How Faith Finds Courage

Well, listen, I want to start with an inspiring, incredible, but true story about this young man, Jake Olson. When Jake was just a very, very small boy, just four years old, he had to have one eye amputated because of cancer. And then when Jake was only 12, the cancer came back. And the doctors told him his other eye would have to go too. At 12 years old, Jake knew that he would be blind for the rest of his life. And so his parents asked him, "Jake, the night before the operation to remove your eye, what is the last thing that you want to see? What's the last thing that you want to experience?" And here's what Jake said, "I want to go to a USC football game." Because Jake was a huge University of Southern California fan. Any Trojan fans here today by any chance, a couple of you, right? So Jake was a fan.

Well, when the USC coaches heard about it, they let him walk onto the field with the team for the start of the game and then watch the game from VIP seats. And at the end of that day, Jake looked at his mom and dad and said, "I am so glad that for the rest of my life, the last things I saw will be mom and dad and Trojan football." Now that's a true fan. Well, after that, as Jake grew older, he began to become obsessed with football. And not just following football, he became obsessed with playing football. He practiced long snapping. That's the skill when you hike a ball out to the kicker, you know, who kicks the extra point or the field goal. And he got so good that get this, he ended up playing two seasons for his high school varsity football team. And that's when the coach at USC heard about it and remembered the day that he visited.

And he told his coaching staff, "I am about to do something that has never been done before. I'm pretty confident in the history of college football. I'm about to recruit a blind football player." And Jake gets a football scholarship to the University of Southern California. And with some apprehension, he joins the team, but it gets better. Because on September 2nd, 2017, USC is playing its season opener and in the fourth quarter, the person who takes the field to snap for the extra point on national television is Jake. The suspense mounts. His delivery is perfect. His team scores. He is mobbed by teammates. The crowd chants his name and he becomes a household word. I've spoken already this morning to a couple of people who were there in the stands during that game. And they said he just became a lifelong legend of USC Trojan football.

Today, Jake is a successful entrepreneur. But I was remembering that story this week because college football is in full swing again. And I thought, "What a great parable of how God works in our lives." Follow me here. "Of how God recruits the most unlikely people to do great things and turns them into champions." People like you. Let's talk about it. Grab your message notes. We are in a series, Faith Forward, based on Hebrews 11 in the Bible. And we've been discovering this series, how Hebrews 11 is filled with story after story after story after story from the Hebrew scriptures of how the least likely people became heroes of faith, became champions. And let me tell you something. If you walked in the door today needing a faith boost, if you ever feel like, "I sense that God is calling me to do something, but I'm full of insecurities," you're going to love today's story.

We've seen how in Hebrews 11 the author has been going into detail about the story of Moses and the story of Abraham and some of the other people, but now he gets to a list of names. And one of the first names that he gets to is Gideon. He says, "I don't even have time to tell you about Gideon." And he didn't have to because the original readers of the Book of Hebrews, they were Jewish Christians who, like they knew exactly, you just had to say the name and they're like, "Oh, yeah. Wow. What a great story. You're right. That is so inspiring." He didn't have time. Maybe a scroll was running out or something, but we got about a half an hour this morning. So I want to look at Gideon's story in a part of the Bible called the Book of Judges. It's in chapter 6, and this is sort of expanding on the small group lesson for this week.

So first, a modern audience might need a little refresher. Who is Gideon? Well, of course, he is the guy who leaves all those Bibles in motel rooms. No, he is a...he's a great character in the Bible. Let me start you by giving you some context. The Book of Judges in the Bible is fascinating. It takes place right around 1200 B.C. in Israel. A series of judges, they're kind of like knights, leads the people. And the first four judges in the Book of Judges are amazing people. They are brave and they are wise and they're intrepid, kind of like Deborah. And I love that, by the way, at a time in history when women were basically treated like possessions. And even today, many people don't believe women can be leaders, incredibly, even today. In the Bible in 1200 B.C., one of the greatest leaders the nation of Israel ever had was Deborah. But she and the three men who were among the first four judges in their history, they were all impressive people. They were spies and they were warriors and they were prophets. And then comes Gideon.

And going from those first four men and women to Gideon is kind of like going from James Bond to Barney Fife. Let me just tell you the story. Here's a scene in Israel in those days. People called the Midianites were coming in and just ravaging the countryside. If you want to know the personality of the Midianites, the way they're portrayed in Scripture, they're kind of like school lunch bullies times a thousand. Watch the way the context is described. We pick up the story in Judges 6 starting in verse 2. It says, because the power of Midian was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves and strongholds. Can you imagine the humiliation of having to leave your crops and your fields and your jobs and your homes and hide in caves? Because whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites, Amalekites and other Eastern peoples invaded the country and they camped on the land and ruined the crops all the way to Gaza and did not spare a living thing for Israel. Neither sheep, nor cattle, nor donkeys.

They came up with their livestock and their tents like swarms of locusts. Watch this. It was impossible to count them or their camels. They were innumerable. They invaded the land. Why? To conquer it? No, just to ravage it. The Midianites so impoverished the Israelites, the Bible says, that they cried out to the Lord for help. And what they're thinking is, and from context, incidentally, this whole situation goes on for seven years. Seven years without a leader who is doing a thing about this. And so they're crying out to the Lord and what they're thinking, of course, is God send another leader like Deborah. And instead they get Deputy Fife.

Verse 11. Here's where we meet Gideon. It says, "The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Oprah that belonged to Joash the Abbeas." Now stop there for just a second. You know, you read these names in the Bible like, you know, the Bible talks about Israelites and Hittites and Midianites and electrolytes and appetites or whatever else. And you kind of go, you know, it's about three thousand years ago. I don't know what all these people were, but obviously they kind of let everybody knew who these people were back then. But the point of the story as it goes on is nobody knew who these people were. They were such a tiny clan. They were nobodies. "Joash the Abbeas," right? Where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a wine press. What? To keep it from the Midianites.

Now let me explain what this is all about. Most of us have never threshed wheat before. So here's a video of people threshing wheat the old fashioned way. You put the harvested grain in a basket and you toss it up in the air. Why? This separates the heavier wheat grain, which falls into the basket from the chaff, the dust, and the twigs and so on that got harvested. It separates it. And as you do this, the chaff blows away. Usually you do this outside where it's breezy. And then you got the grain that you can do something with. You can bake bread and cakes and so on with it. Now the problem is the Midianites would watch and if they saw little clouds of chaff rhythmically coming up, what would they know? Somebody's got grain. And what would they do based on what we read? They would ride out and steal it.

And so Gideon is hiding down at a wine press underground like this actual ancient wine press from around that time found in Israel. You can, this is taller than a man. So it's this big ground vat. It's a wine vat where they normally would have kept gallons and gallons and gallons of wine. And often it would be covered. And so Gideon is down underground to hide his grain threshing from the Midianites. So this is a miserable place he's in. Can you imagine? He's choking on these clouds of dust trying to do something that's basically impossible just to hide from the Midianites. He's so afraid of them. And once in a while his head kind of pokes up like a gopher. You know, any Midianites? No. Any Midianites? No. Any Midianites? God, he freaks out because he sees this. Suddenly there's a guy where there wasn't a guy a second ago just standing there looking at him under the oak.

Right. And here's what happens. Verse 12. When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, by the way, so this person appears as a man. And you'll notice in the text that it switches back and forth between describing this person as the angel of the Lord. And then it goes back and forth. And then it goes back and forth. And this jumped out at me this week in a way that it never has before in verse 14. The Lord turned to him and said, "Uh-huh, go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you?" This is God's answer to Gideon going, "How come there's all this suffering?" Do you see God as saying, "Yeah, I get it. I don't like it either. Guess what part of my solution is? I'm sending you." That's what He says to us too.

In fact, here's a concept that I want to make sure you get from this story and the Bible in general. Our faith, the Judeo-Christian faith, is not like a lot of fables and mythologies that are primarily explanatory. Here's why the zebra got its stripes, that sort of thing. Our faith is not primarily explanatory. For example, God's not going to appear to you every single time you go through something tough and tap you on the shoulder and explain the reason why you're going through it. A lot of people wait a lifetime for that conversation. But that almost never happens, even in the pages of the Bible when you think about it. God usually doesn't go, "Yeah, let me just step in here and explain to you why all this bad stuff is happening. Let me explain to you what I'm doing behind the scenes, Joseph or Job or Peter." No. Our faith is not primarily explanatory. Our faith is missional. God gives Gideon a mission. He says, "You're part of the solution to the very problems you just pointed out." And He gives you and me a mission too.

This does not mean there aren't biblical answers that you can tease out to questions like why is there so much suffering? In fact, there's a great book called Reasons for God by Tim Keller that we have today out in our lobby book cart that answers a lot of those common questions. What I mean by this is Jesus clearly sees the suffering in the world too. And He makes it clear in the Bible that He doesn't like it. But He also makes it clear that part of His answer is, "Am I not sending you?" In fact, here's something to put in the back of your mind. Notice that the words that the Lord speaks to Gideon, all of them are reiterated by Jesus to His disciples later on in the New Testament. But this is part… the fact that God is sending us is part of the reason that we have acts of kindness as part of this Faith Forward series. This isn't just about getting head knowledge about faith. This is about stepping out in faith and doing what God calls us to do to feed the poor and to help the sick and to care for the lost and so on. He says, "Am I not sending you?" That's part of our study of faith. That's why we're doing the food drive as part of it, to put our faith into action. Faith without works is dead.

I'll tell you a story. I was sitting in our living room several years ago now on a chilly October night, just like this one. And I was reading something and our youngest son David, who was then only eight years old, is playing with Legos, which he was kind of obsessed with. And all of a sudden he looks up and he goes, "Dad, you know what? I was so glad to see Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. elected to the Cooperstown Hall of Baseball Fame on the first ballot. Although Mike McGuire and Sammy Sosa have hit many home runs, they were not elected and I doubt they'll ever be elected to Cooperstown because of the steroid scandal taint." And then he goes back in place with his Legos again and I go, "What?" I said, "David, how do you know all that stuff?" He goes, "Well, he goes sometimes early on Saturday mornings when you guys are still sleeping and I get up early and you probably think I'm watching cartoons, but usually before cartoons, I turn on the news for a few minutes to get updates." Just like that.

And then he says, "But sometimes I have to turn it off because it's so sad." And then he says, "Especially what makes me sad is all the starving children." Of course, he's eight years old. And he looks up at me with two Legos in hand and he goes, "Daddy, what can we do about that?" So what am I going to say to my eight-year-old son in that moment? Because I knew I had like, you know, he's eight. He's got like 60 seconds max of his attention, right? So what am I going to say? You know what I did not want to say? I didn't want to say, "Don't worry about it." I didn't want to say, "Ask me when you're older." I didn't want to say, "Yeah, you know, just turn on some cartoons or something." I wanted to say something, right? So here's what I said, for better or for worse. I said, "David, that's such a good question and God does call us to do something about it."

And here's what your mommy and I are doing about the starving children. There's a place in town that we love called the Food Bank. And remember it was October and you know what happens around here every October and November. And so I said, "We're challenging the whole church. If everybody can give on average $100 to the Food Bank, then guess what? If we all give that on average, some can give more, some can give less." You know what that adds up to? One million meals. That's a lot of people that could be fed. David goes, "Okay." And he goes back and starts playing with Legos again and I thought, "I messed it up." Classic pastor mistake, right? I preached a sermon. I couldn't make it short enough. Some of you are going, "Yep." Well I walk out of the house the next Saturday. Remember he's only eight years old and he has a stand set up. It was his puppet stage and he's selling brownies that he made and he's got a sign that he hand wrote taped to it that says, "Help support the Food Bank." And guess what? He raised his hundred bucks.

And if you'd like to purchase of it, you can go to TLC.org/food. But my point is this. If you've been feeling defeated lately like Gideon and like eight-year-old David about how bad the news has been, God says, "Okay, I get it, but don't just sit around in your hole in the ground. Am I not sending you?" Now maybe you feel like, "Well, what can I do? I'm a nobody. I'm only eight." That was Gideon. He is so demoralized. Look at verse 15. He goes, "Pardon me, my Lord. Still Mr. said through gritted teeth, 'But how can I save Israel? What are you talking about? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I'm the least in my family.'" Do you understand what he's saying? He's saying, "My little group, my little ethnic group that I'm a part of, we're like the losers everybody else in the country looks down on, and I'm the loser that all the losers look down on." So I guess you picked the wrong wine vat because what he's saying is there is literally not an individual in this country that is less likely to be your champion than me.

And look at God's answer in the next verse. The Lord answered, "Say this out loud with me. I will be with you." You plus God equals a majority. And again, Jesus promises that same thing to you and me. I will be with you always. But Gideon was not only feeling defeated and demoralized, he was also still doubting. Next verse in verse 17, Gideon replied, "Okay, if I now have found favor in your eyes," now he's starting to think, "Oh, I think this is like one of those burning bush moments, like this is God calling me. Give me a sign that it's really you talking to me." And guess what happens next? God does. Reader's Digest version, Gideon makes lunch for this visitor and the Lord goes, "Thanks for the lunch," touches it with his staff and it's consumed by fire.

Verse 22, "When Gideon realized that it was the angel of the Lord, he exclaimed, 'Alas, sovereign Lord, I've seen the angel of the Lord face him.'" He's like, "I've been talking sarcastically to God. Like now he's going to kill me." He's gone from doubting to full-on freakout mode in like 60 seconds. "But the Lord said to him, 'Peace, don't be afraid. You're not going to die. Peace, do not be afraid like Jesus says, the resurrected Christ to his disciples.'" Now, parenthetically at this point in the story you might be thinking, "Wait, why doesn't God give me a sign?" Right? You might be going, "God, if you destroy my lunch after church with fire today, I'll do anything you ask." Right? Listen, if fire came down from heaven and consumed your lunch, you know what would happen? Tomorrow, you would doubt what you had seen and you'd want God to do it all over again.

And why do I think that? Because that's exactly what happened with Gideon. He says, "God, if this is really you, send me a sign and God does." And then a day or so later he goes, "Now God, if this is really, really you, give me another sign and God does." And then guess what happens? The next day he goes, "Okay, don't be mad, but give me another sign to show that it's really, really, really you." Now, do you suppose that's in the Bible to show how that's how we're all supposed to act? Of course not. Gideon, comically, could barely keep his faith in God alive for 24 hours at a time. In fact, in verse 27, I left this out of the first two services because of time, but I'm going to sneak it in here. In verse 27 of Judges 6, it says, God says to Gideon, "Okay, here's job one. Go pull down the altar to Baal and build an altar to me in your town." And it says Gideon does, but he does so in the middle of the night. It says, "Because he was afraid," and you're thinking to yourself, "Of course he was afraid of the Midianites." No. It says, "Because he was afraid of his own family." And I love that little line because Gideon continually shows like, he's got just enough stuff for like just the next step forward.

And he's like, "But I'm not sure, but I'll do that." And then like just enough, and God goes, "You know what? I'll take it. Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief. You know what? I'll take it." God still used him and he became a hero who with a tiny army of 300 defeated the innumerable oppressors. That's the point. This isn't a story about Gideon's great faith. It's about small faith and a great God. That's why these stories are in Hebrews 11 because that's the place that the original readers of Hebrews found themselves, these very early Christians who were beaten up asking the same exact questions Gideon was asking. If God is with us, then why is all this bad stuff happening? And the author of the Hebrews is going, "Yeah, remember that story?" And with a small group of people, God took down the oppressors and he's going to do the same thing for you.

Now in case you're thinking, "Well, that's great for Gideon and that's great for these early Christians, but how does this story apply to me?" We've all got steps of faith that God is calling us to take. And often we don't take those because we feel uncertain or unqualified. And what we need to hear is the voice of Gideon's angel to us, two application questions to ask yourself. First, am I hearing what God is saying to me about me? Because the angel of the Lord is speaking to you today too. You say he is? That's right through the word of the Lord. You say, "What's he saying?" Well, look at the verses that I put at the top of page two of your notes where it says, "How does God see me?" I could have put a hundred verses there, but look at verses like Ephesians 1:4. "He chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight." That's you. Or look at 1 John 3:1, "See what great love the Father has lavished on us on you, that you should be called a child of God and that is what you are." What about 1 Peter 2:9? You are a chosen people, a royal priest, a holy nation. God's special possession that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness and into his wonderful light.

If you have placed your trust in God's provision for you through Christ Jesus, this is what God says to you. God says to you, feeling like you're in the pits, "Good morning, you mighty man or woman of God. You're a person of courage and valor and strength that I have chosen and destined for greatness." Amen? Are you hearing what God is saying to you about you? Here's another way to put it. How do you narrate your life? What sort of things do you consistently say to yourself? Things like, "God has a plan for you. God is going to empower you today to face whatever you face. Take that next step of faith." God is working through you or, "This will never work. You're not capable. You're such a failure." What's kind of the narration of your life? Now I get it. Negative self-talk, I'll tell you something that might surprise you. Negative self-talk like this is what is natural for me. It's something I've always struggled with. Some of you would probably be shocked if you heard my internal dialogue some days. I've had to learn to listen to the Word of the Lord, not by jinning up self-confidence, but by knowing it through the Word of God. You see? To step out in faith, to climb out of my pit. I need to hear God's call. I need to hear what God is saying to me about me from the Word of the Lord. I'm not talking about hearing an audible voice of God. I'm talking about what's right there in Scripture. Are you hearing it?

And then second, am I speaking what God is saying to others about them? Are you the voice of Gideon's angel? Or are you the voice of another fallen angel? The Bible calls Satan the accuser. And one of the things that just makes me despair sometimes almost is how Christians are reflecting that attitude, the attitude of the world to everybody, that judgmental, cynical tone of communication that the world is adopting these days to everybody. Instead, the Bible says in verses like Ephesians 4:29, "Don't let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs that it may benefit those who listen." Because there are Gideons all around you hiding in their holes. And they need you to be the voice of Gideon's angel to them so they can take the next step of faith for them.

And I want to wrap up by letting you hear some encouraging words that I know are going to build you up. Each week in this series, we're hearing real life faith stories from people here at TLC. And this week, it's Matt and Evangela Massey. I spoke with them earlier about the incremental steps of faith they have taken in their lives. And here's part of our conversation. I think you'll like this. Well, it's great to have Matt and Evangela Massey with me. Were both of your parents in ministry? Yes. I love preacher's kids. But then your lives kind of took a little detour. Growing up in the church and some of the pressure that comes with that, I think that it was definitely for me personally, it was nothing that I was finding out individually yet on my own until later in life. My parents raised me to fully trust and love the Lord, but also just learning how to trust that and trust God instead of my own neurotic, like controlling things, I think is where my journey with my relationship with God has changed.

And even to get to the point of going to church, I mean, we were, I think we were together probably five years before we ever even started going to church together. We sat in the very last pew in the top of the balcony at the back of Twin Lakes for about five years. Every Sunday. We didn't talk to anybody. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's where you sat for how long? Five years. It's a good vantage point. You really get to like, you know, get the energy of the whole room. Honestly, we really, it was, you know, get there, get in the, they get where you're not really going to be noticed and then get out. So tell me about your next step. One big ministry that's really impacted us a lot is a ministry called RetroVy. RetroVy is a weekend where couples go for some serious, intense work on their marriage. I've seen miracles happen. Yeah. We're a miracle. Exactly. We're one of those miracles. We went through a pretty gnarly, like, you know, just a few rounds of needing to surrender to self, surrender to each other, surrender to God, to really get at a place where we're ready to build from a foundation from that.

And so we knew that RetroVy would be a good start for that, but we had just avoided it for so long. And a big part of our story and our journey is also the rigorous honesty group that meets on Monday nights at 7pm at TLC. That Monday night recovery group. We were like, all right, if we're surrendering, we're really fully surrendering our entire heart, soul, mind, body, everything. And so we made the choice to get completely sober from, you know, from anything that was distracting or intoxicating or just like taking attention away from what we needed to be focusing on. And that big step of faith that comes with that, you know, like through that process. And then the next step of faith for you was serving. Yeah, this is true. I think a lot of great mentors of mine that kind of mentored me along the way through this process a little bit. They've always said like, hey, you know, it's real important to step out of faith and serve, you know, I've been so, you know, I'm a full time musician. So like, even like being able to serve at the worship team, everybody, everybody always says like, oh, you should get on the worship team. And it's just like, oh, I don't know if I want to be able to do that right now or even if I want to. But now just seeing God's blessings through that and like even like serving. And I just see his faithfulness even more even through that, like being able to like I make sure I play at church at least once a month.

Faith is a series of these small steps. This is true. What would you say to the person who knows what the next step of faith for them is? But, but they're right on the precipice, but they're afraid. What would you say to that person? One of the things that was the hardest for me in a place of just not knowing where to start or in a place of like such brokenness that I didn't even, you know, I was resisting against, you know, surrendering my will and trusting God's, even when I didn't know what that looked like. That's like, that's just such a scary place to be. It makes me even emotional to think about where I was at that moment, like that breaking point that somebody gets to when they know that something more, that there's something more that is, that they're just not tapping into. One of the things that just kept being spoken over me at that time from people who were loving on me when I was just right on the cusp of like surrendering myself was like, when you look back at this time, you'll see how far you've come. When you look back at this, you are still going to have that feeling of like, wow, this is so scary. This is like the most vulnerable, scary thing I've ever done. You'll look back at that and say, wow, look how far I have come since then. And if I hadn't taken that first step, I wouldn't have all of the rest of this, you know, the story of healing and growth and recovery and, you know, partnership and community.

I love that story because it illustrates how you don't go from zero to 10 instantly. Faith is a series of steps that you take to place your trust in Christ, then start being part of a regular church, and then maybe go to a small group, then maybe a 12 step group, maybe a marriage class, and then start serving. And God builds faith in you with each step. So what is the next step of faith for you? I'll circle back. We started with the story of Jake Olson, the blind football player. What a perfect metaphor to close with because what this message, what the series is all about is live by faith and not by sight. Maybe you feel like, but take another step of faith, but I can't see far enough into the future to be confident or you say God is calling me, but I can't see it. Live by faith, not by sight. You know why you're here today? You know why you're joining us online? Because the coach recruited you. You heard the voice of God. That's why you're here. He sees something in you that maybe you don't even see in yourself. So take the next step onto the playing field and watch amazing things happen as you live faith forward.

Let's pray together. Would you bow in a word of prayer with me? Heavenly Father, I just want to lift everybody here up who needs to take another step of faith. And I think maybe for many people here, they've been thinking about becoming a Christian, taking the first step. But I thought my faith is weak. And God says, "I'll take it." So I pray that many would just say in this moment, "I trust in you, Jesus." And others have sensed God calling them to do something, yet they're unsure they can do it. And I know you are saying to them in this moment, "Perfect. You're just like everybody else in the Bible. May we take the next step." Thank you, God, for the example of Gideon, how you take weak people and make them heroes by your spirit and by your grace. Help us to live faith forward every day, taking the next bright step of faith. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.