Today's Devotion
From Mike MacIntosh
Now it came to pass the same night that the Lord said to him, "Take your father's young bull, the second bull of seven years old, and tear down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the wooden image that is beside it; and build an altar to the Lord your God on top of this rock in the proper arrangement, and take the second bull and offer a burnt sacrifice with the wood of the image which you shall cut down." So Gideon took ten men from among his servants and did what the Lord had said to him. But because he feared his father's household and the men of the city too much to do it by day, he did it by night.
Judges 6:25-27
God called Gideon a mighty man of valor (Judges 6:12), but all we know is that he's a farmer. There's not a verse anywhere in the Bible that tells us he's a warrior. This man has never held a sword in his hand, he's never been to battle, and he knows no strategies of warfare. From our vantage point, Gideon is no man of valor. He has even shown with his own lips that he's somewhat of a coward, and he's hesitant to believe that anything good would happen because of so many years of oppression. So why does God call him a man of valor? Because God sees who Gideon is when he's empowered by His Spirit.
Now Baal was one bad thing to worship. The people who worshiped Baal believed that if they sacrificed and built altars to him, the weather would be favorable and their crops would be spared of disease or disaster. Plain and simple, this was devil worship, and that's why God wanted all those people wiped out. So God's first assignment to Gideon was to tear down Baal's altar and the wooden image, and to build a brand new altar that was for the Lord. Insecure and hesitant as he was, he obeyed!
Sometimes we hide behind our frailties and insecurities, our setbacks and our sin, and we basically give up on doing anything great for the Lord. Look at Gideon's life here as a great example of a simple man used by God to do supernatural things. This could only be done by the power of the Holy Spirit (Judges 7:34). That's why an ordinary farmer could be called a mighty man of valor by God. And with the Lord on your side, you too are a mighty man or woman of valor. If you have Jesus Christ dwelling in your heart, you have value and you have worth because you're His kid and you're filled with the Holy Spirit.
Posted via email from ..................The Last Call Digest
