Fear

“And Jehoshaphat was afraid and set his face to seek Yahweh, and called for a fast throughout all Judah.” (2 Chronicles 20:3, LSB)

Read Part 1.

Although Gideon is certainly a man driven by his anxieties when we first meet him in Judges 6, the magnificent accomplishments which God worked through him were definitely done on the basis of faith.

Indeed, this man of fear became a man of faith—and it was that faith that drove one of the greatest victories in all of Biblical history.

When we first encounter Gideon, the fifth of the 12 leaders of Israel described in the book called Judges, he is definitely a man who is overwhelmed, even dominated, by fear.

Gideon lived during that long stretch of time—more than three centuries—between the days of Joshua, and the launch of the monarchy, which is captured for us in the shadowy book of Judges.

Now, Gideon’s fears were not unfounded. Over the course of seven straight years, the Midianites, Amalekites and other Easterners had swept through Israel at harvest time and taken every shred of their crops, along with their animals, leaving the people of Israel completely desolate.

Read the series.

Number 7: Fellowship. You need those people who disagree with you.

Believe it or not, one year I played football. American football. I was an offensive lineman.

Pop Warner League. Seventh grade. Weight limit was 110 pounds at the top, 75 at the bottom. I was 2 pounds too light, but they let me play anyway.

We called ourselves the Patriots. (We were in a Boston suburb.) We lost every game but one.

That experience didn’t jump-start my career, but it did teach me a lot of things. Most important, it forever changed my thinking about diversity.

Written in 2018; read the series.

Number 6: Responsibility. You can and should control your reactions. You should resist being manipulated.

When Adam sinned, God confronted him. And in a really remarkable display of chutzpah (was the first language Yiddish?), Adam blamed his wife. And then, in the same breath, he blamed God himself: “the woman, whom YOU gave to me … “ (Gen 3.12).

Read the series.