take wheat, you would throw it in the air, wind would come, you would wait till it was windy, you could sometimes produce that artificially, and the wind would blow the chaff away from the grain, and the grain would fall down, and that's how you got the grain to eat.

It's really hard to get wind in a deep hole in the ground.

Right?

So what's going on here?

Well, the answer is really simple.

Gideon is terrified of the Midianites.

There's no way to thresh wheat discreetly on a threshing floor.

So he's hiding in a hole.

He's got some grain, and he's he's basically trying to thresh it himself.

So what he's probably doing is holding some wheat in his hands, and he's blowing that wheat, trying to get a little bit of chaff to go away, just so he has some grain to eat, because he is he's mortified at the thought of the Midianites seeing him.

It's that time of the year when the Midianites are going to come and raid the land.

And he's hiding, he's scared.

And that is when the angel of the Lord shows up.

Now, some scholars will say the angel of the Lord means Jesus.

Before Jesus came as a person, we have to remember that Jesus became a man, but he is God, he's always existed.

If it's not Jesus, it's at the very least some high-ranking angel that is there to deliver a message from God.

So when we see an angel in Scripture come and talk to someone, it might as well be God talking directly to that person.

This is what God wants to say.

And this has to be a very awkward experience because you can just imagine scared little Gideon in the hole, threshing the wheat, very nervous that someone's gonna come upon him.

I'm sure the sun was shining down, and then all of a sudden there's just shade.

And he feels really nervous.

He knows someone must be standing above me.

He looks up, and there's the angel of the Lord.

And the angel of the Lord has to be looking at Gideon and thinking to himself, what is this guy doing?

I mean, you half expect him to kind of bend over and go, hey buddy, what are uh what are you up to?

It kind of looks like you're threshing wheat in a wine press.

But this is not what that is for.

But that's not what happens.

The angel of the Lord instead looks into this hole at this man cowering, hiding, and he says, mighty hero.

He addresses Gideon as mighty hero.

And Gideon must have thought to himself, oh no, there's someone else in this hole.

Like, this is not this is not good.

And then the angel of the Lord goes on, and he says, The Lord is with you.

Now, you can tell that Gideon is not particularly high on God at the moment, because as soon as the angel of the Lord says, The Lord is with you, that triggers this very sharp, very antagonistic response from Gideon.

And he all of a sudden talks back to the angel of the Lord.

So he's found some deep courage he did not know that he had.

And he says, Oh, the Lord is with us, huh?

Well, if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?

And oh, by the way, what happened to the miracles that my ancestors have have talked about for years?

Essentially, he says, Oh, if God is real, why do bad things happen?

And if God is real, why why doesn't he just make it obvious with miracles left and right?

It's amazing how modern those questions are.

Right?

Gideon's questions do not seem like they belong 3,000 years ago in ancient Israel during biblical times.

They seem like they belong in our world today, which is an amazing reminder to all of us that our holdups to God have not changed all that much in the last 3,000 years.

I love the questions that he asks.

I'm kind of on pins and needles, I'm on the edge of my seat because I would love to know the answer to these questions, wouldn't you?

I mean, come on, who would not love to hear God Himself answer these questions about why bad things happen and why he doesn't just do crazy miracles left and right so that everyone has no choice but to believe in him.

And Gideon has this opportunity that we would all love.

He's talking to the angel of the Lord, and he gets to ask these questions, and we get to see the angel of the Lord's response.

So Gideon says, Hey, if God is with us, why has this happened to us?

What about the miracles?

And the angel of the Lord goes, Yeah, so I'm sending you.

Go in the strength you have.

And that's kind of disappointing.

Right?

I'm disappointed.

Because the angel of the Lord basically acts like the questions were even asked.

And now here we are, 3,000 years later, and we still don't know the exact answer to those questions, and it could have all been cleared up, the opportunity has been missed.

And it makes you wonder why.

Why does the angel of the Lord not answer Gideon's deep questions?

It's clear that he believes Gideon is meant for something important and Gideon has these holdups.

Why does he not dive in to these deep questions that Gideon has?

Is this confirmation that we're not supposed to question God?

Because that's something that religion teaches us, right?

Religion teaches us don't question God.

Do not question him, you're gonna step over a line, he's gonna get upset, you don't know what's gonna happen to you.

But that is not consistent with scripture at all.

God has never been afraid of questions.

In fact, many of the people who had the deepest and closest walks with God, relationships with God, asked God a lot of questions.

Abraham questioned God's mercy when God decided to destroy a city called Sodom and Gomorrah.

Jonah questioned God's justice when God decided not to destroy a city called Nineveh.

David questioned God all the time about everything.

If you read the Psalms, it's just this whiny guy asking why this, why that, why this, why that.

He questioned God left and right.

Job questioned God when his life was falling apart.

God, don't you care about me?

Even Jesus questioned God, and God did not strike any of them down.

In fact, God blessed all of them immensely.

And so we know that God is not afraid of our questions.

And in fact, we need to be people who ask God questions because if we don't ask questions, we'll never have a mature relationship with God.

This is not confirmation that questions are not okay.

And so, what's going on?

Why are the questions skipped over?

I think it's really simple.

I think the reason that the angel of the Lord skips these questions is because these questions that Gideon has about the past and about all this stuff are completely irrelevant to what God wants to do in his life right now.

They're totally irrelevant to what God is up to in the moment.

The angel of the Lord shows up and he says, Gideon, mighty hero, God wants to use you to deliver your people.

God wants to raise you up and make you the leader of your nation, and he wants to take you and he wants to have you lead an army against the Midianites and deliver your people from all their oppression.

God is doing something, Gideon.

He's doing something big and he's doing it right now.

And Gideon's like, Yeah, but what about the past?

What about all the stuff that's happened for all these years?

And what about all those miracles I heard about centuries ago?

I mean, what's going on?

In other words, Gideon is really close to missing what God is doing right now because he doesn't understand the past.

It's very, very easy to miss what God is up to now because of what we don't understand from before.

God's perspective is looking forward, looking at what he wants to do, what he wants to change, and Gideon is looking behind him.

And the angel of the Lord is trying to get Gideon off that train of thought.

There's an ongoing debate in my marriage about the quality of my driving.

Umgoing debate for years?

Okay.

Some people are really scared to raise their hands.

I get it.

Megan does not think I'm a good driver.

And I know that.

I know it for several reasons.

Just yesterday, she said, you're not a good driver.

As I was driving home from Savannah, we we took a little trip to Savannah this weekend.

Um but even if she didn't say that, I would know.

I would know.

It's so clear.

Because anytime Megan gets in the car with me and I'm driving, she acts like her life is in grave danger approximately every eight seconds.

Right?

She has this one thing, and maybe some of you have experienced this.

If Megan sees brake lights on the car in front of me, she assumes that I do not see them.

Or that if I do see them, I don't know what they mean.

I don't know what that signifies.

And in her mind, I'm just gonna keep going full speed into the car in front of me.

So anytime a brake light comes on in front of us, this is what Megan does.

She goes like that.

As if it's the last breath she's ever going to have.

Sometimes this is accompanied by her bracing herself on the dashboard or just squeezing my leg really hard, which would which would not be helpful if I'm trying to make some type of quick adjustment.

Every time, brake lights, every time.

Now keep in mind, we've been driving together for 15 years.

I've never re-rented anyone.

Fifteen years, whether she's in the car or not.

I have responded appropriately to every single set of brake lights I have seen for 15 years.

And yet the fear remains.

And now that I'm feeling empowered by the men clapping in the room, she never wants to drive.

Never.

She thinks I'm gonna kill her, but every single time we get in the car, if I say, Hey, do you want to drive?

She's like, No, you drive, and then it's two hours of left and right.

Okay.

I'm gonna stop before I harm my marriage.

I'm gonna stop talking.

Alright, one more thing though.

The worst, the worst is if we're like, it's crazy.

We might be in a parking lot going two miles per hour, and she will get just as scared if she sees brake lights on a car in front of us about to pull into a parking spot as if we're like on 75 going 80 miles an hour.

Even though the speed limit is not 80.

If there's a police officer in the room, I'm sorry.

But like we we could be in a parking lot.

Go, I'm serious, going two miles per hour, and if a brake light comes on, she goes, and I'm sitting there going, what do you think is going to happen?

We're going two miles per hour.

I could hit a rabbit at this speed, and it would be fine.

It would be totally okay, and yet the same reaction comes.

The hard thing about this debate that we have is that even though I do think the brake light thing is ridiculous and totally, totally unnecessary, and I think.

I think I've proven that over the years.

There will still be these moments where I will be driving and I will do something that confirms her suspicions and strengthens her case.

And it happens mostly if I'm driving backwards.

Because I'll give her this.

I'm not very good at driving backwards.

I'm not.

Her parents have this really long, narrow driveway.

And they've lived in the same house their whole lives, so I have been to her house.

We've been together 15 years.

I've been to this house thousands of times.

And the driveway is such that, you know, you go into their home, but getting out, you have to back up.

And even though I've been on this driveway thousands of times, I'd say about 75% of the time I end up not in the driveway or on the driveway as I leave their house.

They used to have all these bushes that line their driveway.

And I ran over enough of them that either I killed them all or they just took them all out because they were tired of bunch being dead, which is super inconvenient for me because the bushes were how I would know I was getting off the driveway.

That was my signal.

I'd feel the car raise up and I'd go, oh.

Now there's no bushes, and I'm just clueless.

I'm just I'll be like halfway in their yard and go, wow, how did I get here?

It's bad.

It's not good.

I'm not very good at going backwards.

But that's okay.

I can rationalize it in my mind.

We rationalize lots of things.

And my rationale is simply this: driving backwards is way less important than driving forward.

So if I have to choose to be good at one or the other, I would rather be good at driving forward than backward.

It would be a lot scarier if I was saying, hey, I'm not so good at going forward, but I'm awesome at going backwards.

So we're just gonna take 575 going this way or something like that.

That would be a lot scarier.

That's how I live with myself when it comes to driving.

Not good at going backwards.

The reality is no one is that good at going backwards.

Especially not compared with going forward.

We're just not built to do that.

And yet we have this tendency in life where we we desire to go forward in life, but we spend a lot of time looking backwards.

And we struggle.

It's very, very easy for us to live life looking this way when we wonder why we're not going that way.

That's what's happening to Gideon in this moment.

The angel of the Lord shows up and is saying, God's going this way.

God wants to move you forward in life.

God wants to move your nation forward in life.

God has things that he wants to do right now, Gideon, powerful things, big things.

And Gideon immediately focuses on what's behind him, on the past.

So much so that he's in danger of missing what God wants to do now because of what he doesn't get from before.

And all of us, all of us can relate to Gideon here because all of us have that tendency to get stuck in the past.

And if we live there long enough, if we live long enough with our eyes looking behind us, we begin to believe that our lives are defined by the past.

That our present, even our future, is defined by what has already happened.

And look, there is great value in certain situations at looking at the past.

You want to know history so you don't repeat history.

And there are times where we can't move forward because we haven't processed the past.

But there is another side to that coin, and it's simply this: there are a lot of times where we can't move forward in life because we won't stop trying to process the past.

And at some point in time, we have to dedicate ourselves to moving forward in life, regardless of what's behind us.

Some of the greatest people of faith that have ever lived were in many ways the way they were because they lived looking forward.

The Apostle Paul is one of those that gets talked about a lot.

The Apostle Paul is one of the giants of our faith.

He's this person that God used to do great things.

If there was Christian currency, he'd be on one of the bills, not the coins.

He'd be on a bill.

God used Paul to write most of the New Testament, and so he's one of a very small number of people in the Bible that we have so much written by him, we get to really understand his personality.

You can really get into the mind of Paul.

David would be one of the only other people you can do that with because of the breadth of writing that we have from him.

One of the amazing things about Paul was that his perspective was always forward.

He might be in a terrible situation, in a terrible place, but he never sat and just lamented and said, Why am I here?

What has happened to me?

What happened yesterday or five years ago in my past?

And why is it the way that it is?

And God, why am I here now?

And what's going on?

And why have you this and all that?

He was just never like that.

In fact, in Philippians, Paul's in prison writing this letter to the church at Philippi.

And he's in prison because he's been sharing Jesus with people.

That was his crime.

It's not the first time he's been in prison.

He's been beaten half to death.

He's in terrible shape, in prison.

And this is what he writes in Philippians 3, verse 13.

Philippians 3:13

He says, I focus on this one thing: forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead.

I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.

In other words, Paul's saying, I recognize that God is calling me forward, and I'm not gonna miss what God is doing because I don't understand what God has done.

So when Paul was in prison, Paul just asked, God, what are you doing?

What needs done right now?

Does my cellmate know Jesus?

No, I'm gonna tell him about Jesus.

Does my guard know Jesus?

I'm gonna talk to my guard about Jesus.

When he gets off his shift, I'm gonna talk to the next guy about Jesus.

Does the warden know Jesus?

I gotta figure this out.

Paul just understood that wherever he was, God must want him to do something.

And he decided to make the conscious effort to be part of what God was doing now.

And for Paul, that meant forgetting the past.

That meant letting go of what happened before, of letting go of the things he doesn't understand from before.

It's a very difficult thing to do, but it's a very important thing to do as well.

I have to ask myself, which direction am I looking in life?

Where's my focus?

Is it forward or is it behind me?

Because like all of us in the room, I have things from my past I don't understand.

There are things that happened to me that I don't get why they happened to me.

There are things that didn't happen to me that I think should have happened to me.

There are moments of failure in my past.

Because like all of you, I have things in my past that I am I'm not proud of at all.

And if I make the mistake of thinking on those things day in and day out and replaying those in my mind and fixating on those things, I begin to believe that I'm no better than those moments.

And that's just not true.

When I was 19 years old, I had this amazing privilege to hear a woman speak in Kansas City, Missouri.

Her name was Helen Prajon.

Her name is Helen Prajon, she's still alive.

She's a Catholic nun, so she went by sister Helen Prajon, and her story was incredible.

In fact, her life story inspired a book called Dead Man Walking, and inspired a movie called Dead Man Walking.

And it was it was done in the mid-90s, it won some awards.

You may have seen it, you may have heard about it.

Susan Sarandon played her in that movie.

There you go.

One person recommends that movie.

And I think we should, you know, we should take them up on that.

So here I am, I'm listening to this woman speak.

Now, here's her story.

She's a Catholic nun who felt called by God that her ministry was to minister to men on death row.

And so she goes and has for decades, she goes and she spends time with men who have committed unspeakable crimes, and she's with them, and she prays with them, and she talks with them, and she listens to them, and she is there alongside them until their very last moment.

She is there when they're executed.

And we're talking as difficult of a position as you could put yourself in.

Because there's prison ministry, and then there's like death row prison ministry.

And you wouldn't look at this woman and think that's probably where she spends her time.

And she talked about the things God had showed her and the things she had learned through that process.

And one of the things she mentioned as she talked was that people ask her all the time, why do you do this?

Because you could do anything for God.

You could do things for God, you could go overseas and do missions work.

You could work with the homeless, you could work with children, you could work with all these needy groups.

Why would you spend your time with, let's be honest, in the world's eyes, the lowest of the low?

Why would you give them all your time?

And I'll never forget what she said.

It was so it was so passionate, it was so resolute, it was quiet, but strong.

She said, every time someone asks me that question, I answer it this way.

I do not believe that a person is defined by their worst moment.

I don't believe any human being is defined by their worst moment.

See, when we live looking in the past, we begin to believe that that is what defines us.

Gideon believed that what God could do was defined by what he had observed God doing, which in his mind wasn't much at all.

So he doesn't have a lot of faith.

I've made that same mistake.

We all do.

But we have to ask ourselves, do we believe that God is doing something right now?

Do we believe that God wants to do something in our lives today, right now?

Do we believe that God has something for us, something better for us than we've experienced before?

Do we believe that God, like Paul, is calling us onward, that God is calling us forward in life?

And if we believe that, are we willing to set our eyes forward?

To live expectant lives, believing that God is moving, believing that God is doing something, believing that God has something for us we haven't experienced yet, that God has a new journey, that God has a new adventure, that God has a new depth of relationship with Him that we haven't had yet.

Do we believe that God wants to do something today?

I believe that God wants to do something today in your life.

I believe that right now in this season of life, God has something for you.

And you may feel like you deserve it, you may feel like you don't.

You may sit here and go, I haven't experienced God at all.

I've never heard him speak to me, I've never I've never felt what you talk about before.

I haven't had that, so I don't know if that's gonna happen for me.

God wants to do something in your life today, he loves you.

You might be here and you might feel disqualified by your past.

You might think, hey, look, whatever whatever chance God had in doing something significant in my life, that that chance is gone.

Because you don't know where I've been, you don't know what I've done.

You might feel like you're stuck in a hole in the ground.

Paralyzed by fear or by shame or by guilt.

But the angel of the Lord showed up to a man who was paralyzed by fear in a hole in the ground.

And the angel of the Lord called him a mighty hero.

So you need to understand this morning that you're a lot mightier than you might believe.

That your past is not what defines you.

God can use you today.

God wants to use you today, God wants to speak to you today.

He wants to heal what needs healed, he wants to fix what's broken.

I'll be honest, he just wants to love you today.

Are we willing to be people who live life looking forward?

That brings a question, and we'll go here as we wrap up.

You might be sitting here going, yes, stop talking.

Forward.

I get it.

I do want to experience what God is doing today.

I do want to experience what God has for me.

I just don't know how to how to hear that.

I don't know how to have that.

I would just love it if God would send the angel of the Lord to me.

What do I have to do to have that?

Do I have to dig a hole in the ground and get in it and wait?

Because I'll do that if that's what I have to do.

And you know what?

It worked for Gideon.

And so I'm not going to tell you not to do that.

The weather's been unusually nice for November.

Go ahead if you have a big tree in your backyard, dig a hole, wait there, see what happens.

Get back to me.

I think so much of the time we do desire God to do something, but we just don't feel like we know how to discern what it is.

And we might even believe that, okay, I if an angel of the Lord showed up to me, then I'd know, but that's what happened with Gideon, and he's still questioned a lot.

But I want to leave you with a few things.

Number one, I believe Jesus.

I just believe Jesus.

And Jesus has a lot of things that are hard to believe.

Jesus says a lot of things that are inconvenient to believe because he makes big promises.

Jesus doesn't hedge much.

When you read Jesus and he talks about God and the things God wants to do, there's not a lot of if it if it's your will and you know, and if you're in the mood for it, God, and as long as you know it all works out and your timing and all this kind of stuff, he doesn't, he doesn't like set up his request of God with all these little conditions just to just to shield him from the disappointment of it not happening.

And so in Matthew chapter 7, Jesus says this keep asking, and you'll receive what you ask for.

Matthew 7 · chapter mention

Keep seeking and you will find, keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.

You see, I just believe Jesus.

And I believe that the people that end up discovering what God is doing now and what God wants to do now in their lives, in their communities, and their world are the people who just keep bugging God until he tells them.

I believe that if you will be a person who commits yourself to seeking what God is doing, and you constantly ask God, God, show me what you're doing so I can be part of it.

God, show me what you're up to so I can get involved.

There's a big difference between that, by the way, and saying, God, let me show you what I'm involved with, I want you to be part of it.

Nothing wrong with that, but there's a whole other thing to say, God, you show me what you're doing, because I want to be part of that.

That if we would be people who would commit ourselves to say, God, show me what you're up to, I want in.

And we would keep asking and we would keep seeking, we would discover.

Because, guys, God wants you to be part of what he's doing.

And so if you sit here and go, man, I want that, I just don't know how to hear it, I don't know how to discern it, just ask and ask and ask and ask and ask.

That's what Jesus said.

I just believe him.

But in the meantime, while you're asking and waiting for God to give you clarity on what he wants to do in your life now, know a few things.

Number one, he wants to encourage you.

Angel of the Lord goes up to Gideon and calls him a mighty hero.

Which would have only made sense at the time if he was being sarcastic.

But he wasn't.

Because he saw in Gideon what Gideon did not see in himself.

And as you wait to hear God tell you what he's doing now in your life, know that right now, today, regardless of the way you see yourself, regardless of your past, God wants you to know who you are.

You are mighty in his eyes.

You are capable, you are strong.

You have what you need to be successful in life.

God wants to encourage you today.

He wants to do that now.

Number two, he wants to empower you.

He wants to give you a strength that is not of you.

He wants to give you himself, he wants to give you his spirit.

The Bible says that God has given us everything we need for life and godliness.

In other words, when we have the Holy Spirit in our lives, when we have God's presence in our lives, we are empowered to do whatever God asks us to do.

You might be here today seeking God's will for your life, you might be desiring to know what God wants to do right now.

You might feel kind of stuck and like you're waiting, like you don't know.

But in the meantime, while you wait on that, please know that God wants to empower you with his presence so that when he says, do this, you can do it.

He wants to encourage you, he wants to empower you, and he wants to send you out.

He told Gideon, go.

I'm sending you.

And for Gideon, that meant climbing out of his hole.

And maybe today, maybe your step in being part of what God is doing now is just climbing out of a hole.

Because it's easy to find ourselves in holes.

It might be depression, it might be fear, it might be anger, it might be bitterness.

But it's really hard to go where God is sending us if we're in a hole.

And you don't have to be there.

God did not put you there.

God does not want you there.

God loves you.

And he will encourage you, he will empower you, and he will call you, he will give you purpose for your life.

But we have to believe that he's moving.

We have to believe that he's doing something, we have to believe that he's active and that we have this unique opportunity as people to be part of it.

But only, only if we look ahead.

If we look forward with faith that God's doing something.

Do you want to be part of what God's doing?

Alright.

Good.

Me too.

Do you believe that God wants you to be part of what he's doing?

Okay?

Some people said yes to that one that didn't say yes to the first one.

That heard you need.

Do you believe that he loves you?

He does.

So let's pray.

Let's worship.

And let's leave here today committed to moving forward with God.

Jesus, we love you so much.

You are so good to us.

Lord, I pray that you would calm my wife's nerves when I drive.

And that you would remind her, I'm not that bad of a driver.

God, way more important than that.

I pray that we would all be filled with hope and high expectations for what you're doing right now, for what you want to do in our lives.

We live in a world that needs you desperately.

And we have you.

And so, Lord, we believe that you want us to be people who, just like Gideon, go out in the strength that we have to deliver you to this world.

And for some of us this week, that might look like showing love to our next door neighbor.

That might look like sitting down with someone we work with and listening to them and praying for them.

But whatever it is, God, we want you to know that we're in.

We want in on what you're doing.

We want to be part of what you're doing.

We want to be part of what you're doing now.

There are so many things that we don't understand from our own past.

There are so many things that we don't understand from before.

And Lord, if we need to come to terms with that stuff in order to move forward, then so be it.

Help us with that.

Help us seek counseling and help and support, whatever we need to get there, Lord.

But if we're stuck looking behind us to the point that we can't move forward effectively, God, change our perspective.

Fix our eyes on what's ahead.

We love you, Lord.

We ask all this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.