Speaker 1: Hey, I'm coming to you now from the basin. This
Speaker 1: is a special bonus teaching that I recorded just for
Speaker 1: you to break it down a little more, to take
Speaker 1: it a little deeper.
Speaker 2: I hope you enjoy this overflow message. Let me know.
Speaker 2: Let's go.
Speaker 1: So if we bring these two verses together, right, get
Speaker 1: in a mighty warrior hiding in a wine press. You
Speaker 1: an incredible creative human being, kind of living in a
Speaker 1: state of constant chronic distraction, and you know, giving into
Speaker 1: the culture around you that wants you to compare and
Speaker 1: feel terrible about yourself, or compare and feel like you're
Speaker 1: you're better than other people, whatever extreme you fall in.
Speaker 1: This culture of comparison, this culture of cynicism, this culture
Speaker 1: of reliance on everything else that isn't God on the
Speaker 1: scene rather than the unseen, This culture that we seem
Speaker 1: to live in where we divide so quickly with people,
Speaker 1: we can't learn anything from anybody, so we stay in ignorance.
Speaker 1: The Lord says, go in the strength you have and
Speaker 1: save Israel out of Midian's hand. And then after Gideon
Speaker 1: sees the fire of the Lord and is afraid, and
Speaker 1: God says it's friendly fire. He says peace, you're not
Speaker 1: going to die. And they built an altar and called
Speaker 1: it the Lord is Peace. I want to bring those
Speaker 1: two verses together for just a minute and tell you
Speaker 1: what the Lord spoke to me. He said, make peace
Speaker 1: with your strength. Make peace with your strength. Don't you
Speaker 1: mean with your weakness. Don't you mean with your past?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, those two, but make peace with your strength.
Speaker 2: That is so.
Speaker 1: Contradictory to a lot of what I was taught, especially
Speaker 1: in a religious sense, but even growing up in the South,
Speaker 1: you know, we had this phrase that we say, he's
Speaker 1: getting too big for his breeches, and I thought that
Speaker 1: was just monk's corner until I went to Australia. They
Speaker 1: call it tall poppy. You know, somebody gets too high,
Speaker 1: they cut him down. And in all fairness, you know,
Speaker 1: after God gives Gideon two signs with the fleece, the
Speaker 1: fleece is first drenched and the ground is wet.
Speaker 2: So that's like the thing the thing.
Speaker 1: That God touched was wet and everything around it was dry,
Speaker 1: and then the second time everything around it was wet,
Speaker 1: but it was dry. And I take that to mean
Speaker 1: that God's spirit will be your supply in any situation.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you'll be dry inside. But God will bring do
Speaker 1: from somebody else or somewhere else to refresh you for
Speaker 1: what He has called you to do. And how sometimes
Speaker 1: everything around you will be dry. The situation will be
Speaker 1: like valley of dry Ohs. Try, but man, God's going
Speaker 1: to drench you with his spirit. Because Gideon picked up
Speaker 1: the fleece and squeezed it and all that happened a
Speaker 1: little bit later, after Israel had come out, the people
Speaker 1: of Israel heard that Gideon went after he built an
Speaker 1: altar to the Lord and said, the Lord is peace.
Speaker 1: He then went and smashed the altars that his father
Speaker 1: had made to Bail, which is crazy, right, like to
Speaker 1: break his father's altar in order to make peace with God.
Speaker 1: He went and smashed the altar that they would use
Speaker 1: to call on Bail and Astra.
Speaker 2: He used even the wood from the.
Speaker 1: Altar to asher, which was kind of like a sensual
Speaker 1: sex god in the surrounding area, and he broke it,
Speaker 1: and all the people came out and they were like
Speaker 1: Gil Gideon, and his dad was like, now you know,
Speaker 1: if Bail, who the altar was to, was wrong, let
Speaker 1: Bail deal with him. And they actually nicknamed Gideon and
Speaker 1: they gave him a name that meant may bail contend
Speaker 1: with him. So you know, after that happens, and you've
Speaker 1: got God coming to Gideon calling him out of the
Speaker 1: wine press. God calling you out of this kind of
Speaker 1: weak place where you locate yourself, and he was there
Speaker 1: because of fear. The Midianites would come and take their crops.
Speaker 1: And it said they were like swarms of locusts that
Speaker 1: would come. And I thought that was interesting because locusts
Speaker 1: are little, and Gideon has the strength of a lion,
Speaker 1: but he's he's hiding from locusts.
Speaker 2: That's what God said.
Speaker 1: Their enemies were like like swarms of locusts to take
Speaker 1: the crop. And Gideon's first strategy, because he's so scared,
Speaker 1: is to try.
Speaker 2: To make himself smaller.
Speaker 1: Oh man, I'm the weakest I'm from the weakest tribe.
Speaker 2: Now, all of this.
Speaker 1: Is Gideon trying to size up his own strength. And
Speaker 1: God has called him a mighty warrior, and so he
Speaker 1: goes immediately to his own strength because he's scared. When
Speaker 1: we get scared, we tend to shrink ourselves, we tend
Speaker 1: to shrink others. We even get into the part of
Speaker 1: our brain that they call the lizard brain, which is
Speaker 1: the survival part of our brain, which is like running
Speaker 1: from tigers and bingles and bears.
Speaker 2: And stuff like that.
Speaker 1: And we start running from stuff and hiding from stuff
Speaker 1: even though nothing's really chasing us and nothing's really wrong.
Speaker 2: And I know you've done that before.
Speaker 1: You just feel like, why am I down here in
Speaker 1: this winepress thrush of my week? What's because you've been
Speaker 1: attacked before. It's because you've been rejected before. It's because
Speaker 1: you tried to step into something before. And you know,
Speaker 1: you look at what's ahead of you in the season
Speaker 1: of your life and you're like, I'm not smart as them,
Speaker 1: I'm not as good as them. And a lot of
Speaker 1: times the first step to making peace with God and
Speaker 1: making peace with yourself and making peace with who He
Speaker 1: made you to be and who he didn't make you
Speaker 1: to be. Sometimes the first step to all of that
Speaker 1: is smashing your father's altars. That doesn't mean to me
Speaker 1: that you, you know, go outside if you're a teenager
Speaker 1: and just start going through your dad's garage and throwing
Speaker 1: his power tools around because he spent too much time
Speaker 1: out there and not enough with you.
Speaker 2: That's not what I mean I.
Speaker 1: Don't mean if your if your parents' drink, you go
Speaker 1: through smashing their their liquor bottles.
Speaker 2: That'd be kind of that'd be kind of bad if
Speaker 2: if you hurt me say that.
Speaker 1: But realistically, though, I think a lot of us never
Speaker 1: make peace with the strength that we have, the capacity,
Speaker 1: we have, the potential that we have, because we are
Speaker 1: limited by what we've seen before us. I thought it
Speaker 1: was crazy how Gideon's dad came out and he's like, hey,
Speaker 1: let Bail deal with him if he's really God. And
Speaker 1: of course Bail didn't and Bill couldn't because God was
Speaker 1: with Gideon and God is with you. And there may
Speaker 1: be some altars that you need to smash, beliefs that
Speaker 1: you need to smash, agreements that you came into, Like
Speaker 1: everybody in our family does this.
Speaker 2: Nobody in our family did that.
Speaker 1: I actually remember this cool moment where somebody was saying
Speaker 1: to my dad that I would never be able to
Speaker 1: afford to go to college. Talk about me, and my
Speaker 1: dad never graduated high school, so that triggered at me.
Speaker 2: He's like, don't you ever tell my boy.
Speaker 1: You shut up, You don't ever tell my boy he
Speaker 1: can't go to college. He's like I'll rob a bank,
Speaker 1: I'll kill somebody and take their money so he can
Speaker 1: go to college if he wants to go to college.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying that's like christ.
Speaker 1: Like, Like I often joke, that's not going to land
Speaker 1: him on focus on the family with that kind of parenting,
Speaker 1: but kind of meant a lot to me. He's like,
Speaker 1: don't let my limitations become your insecurities. That's what I
Speaker 1: think he was trying to make sure of there. And
Speaker 1: this isn't a video devotion about my dad. It just
Speaker 1: got me thinking about him. I was sharing with a
Speaker 1: friend of mine a little bit about his story yesterday
Speaker 1: and how his life was so hard and my dad
Speaker 1: was a barber and he never made more than twelve
Speaker 1: dollars a haircut before he died, and how in many ways,
Speaker 1: I think the fears that he experienced now he grew
Speaker 1: up in a real rough household. His dad was an alcoholic,
Speaker 1: a really mean drunk and would beat them and stuff,
Speaker 1: and eventually his dad committed suicide. And he actually committed
Speaker 1: suicide on my dad's birthday when he was a little boy,
Speaker 1: like seven or eight years old. I think it was
Speaker 1: kind of important to him and I know it was
Speaker 1: to my mom too that they gave me opportunities, even
Speaker 1: based on their own sacrifices, to enable me to go forward,
Speaker 1: and so that I could have the strengths, so that
Speaker 1: I could have the skills that I was supposed to have.
Speaker 1: Every parent wants that for their child. I want that
Speaker 1: for my children too. And yet at the same time
Speaker 1: that they gave me opportunities, there are ways in which
Speaker 1: God will call me to grow into my own man,
Speaker 1: my own family traditions, and sometimes moving forward and what
Speaker 1: God has given me is going to feel like I'm
Speaker 1: being disloyal to somebody that I love, or something that
Speaker 1: I always thought, or something I believe. To me, this
Speaker 1: image of Gideon making an alter to God that says
Speaker 1: the Lord is peace and going forward in the strength
Speaker 1: that he has means in many ways, leaving behind a
Speaker 1: lot of the life that he was loyal to, all
Speaker 1: the people around him, the clan that he was a
Speaker 1: part of, how they saw themselves, and breaking out of
Speaker 1: that is not easy. Making peace with your strength isn't easy.
Speaker 1: So you try to shrink yourself. You try to shrink
Speaker 1: what God is doing and fit it into your previous experience.
Speaker 1: If you've never seen it before. You think God can't
Speaker 1: do it, You feel God calling you up higher. It
Speaker 1: kind of scares you. You're like, well, I can't do that.
Speaker 2: That's not me. But what if it is? What if
Speaker 2: it is me? What if the other stuff?
Speaker 1: The fear, the holding back, the not being encouraging, the
Speaker 1: going through life guarded, the hiding in a wine press,
Speaker 1: not coming out and really being creative, not engage in
Speaker 1: my day, not wanting to lead, not wanting to set
Speaker 1: an example, not wanting to do the things that I
Speaker 1: know we're going to make me feel better, Just trying
Speaker 1: to get relief through the day so I don't have
Speaker 1: to feel bad right there? What if that is? What
Speaker 1: if that is false? And what if Mighty Warrior is true?
Speaker 1: What if wimp and a wine press is just where
Speaker 1: fear has put you? What if wimp and wine press?
Speaker 1: I'm not calling Gideon a whimp, Like between me and you,
Speaker 1: I think he's pretty crazy. How much faith he did have,
Speaker 1: He just needed a few signs. He blows a trumpet, boom,
Speaker 1: he goes out. The first thing God does, though, he
Speaker 1: starts taking people away and gets Gideon's army down to
Speaker 1: three hundred and he shrinks the army, doesn't shrink Gideon.
Speaker 1: He calls Gideon a mighty warrior, but yet he shrinks
Speaker 1: the things that Gideon would depend on that would make
Speaker 1: Gideon think that it was his.
Speaker 2: Own strength that saved Israel.
Speaker 1: He didn't want Gideon to rely on his own strength,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean he didn't want him to own
Speaker 1: his strength because he called him a mighty warrior. So
Speaker 1: you got to get this. This is crazy. He says,
Speaker 1: You're a mighty warrior. That's who you are. You got
Speaker 1: a lion within you, and the Midianites are swarms of
Speaker 1: locusts compared to the lion of the spirit of God
Speaker 1: that's in you. And Gideon did go and do amazing things,
Speaker 1: and powerful, powerful things are ahead for Gideon. But the
Speaker 1: first thing that's got to happen is he's got to
Speaker 1: break his father's altars, which doesn't mean that he hates
Speaker 1: where he came from. It just means that he's moving
Speaker 1: forward and he's got to go say this out aloud,
Speaker 1: go in the strength you have. And then the next
Speaker 1: thing that he has to do is make peace with
Speaker 1: God at the altar so he can know that that
Speaker 1: is God calling you Gideon.
Speaker 2: That is God using you.
Speaker 1: And then when God starts removing people who aren't going
Speaker 1: to be ready for the battle, people who God doesn't
Speaker 1: to move into the next season, it's getting Gideon ready
Speaker 1: to experience a strength that doesn't come from him. And
Speaker 1: if you have felt in this season like you've been,
Speaker 1: you've been shrunken. Maybe your options, maybe your friendships, maybe
Speaker 1: your your possibilities, maybe your energy, maybe your time has
Speaker 1: been shrunken. That could be God's setting you up to
Speaker 1: rely on his strength like never before. I want you
Speaker 1: to go in the strength that you have. What does
Speaker 1: that mean? It ties into the teaching I've been doing.
Speaker 1: Do the thing that you would do. Mighty warrior, you capable,
Speaker 1: you annointed you, the you that has made peace with
Speaker 1: your strength.
Speaker 2: When you make peace with your strength, that's because.
Speaker 1: You know it comes from God, doesn't come from you.
Speaker 2: You make peace with that.
Speaker 1: Like God, these are the gifts you've given me, these
Speaker 1: are the abilities you've given me.
Speaker 2: I'm good with being Gideon. I'm good with being Stephen.
Speaker 1: They had a prompt one time when I was a
Speaker 1: little boy in class that we thought was funny. It
Speaker 1: was a vocabulary prompt and it said even Stephen knows
Speaker 1: this word. I don't remember what the context was. I
Speaker 1: just remember that was funny to me and we left
Speaker 1: at it. Even Stephen knows this word. I was reading
Speaker 1: this morning. The Lord brought that up as funny, even Stephen.
Speaker 1: It's like a little saying. And the Lord was saying,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Gideon
Speaker 1: and even Stephen, because I'm like, man, Lord, I'm from
Speaker 1: Monk's Corner. I'm from Manassa and I wasn't a star
Speaker 1: athlete at Berkeley High School. I was like a water boy.
Speaker 1: And God, you want to use me to speak to people,
Speaker 1: influence people.
Speaker 2: That's crazy. I'm not a trained or crazy talented musician.
Speaker 2: Like I talk. That's what I do for a living.
Speaker 2: That's my strength.
Speaker 1: And what do we say about people who talk, They're
Speaker 1: all talk.
Speaker 2: Talk is cheap.
Speaker 1: So I come to God sometimes like all I know
Speaker 1: how to do is talk, and I don't even know
Speaker 1: if I'm very good at that. Sometimes, you know, and
Speaker 1: the Lord is bringing me into a season that he's
Speaker 1: the God of Abraham, Isaac Jacob, get in and the
Speaker 1: God of me, Like I'm here where I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: be doing what I'm supposed to do. Make peace with that,
Speaker 1: make peace under the oak of your urba that I'm
Speaker 1: making peace with my strength. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: times we talk about accepting your limitations, and that's great,
Speaker 1: but that should lead to making peace with your strength
Speaker 1: and action. When you accept your limitations, it shouldn't paralyze
Speaker 1: you and make you go.
Speaker 2: I can't do that.
Speaker 1: Let me just sit back and watch YouTube for four
Speaker 1: hours because I can't do that.
Speaker 2: I can't.
Speaker 1: I don't have any opportunities over here. Nobody's calling me,
Speaker 1: nobody wants me, nobody No. Go in the strength you have.
Speaker 1: Do the thing that you would do if you believed
Speaker 1: you were a mighty warrior.
Speaker 2: What would you do? So do that? Do that? And
Speaker 2: I thought about how.
Speaker 1: When you hear about a when you hear about a target,
Speaker 1: they always say it's harder to hit a moving target.
Speaker 1: How God's telling getting get going be a moving target.
Speaker 1: If the enemy's gonna hit you, don't let him find
Speaker 1: you in the wine press. If you're gonna fail. I
Speaker 1: wrote this down the other day. I may end in failure,
Speaker 1: but I will not live in fear. And boy, that
Speaker 1: thing got in me when I said it. I don't
Speaker 1: mean that I am a failure. But shoot, man, I
Speaker 1: don't know my story is gonna end. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I'm gonna win great victories in every season or
Speaker 1: climb up or fall down.
Speaker 2: I don't know any of that, all right, But if
Speaker 2: God is with me, then I gotta go.
Speaker 1: And if I'm an to get hit by the enemy,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do it while I'm moving towards something that's
Speaker 1: worth moving toward, and enjoy my life and make peace
Speaker 1: with my strength. I hear God saying to somebody, that's
Speaker 1: me that you're running from. That's me calling you. That
Speaker 1: is the real you that I'm trying to show you.
Speaker 1: Don't reject it when you feel yourself going like man,
Speaker 1: maybe I could be more of a patient person. Maybe
Speaker 1: I could be more kind, Maybe I could be more encouraging.
Speaker 1: Maybe I could do these things. Maybe you could go
Speaker 1: into strength you have and find out what it can be.
Speaker 1: But the first step to going in the strength that
Speaker 1: you have, you got to be grateful to God for it.
Speaker 1: It insults God when we diminish that it does. So
Speaker 1: make peace with your strength so that you can be
Speaker 1: at peace with the God who gave them to you.
Speaker 1: Don't fight the fire God has given you, don't fight
Speaker 1: the flow He's given you. Don't downplay yourself to fit
Speaker 1: in with people.
Speaker 2: That, honestly a lot of times are weaker than you are.
Speaker 1: And don't worship at the altar of everything that your
Speaker 1: family knew. God might have brought you into the season
Speaker 1: to even set some of them free.
Speaker 2: There are so many.
Speaker 1: Applications of this, I know we could take it to
Speaker 1: crazy places. Here the Lord saying, make peace with your strength.
Speaker 3: Hey, I hope you enjoyed the podcast, and if you did,
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Speaker 3: they're available. I also want to take a moment and
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